So you're wondering what post-positivism is? You've come to the right place. Let's dig in. As the name suggests, post-positivism came after something called positivism, so you may want to check out the positivism video as well for more context. But let's suffice it to say that post-positivism is a philosophical perspective arising in the second half of the 20th century which critically revised the prevailing understanding among scientists that reality outside of oneself can be objectively observed and recorded, resulting in full understanding of that reality.
There came a point where this view of the world and knowledge creation as orderly and predictable was criticized as being out of line with lived experience, the history of scientific discovery, and new findings in physics. These critiques shaped a new perspective. that of post-positivism, that did not fully reject positivist understandings, but modified them.
Post-positivism moved from the naive realism of positivism, which believed in fully and objectively apprehending reality outside of oneself, towards a critical realism, which still embraced an understanding of reality outside of the knower, but instead sought to partially and probabilistically apprehend that external reality. So instead of saying, through observation and experimentation, I can fully understand the reality of this forest, like a positivist, the post-positivist might say, through observation and experimentation, I can gain knowledge of this forest that is highly probable, though could in the future be falsified through further investigation. The first major figure in post-positivism was Karl Popper. who positioned himself against the logical positivism of the Vienna Circle and Wittgenstein, which is discussed in the positivism video.
For Popper, the process of falsification is central. Rather than understanding science as an inductive process, where observing a result over and over and over a bunch of times meant that you could conclude it was a universal truth or principle, Popper aligned himself with a number of philosophers, including David Hume and Bertrand Russell, in pointing out that just because something happens a bunch of times does not mean it will happen every time. Rather, Popper presented science as a deductive process in which a researcher deduces a proposition from their hypothesis and then attempts to prove that deduction wrong.
If it is not proven wrong, even when everyone in the scientific community is given the chance to try hard to do so, it can be accepted as provisionally true. While Popper got the post-positive train rolling out of the station, he was replaced in the driver's seat by Thomas Kuhn, scholar and author of the seminal book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which argues that scientific knowledge has not been accumulated neatly. Rather, Kuhn documents the messy historical and sociological development of scientific knowledge, which is marked, as he observes, by significant paradigm shifts in which one overarching worldview suddenly gives way to another.
This process is demonstrably not objective or detached, but rather integrates many influences, including human ones. Post-positivist thought grew in response to and built on findings in physics, particularly those of Werner Heisenberg and Niels Bohr. Heisenberg's quantum theory includes the uncertainty principle, stating, that it is impossible to figure out both the momentum and the position of a subatomic particle where is that little electron going? We can't predict.
And that the very act of observing the particle alters it, making prediction impossible and challenging positivism's assumptions about knowledge or its epistemology. Bohr, on the other hand, challenged positivism's assumptions about reality, its ontology. By asserting that subatomic particles are inherently different from previously observed and understood reality, opening up the possibility of reality that cannot be objectively and positively known, as complex, even chaotic findings such as these continue to emerge in physics and other areas of science, the post-positivist perspective has seemed increasingly relevant as an alternative to positivism as a basis for scientific inquiry.