Popper was not a Positivist: Why Critical Rationalism Could be an Epistemology for Qualitative as well as Quantitative Social Scientific Research

Abstract

Within this article we argue that Karl Popper’s philosophical approach of critical rationalism has often been erroneously subsumed under the positivistic epistemological paradigm in the literature on qualitative and quantitative approaches in the social sciences. In other highly influential publications on this issue, critical rationalism has been regarded as merely a small and superficial improvement of naive positivism (post-positivism; e.g. Guba & Lincoln, 1994). In contrast, we argue that Popper was a staunch anti-positivist and that his approach is much closer to the epistemological beliefs that seem to underlie most of qualitative research. Beyond a mere pragmatism in doing whatever is useful, critical rationalism could serve as a guiding epistemology for all social scientific research as long as all aspects of the methodological approach are open to pertinent criticism themselves.

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