Positivism

Abstract

Notwithstanding their views on the apparently self-evident need for an interpretive approach, modern action theorists believe the history of the social sciences to be, for the most part, dominated by ‘positivistic’ social science.¹ Writing of the development of social science in the nineteenth century, Giddens argues that the purpose was:

to bring into being, a science of society which would reproduce in the study of human social life, the same kind of sensational illumination and explanatory power yielded up by the sciences of nature. By this token, social science must surely be reckoned a failure. [1976:p. 13]