The principle that true knowledge must be based on the scientific method is known as

Positivism is the name for the scientific study of the social world. Its goal is to formulate abstract and universal laws on the operative dynamics of the social universe. A law is a statement about relationships among forces in the universe. In positivism, laws are to be tested against collected data systematically. Auguste Comte—who saw Newton's law of gravity as the exemplar—advocated positivism as a means to legitimate the new discipline of sociology. Herbert Spencer and Emile Durkheim executed this advocacy in formulating laws that were assessed by data. Positivism however, has, never gone unchallenged, particularly in sociology and anthropology; and as a consequence it has been subject to intense epistemological debate. The debate was, for much of the first half of the twentieth century, framed by the Vienna Circle, a group of intellectuals in Vienna who debated the nature of thought and logic on the one side, and their relations to empirical data on the other. This debate continues in many different guises at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

Qualitative versus Quantitative

Although the differences between qualitative and quantitative research have been overstressed, there seem to be differences between both approaches at the metaphysical level, which can be expressed in terms of epistemological and ontological assumptions. It will take us too far to extensively discuss these matters here, but it will be insightful to sketch the key features of the qualitative and quantitative approach. Positivism, on the one hand, and hermeneutics, on the other, are the main representatives of the quantitative and qualitative approach respectively.

Positivism involves the claim that there is no difference in principle between the goals and the conduct of research in all disciplines. It proposes a unified methodology for the different branches of the natural and the social sciences. It poses the discovery of general laws as the ultimate goal of scientific inquiry, and it advocates the method of hypothesis testing as a general procedure for generating and validating scientific knowledge. The growth of knowledge in the natural sciences forms the ideal model. In this context it is interesting to remark that originally positivism meant collecting and validating factual knowledge by scientific methods, and that this positive spirit aimed at true knowledge, which had been obscured by the traditional powers of the church and the state. Although positivism is often presented, both by adherents and adversaries, as a monolithic and unified approach, it must be remarked that there are many varieties of positivism and that positivists disagree on many specifics of their methodology. But there are some key features that all positivists have in common:

In the positivist view science rests on some minimum and therefore necessary standards:

clarity of language in terms of definitions and concepts which are tools for communication;

validation of truth claims by rational means of logic and empirical inquiry.

Research-oriented positivism seeks to establish generalisations that have survived serious attempts at refutation; in this sense it is nomothetic.

Hermeneutics, sometimes called interpretivism, is rooted in the human and social sciences, and can best be described as the science and method of interpreting meaningful social action. Originally it was a valuable collection of heuristic rules and interpretive hints on how to read and interpret historical texts. It tries to establish a special methodology for understanding meaning in these sciences. Its objective is the exploration of common understandings in historically based cultural traditions. The model case of hermeneutics is the interpretation of texts. Hermeneutics is involved with the study of meaning created by human beings in historical contexts; it is ideographic in the sense that its goal of inquiry is describing the particular. Its key features are thus meaning, historical situatedness, and describing the particular.

Although radical stands in both positivism and hermeneutics still differ strongly on such epistemological and ontological issues as realism, relativism, and generalisation, it has become clear that many of these radical positions are logically unsound or self-defeating. Moderate positions in both positivism and hermeneutics are much closer to each other than is generally thought and many differences turn out to be differences of degree and not of kind. For instance, many researchers in both traditions now assume a reality out there that accounts for our intersubjectively shared experiences, but they also acknowledge that these experiences are framed by learned cultural conceptions and are therefore not direct one-to-one representations of the world.

The minimum standards for validating scientific statements also seem to be supported by many researchers in hermeneutics and positivism. These standards include the clarity of language and procedures of validation such as logic and empirical tests. Besides, the claim for intersubjectivity of scientific knowledge entails that the concepts and procedures applied by a researcher should be public so that other members of the scientific community can understand and control the logic of arguments and the weight of the empirical evidence.

