Positivism's Twilight?

What is it about?

A critique of sociological assumption that social processes are law-based, quantifiable and predictable.

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Why is it important?

Sociological research has largely relied on the assumption, sometimes referred to as the Newtonian Paradigm, that social causation is linear, predictable and repeatable. This article argues that in real social life causation is exceedingly complex, frequently non-linear and unpredictable, and historical and unrepeatable. In a complex and changing world other things never remain equal. We can therefore not expect that the same cause will have the same consequence later in an event sequence.

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