Objectivists:
Ontology: "naive" realism
--empirical facts exist independently of our consciousness of them --scientific concepts are said to be capable of copying or corresponding to those factual realities.
Naive realism provides a basis for a theory of scientific representation and is often associated with British Empiricism.
Epistemology: positivism; logical empiricism (science as the discovery of invariant covering laws that determine the relations among observable empirical facts or objective structures that exist independently of our consciousness of them.
covering law model or hypotehtico-deductive model:
to explain something is to provide an adequate and justifiable
account of necessary causes and essential determinants based
on the operation of universal laws under specific conditions
Li (one or more universal laws)
Ci (one or more statements of background circumstances)
======= (deductively entails)
E (statement of the fact or regularity to be explained)
because not all scientific explanations are universal, logicians have employed inductive-statistical models that utilize probabilistic statements:
Li (one or more statitical laws)
Ci (one or more statements of background circumstances)
======= (makes very likely)
E (statement of the fact or regularity to be explained)
Theory of Action:
Positivism tends to support a form of determinism that views intentions and subjective states as essentially epiphenomenal compared to their objective determinants.
Theory of Social/Scientific Explanation:
the goal of explanation is the search for nomothetic explanations: invariant covering laws that account for the patterns found in large populations of individual cases. Such explanations are associated with experimental methods and the quantitative analysis of statistically defined variables (survey research).
"One of the most well known versions of the split between subjectivism and objectivism in epistemology can be found in the opposition of idealism and materialism. In its traditional 19th century form this conflict was defined by the clash between religion and the physicalist materialism of the natural sciences. this clash took the form of the contrast between a view of "man" as guided by a "soul," as opposed to being a "mechanism" reducible to biology...In the more sophisticated form found in the debate between Marxism and liberal social science, materialism refers to a historical analysis that stressed explanations based on external "material" structures (social and economic), as opposed to the voluntary actions of individuals who choose their own fate." Raymond Morrow, Critical Theory and Methodology
Next:
Subjectivism
The Interpretivist Challenge
Beyond Subjectivism and Objectivism: Post Empiricism, Post Positivism, Post
Modernism, Critical Realism
:)