Difference Between Positivissm And Antipositivism

The debate between positivism and antipositivism explores the competitive approaches to understanding how knowledge about the world is constructed. On one hand, a positivist holds an objective view of the world that can be defined and measured in facts. On the other hand, anti-positivism believes that the world is socially constructed thus knowledge is subjective. With that in mind, this paper argues that anti-positivism is a better approach to research design than positivism. For the reason, that anti-positivism considers the complexity and diversity surrounding different understanding and meanings given to our social environment.
Positivism is a research method that developed from the behavioral revolution, which sought to combine positivism and empiricism to politics (Halperin and Heath, 2012: 27). This research approach is governed by natural law to observe, understand and to find meaning in the empirical world. A positivist would investigate empirical questions that assume how the world works through the accuracy of a probable truth (Gerring, 2001: 155). This type of research seeks to answer two empirical questions, such as “what is out there” and “what do we call it” (Gerring, 2001: 156).

Thus, positivism is interested in social realities that can be observed and measured by the scientific method (Halperin and Heath, 2012: 29). As a result, positivists view the world through an objective reality, and this reality offers the “foundation for human knowledge” (JorgenCITE). Positivist accepts that knowledge is a linear process of gathering data thus create laws, known as induction (Halperin and Heath, 2012: 27). If a theory cannot be falsified through the scientific method the evidence then considered verified, which allows the data to be generalized and applied to multiple