Question 1: What is method from a Marxist perspective and from a positivist perspective? Discuss similarities and differences between the two perspectives.
The beginning of knowledge comes from metaphysics, theological and positivism. And these put much on a critical stance in the discourse of method. Little (2011), explains that method is a prescriptive body of doctrines to guide inquiry. The ideal of understanding social world underlies in whether to embrace and use principles and guiding procedures of the natural world where positivism dominates in the epistemological consideration. This method has a considerable influence onto social scientist, in promoting the status of survey research and the quantitative analysis (Atkinson and Hammersley,…show more content… The social world as a domain of phenomena. is fundamentally divergent from the natural world, in respect of its degree of law governedness (Little 1993). Marxist method asserts that the social world is not ordered. Therefore, natural law is governed by a certain causation and its effects are not adequate enough to explain how the composed is the social world. Little (2011)elucidated that Marxist’s view on social inquiry is underpinned in a summation of many cross-cutting and different and processes, institutions and structures driven by the meaningful actions of persons, within given material and cultural institutions that bear contingent and sometimes accidental relations to each other. Marxists think that methods try to focus on the world plurality.
Marxist and Positivism share similarities as the critical realist approach view by Marxism adhere also to have empiricism, unity of science and causal laws. Empiricism emphasizes that the best way to understand the social world is by focusing on both theoretical thinking and reasoning and empirical methods.
Both Marxist and Positivists postulate that the only authentic knowledge is scientific knowledge and that the source of knowledge is sense experience and scientific knowledge hence empiricism and