Many positivists now acknowledge the hermeneutic claim that the meaning dimension is unique to human studies, and that emphatic understanding must be invoked when we want to know the reasons and purposes underlying the meaningful behaviour of human beings. On the other hand it is recognised more and more in hermeneutics that although the gist of verstehen is to grasp meaning from the perspective of the individual and his context with a focus on the particular, some sort of generalisation is unavoidable; otherwise, the difference between the particular and the general does not become revealing.

Moreover, in daily research practice it is realised more and more that the research questions determine to a large extent what methods are used, and often qualitative and quantitative methods are used side by side.

Given these remarks on the qualitative–quantitative divide, I will describe next what I consider to be the main approaches to qualitative research.

Positivism is the name of a social and intellectual movement that tried to learn from the mistakes of the Enlightenment project that eventuated, first, in the Reign of Terror following the French Revolution of 1789, and second, in the irrationalism of the Weimar Republic following Germany's defeat in World War I. While it has been customary to distinguish between the quasipolitical movement called ‘positivism’ originated by Auguste Comte in the 1830s and the more strictly philosophical movement called ‘logical positivism’ associated with the Vienna Circle of the 1930s, both shared a common sensibility, namely, that the unchecked exercise of reason can have disastrous practical consequences. Thus, both held that reason needs ‘foundations’ to structure its subsequent development so as not to fall prey to a self-destructive scepticism. In this respect, positivism incorporates a heretofore absent empiricist dimension to the risk-averse orientation to the world historically associated with Platonism.

Introduction

Positivism, positivist, positivistic, positivist science, positivistic science, positivist geography, positivistic geography – these words have been used widely and frequently in human geography over the last 30 or so years, and hardly ever in a positive sense. Usually, they are used so that some preferred philosophical, epistemological, ideological, or political stance can be propagated as positivism's negative, somewhat similar to the Canadian construction of identity as ‘not-American’. The tone is often pejorative.

Positivism's home territory is philosophy, specifically philosophy of science. So, that is where we start, by describing its historical, intellectual, and social contexts, where, when, how, why, and by whose actions it came to be, what its claims, concepts, and necessary doctrines were, what its problems and failings were, and what it left behind. One of geography's myopias is the view that geography changes, philosophy changes, but science stays the same. In fact, science as theorized and as practiced is not the same in the times of Comte (1798–1857), of the logical positivists (1920s and 1930s), of positivist geography (1953–73), and of postpositivist geographies (mid-1970s to late 1990s: there hasn't been a new one for a while). Much has changed since Newton developed the first fully fledged scientific metatheory. In his time there was one science, natural philosophy. Newton's universe was deterministic and certain. Chemistry, biology, geology, psychology, and the social sciences have since brought increasing levels of complexity, to which the relatively simple analysis appropriate to Newtonian physics may be of limited direct applicability. The biggest change to the theorization of science has been the adoption of explanation based on probabilities, and the acceptance that there are immutable limits to the processes of producing knowledge. By the time the Vienna Circle officially dissolved in 1938, physics in particular and science in general had started to come to grips with the fallout of the Einsteinian revolution, quantum theory, Heisenberg's indeterminacy principle and Godell's incompleteness theorems, all scientific products, all pointing to the impossibility of ever completing a science whose endpoint is certainty.

The biggest change to the practice of science has been one of scale, its industrialization and corporatization. After World War II, the goal-directed research and development model honed in the Manhattan Project continued in the post-Sputnik arms race and NASA's project to put a man on the moon before the end of the 1960s. This was a rearrangement of the relationship between science and the state which led to the situation that now seems ‘natural’. In Scientific Knowledge and Its Social Problems, Ravetz says that applied science had become the basic means of production in a modern economy. Science and technology are now mass activities. The process of discovery is itself now industrialized, carried out within large, hierarchical institutions which exist to do this kind of work, orientated more and more toward applications which are defined first, with the research necessary to bring them about following on.

