Interpretive sociology

Antipositivism (also known as interpretivism or negativism) is the belief within social science that the social realm is not subject to the same methods of investigation as the natural world. The social realm requires a different epistemology in which academics do not use the scientific method of the natural sciences. Antipositivists hold that researchers need to be, first, aware that our concepts, ideas, and language shape how we think about the social world. Therefore, antipositivists focus on understanding the interpretative method employed.

Beginning with Giambattista Vico in the early eighteenth century, and later with Montesquieu, there was a separation between natural history and human history. The former is not directly under man's control whereas the latter is in fact man's creation. As such, an epistemological distinction is made between the natural world and the social realm which informs antipositivism. The natural world can only be understood with regard to its external characteristics, whereas the social realm can be understood externally and internally, and can therefore be known fully. The internal focus is seen fully developed in antipositivist methods.

In the early nineteenth century, various intellectuals, led by the Hegelians, questioned the prospect of empirical social analysis.Karl Marx died before the establishment of formal social science, but nonetheless fiercely rejected Comtean sociological positivism—despite himself attempting to establish a historical materialist "science of society".

The enhanced positivism presented by Emile Durkheim would serve to found modern academic sociology and social research, yet retained many of the mechanical elements of its predecessor. Hermeneuticians such as Wilhelm Dilthey theorized in detail on the distinction between natural and social science ('Geisteswissenschaft'), whilst neo-Kantian philosophers such as Heinrich Rickert maintained that the social realm, with its abstract meanings and symbolisms, is inconsistent with scientific methods of analysis. Edmund Husserl, meanwhile, negated positivism through the rubric of phenomenology.

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