Epistemology: Same-sex marriage

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Research guided by principles of logical positivism and research guided by principles of interpretivism

Positivism (occasionally called empirico-positivism and positive empiricism): This is a modern ideology that stresses empirical evidence, causality and rejects all metaphysical or religious claims. What we see is real, and our logic "lines up" with these objects. The world is deterministic, and, really, the whole point of research is to discover the mechanism of cause and effect such that we can control the phenomenon being studied. It accepts the empirical method only.

All that we know can be reduced to these postulates:
all truth must be expressible in language and replicated;
all truth must be observed multiple times;
the world is only physical mechanism;
ethics is relative and has nothing to do with physical reality;
facts are facts, regardless of what theories you hold;
experiment is needed;
quantitative studies are the best, mathematics is the prime science;
there is no such thing as "intuition";
the whole is never greater than the sum of its parts. Study the parts, and you get the whole;
There are no absolutes;
there is no absolute truth or all encompassing reality.

This is classic, Anglo-American scientific empiricism coming from Francis Bacon and possibly before. Positivists, in general, tend to also be nominalists, that is, objects have no intrinsic meaning or purpose. Only humanity can give it this meaning. Objects in nature exist only externally and logically, and have no essence that makes them unique. Reality is just a swirl of qualities like color, light, texture, etc., with no intrinsic purpose. This has been the dominant ideology of the west for many centuries.

Interpretivism: This is a more recent answer to positivism. It is complex, but for now, let's say that it rejects the positive concept of theory. Theory exists before research in interpretivism, this is ...