Positivism Realism

From its early beginnings, the systematic study of the social world has been strongly influenced by a methodological orientation built upon the positivist sociological tradition of which Auguste Comte is a well-known, early-Nineteenth-Century figure. Theories in many disciplines of the social sciences contain explanatory concepts -- for example, concepts such as norm, gender and behaviour -- that originate from early empirical studies in sociology and cultural anthropology (Wagner & Hayes, 2005). Giddens (1974) mentioned that Auguste Comte conceived of society as undergoing three progressive developmental phases -- theological, metaphysical and positive. In describing the third progressive developmental

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phase as 'positive', Comte revealed his intention to abandon any reliance on both religious and metaphysical sources of knowledge, and instead, to consider the supremacy of the role of science in the search for 'authentic' knowledge.

It has been argued that the growth and development of many of the distinctive disciplines of the social sciences owe much to the dominance of a positivist and realist orientation, seen to have been broadly adopted in the natural and physical sciences. McNair (2003, p. 553) observed that:

[S]ociology has always sought to emulate, and borrowed freely from, the epistemological categories and methodological concepts of the natural sciences. A striving for intellectual legitimacy in a culture which elevates 'science' above other discourses of knowledge, as well as a genuine belief that the social world can be known with as much certainty and accuracy as the world of particles and molecules, has driven sociology since the 19th Century. The very use of the term 'social science' and the search for structure, predictability, causation and laws ... make that explicit.

Cameron, Frazer, Harvey, Rampton and Richardson (1999) observed that this tradition is disinclined to consider postulations concerning social realities and mechanisms that human observers cannot see. Instead, it demands a commitment to the study of empirically testable phenomena and the formulation of law-like descriptions of relationships between phenomena. According to Swingewood (2000, p. 22), the positivist approach that has dominated social scientific research and analysis, and which developed from Comte's earlier work, took two forms:

First, the widely accepted view that the methods of the social sciences were no different from those of the natural sciences, involving the establishing of laws, the employment of experiment and observation, and the elimination of the subjective element in social analysis -- society was defined in terms of an organism evolving through the workings of specific natural laws. And second, the increasing awareness of empirical method and the value of statistics in the framing of hypotheses and modes of validation. Both forms of sociological positivism emphasised the necessity of eliminating philosophical concepts such as free will, intention and individual motives from social science and establishing sociology as an objective science.

Tibbetts (1982) argued that there are eight general claims associated with modern positivism. First, positivism suggests that the only acceptable form of scientific explanation is that of a

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logical deduction from a set of empirically tested laws. Second, metaphysical explanations have no place in positivist assertions, which is to say that empirical observations are paramount, and propositions that attempt to describe something outside an empirical reach are meaningless. Third, there is a 'unity of language' and a common reduction basis for scientific terms, such that statements in all the sciences can be constructed using "predicates describing the properties of physical objects" (Tibbetts, 1982, p. 186). Fourth, a scientific proposition can only be empirically meaningful if it is capable of verification. Fifth, the empirical concepts of science must be subject to operational definitions, considering that scientific concepts are "synonymous with [their] corresponding set of operations" (Tibbetts, 1982, p. 186). Sixth, all genuinely empirical findings must be grounded in and validated by sensory observation. Seventh, while research hypotheses can be formulated through the use of a variety of techniques, such as simply following a hunch, proving hypotheses requires the objective verification done by members of the scientific community, which thus allows a clear delineation between possibly subjective 'contexts of discovery' and 'contexts of verification' that involve objective procedures. And eighth, in principle, science may be incapable of addressing issues regarding the values and objectives that must be pursued by scientists.

There have been issues raised about the epistemological and ontological challenges of a positivist orientation; more specifically, in the sense of the adoption of a purely realist or objectivist approach to studies in the social sciences. Problems attached to the concept of empiricism have been a common criticism levelled at positivism. One argument is that the methods of the natural sciences, generally characterised as positivist or realist in orientation, may be inappropriate for social and cultural study. For instance, Dilthey (1976, p. 192) compared the focus of the natural and physical sciences to that of the social sciences and argued that "[the] mind can only understand what it has created ... nature, the subject matter of the physical sciences, embraces the reality which has arisen independently of the activity of [the] mind ... everything on which man has actively impressed his stamp forms the subject matter of the human studies." Analysing the logical structures of explanations between the natural sciences and the social sciences, Winch (1958, p. 119), drawing from the philosophical ideas of Wittgenstein (1953), also argued that the issues involving methodology in the social sciences are not empirical in their nature but conceptual, and that "the understanding of society is logically different from the understanding of nature." More specifically, he suggested that "the notion of a human society involves a scheme of concepts

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which is logically incompatible with the kinds of explanation offered in the natural sciences" (Winch, 1958, pp. 71 - 72). Others have also suggested that it is possible for even finely objective statements about the social world to have value-laden evaluative and subjective dimensions, and although these dimensions may not be of primary importance, they are nonetheless significant. Harding (1986, p. 250), for example, argued that "a maximally objective [social] science ... will be one that includes a self-conscious and critical examination of the relationship between the social experience of its creators and the kinds of cognitive structures favoured in its enquiry".