1800s: Martineau · Tocqueville · Marx · Spencer · Le Bon · Ward · Pareto · Tönnies · Veblen · Simmel · Durkheim · Addams · Mead · Weber · Du Bois · Mannheim · Elias Postpositivism or postempiricism is a metatheoretical stance that critiques and amends positivism[1] and has impacted theories and practices across philosophy, social sciences, and various models of scientific inquiry.
[3] While positivists believe that research is or can be value-free or value-neutral, postpositivists take the position that bias is undesired but inevitable, and therefore the investigator must work to detect and try to correct it.
It reintroduces the basic assumptions of positivism: the possibility and desirability of objective truth, and the use of experimental methodology.
[citation needed] Postpositivism of this type is described in social science guides to research methods.
[3] According to Thomas Kuhn, a postpositivist theory can be assessed on the basis of whether it is "accurate", "consistent", "has broad scope", "parsimonious", and "fruitful".