It might reasonably be supposed that positivist geography would be any and all geographies which are underlain by the epistemological principles and methodological practices of positivist science. In the same vein, positivist science would be any and all science underlain by the epistemological principles and methodological practices of positivism, logical or otherwise. Thus, positivist geography would connect to positivist philosophy. This is, in fact, not so. Following the path from philosophy into geographical usage, we see that positivist geography was not particularly connected to positivism. Hardly any of the aspects of science which are described as positivist by geographers can be traced, even indirectly, to logical positivism. The core of logical positivism is an incredibly parsimonious and extreme empiricism which can be summed up in one sentence. ‘The meaning of a proposition is the method of its verification’. That is it. The putatively objectionable aspects of science – such as objectivity/disinterest, value freedom, and rationality – described by unsympathetic social scientists are neither necessary parts of positivism, nor necessary consequences of positivism for science.

The Prospects for Positivism

Positivism in the very general sense of an aspiration to scientificity and to the construction and empirical testing of formal theories remains a significant presence in contemporary sociology, and to a much greater extent in economics, political science, and some parts of international relations. As Peter Halfpenny (2001: p. 382) notes,

…large numbers of investigators continue to produce research that conforms to the positivist image of science, explaining social activities in loosely deductive-nomological terms, and these explanations are used to guide and evaluate a wide variety of social programmes.

It may be that the important dividing line is now between formal conceptions of theory and more informal ones such as the ‘theory’ of structuration or risk society or theoretical approaches such as actor-network theory. This dividing line (Turner, 2013; Outhwaite, 2014) runs through several theory families, such as rational choice or rational action theory, which encompasses a highly formalized, even formalistic mainstream, following Gary Becker (1976), and more flexible and sophisticated approaches such as those of Martin Hollis (1938–98), for whom “rational action is its own explanation” (Hollis, 1977: p. 135) or Jon Elster (1989, 2007). Hollis and Nell (1975) deconstructed the powerful alliance between positivism and neoclassical economics, while Hollis and Smith (1990) provided what remains one of the best statements of what is at stake in the oppositions between ‘explaining’ and ‘understanding’ in the social sciences and between ‘agency’ and ‘structure.’ As Smith wrote in the exchange with which they end the book:

I, too, reject the Positivist notion that there is a world waiting to be mapped. There may be regularities in human affairs but I do not accept the idea that we can construct a neutral theory, valid across time and space, that allows us to predict in the same way as occurs in the natural sciences. (Hollis and Smith, 1990: p. 203)

Evolutionary sociology, mentioned above in relation to Herbert Spencer, has recently experienced a certain revival, though in forms which are mostly dismissive of Spencer's earlier efforts (O'Malley, 2007). Marxism is another example, with formal and mathematical reformulations of central Marxist propositions (including French structuralist Marxism, analytical Marxism, also known as ‘no-bullshit Marxism,’ and ‘rational choice Marxism’), coexisting with more humanistic variants which shade off into critical theory, in both its Frankfurt School and broader literary and cultural variants. As Peter Halfpenny (1982: p. 120) concluded,

Positivism may be dead in that there is no longer an identifiable community of philosophers who give its simpler characterisations unqualified support, but it lives on philosophically, developed until it transmutes into conventionalism and realism.

Since then, the term ‘postpositivism’ has come into use. Like most ‘post’ formulations, it tends to be used in a wide variety of senses, ranging in this case from modifications of an essentially still positivist program to strong versions of social constructionism (Alvesson and Sköldberg, 2010). ‘Positivism’ has tended to become a term of abuse, while the positivistic impulse toward formalization and (presumed or hoped-for) certainty continues to pervade our increasingly rationalized and performance-oriented social sciences.

Positivism

Positivism within geography can be described as the use of modern scientific method. Although undoubtedly more influential within physical geography, this has had a significant impact within human geography as well.

