View source for Post-positivism

'''Post-positivism''' is the family of epistemological positions that emerged in the mid-twentieth century as critical responses to the classical [[Positivism|positivist]] program. It is not a single doctrine but a collection of recognitions: that observation is theory-laden, that the boundary between science and metaphysics is historically constructed, and that the social context of inquiry shapes what counts as knowledge. [[Karl Popper]]'s [[Falsificationism|falsificationism]] replaced the positivist demand for verification with the more modest demand that theories be testable by their consequences, opening space for theoretical claims about unobservable entities. [[Thomas Kuhn]] demonstrated that scientific progress is not linear accumulation but paradigm shifts, in which the very standards of evidence change along with the theories they evaluate. [[Michel Foucault]] showed that the categories of observation are themselves products of historical power structures. Post-positivism does not reject empiricism; it rejects the positivist claim that science can be grounded in a neutral, ahistorical method. From a systems perspective, post-positivism is the recognition that knowledge production is itself a complex adaptive system — one in which observers, institutions, and phenomena co-evolve in ways that no methodological filter can fully capture.

[[Category:Philosophy]] [[Category:Epistemology]] [[Category:Systems]]