Like Hume, positivism suggests that there two kinds of meaningful statement. Those that are logically true, such as those concerning the nature of mathematics or language; and those that are verifiable through empirical observation. Anything else is metaphysical and, ultimately, meaningless. This leads to an emphasis on observation, which is based only on what is directly seen rather than inferred, and the primacy of this over theoretical propositions. Models and theories should be developed from their basis in this empirical observation. Observation could be guided by a prior hypothesis, so that rational thought structured the process of inquiry, but this hypothesis was open to testing, and therefore capable of being disproved. In this, the positivists were influenced by early 20th-Century philosophers, particularly those of the Vienna Circle. One of their number, Karl Popper, proposed that the criteria for validity in science should not be that there are examples which prove it, but that there could be those which would disprove it. In other words, the strength of a theory is not that it is sufficiently general that it appears to explain, but that it is sufficiently narrow and focused that if a prediction proved untrue the theory would be exposed. This is the criterion of falsifiability. For Popper, and others, this meant that the explanatory claims of much social science were not scientific at all.

In social science and human geography more specifically, this led to the development of a number of quantitative and statistical techniques. The aim was to ground geography as a spatial science, with the removal of value judgments and the utilization of scientific methods. This is sometimes known as the quantitative revolution in geography. David Harvey's 1969 book Explanation in Geography was a key text in this field, but it also extends to some forms of cartography and locational analysis. It also provides much of the conceptual foundation to the claims of Geographic Information Systems (GISs), which in practice is strongly associated with Empiricism.

2.1 Unity of Science

Positivism (see Comte, Auguste (1798–1857); Logical Positivism and Logical Empiricism) followed in the wake of the natural sciences, endorsing the view that science is to be defined by the methodological procedures that enable us to explain and predict natural phenomena so successfully. If there are to be social sciences, the demand of the unity of science will imply that the method used in natural science (erklären) must also be applicable to human action. If human action allows for scientific knowledge this will mean, according to the positivist credo, that we can and should try to explain human actions by looking for the causal laws that govern them.

This bold statement evoked worries, misunderstandings, and refinements with respect to the place of verstehen in the social sciences. One plausible reaction (developed by neo-Kantians during the first Methodenstreit) is to defend the unity of science but deny the defining role of erklären. Science, one could say, is an attempt to make systematic and generally accessible sense of all phenomena. But there is more systematic and generally accessible sense to be made of what happens than merely explanatory sense. We can—and in the case of the manifestations of human life, should try to—make empathetic sense of what takes place by looking for the perspective from which these manifestations appear to be meaningful and appropriate.

Part of the positivistic project, however, was to show that there is no need and no place for empathetic sense in science. If the meaning and the appropriateness of human actions are to be accounted for by science in a systematic and generally accessible framework, this should be done, according to the positivists, by investigating objective patterns of behavior and not by telling stories about how these patterns look from the necessarily perspectivistic point of view of the people on the scene. The main problems with this line of reasoning are discussed under the three following subsections.

1.2 Post-positivism

The positivism of the New Archaeology drew immediate critical attention, both from fellow archaeologists and from philosophers of science. Many objected that the ‘received view’ philosophy of science had met its demise by the time archaeologists invoked it as a model for their practice. Post-positivist philosophers and historians of science, most famously Kuhn, had decisively challenged its foundationalist assumptions, arguing that theory and evidence are interdependent (evidence is theory-laden). Moreover and the enthusiasm for ‘theory demolition’ and deductive certainty had been called into question by critics who showed that the most interesting theoretical claims overreach all available evidence (theory is underdetermined by evidence). But beyond this critical consensus, responses to the demise of positivism diverged sharply.

Many philosophical commentators were sympathetic to the scientific (naturalist) ideals of the New Archaeology but, together with internal archaeological critics, they made the case for alternative models of science that better fitted the conditions of practice and ambitions of archaeology. Those proposed by Salmon (1982), and the Popperian models advocated by Bell (1994), fall within the ambit of a liberal empiricism even if they are not positivist in conception, while others represent a more fundamental reconception of scientific practice: the scientific realism endorsed by Gibbon (1989) and the coherentism elaborated by Kelley and Hanen (1988). More radical departures are to be seen in post-processual critiques of New Archaeology. The advocates of broadly interpretivist, humanistic approaches (e.g., contributors to Tilley 1993) reject the naturalist assumption that archaeology is best conceived as a scientific enterprise. They draw inspiration from a range of philosophical traditions outside analytic philosophy of science (e.g., critical theory, phenomenology, and philosophical hermeneutics).