Applied Ontology - Ontological Perspectives

Ontological Perspectives

Social scientists adopt one of four main ontological approaches:

1. realism - the idea that facts are "out there" just waiting to be discovered
2. empiricism - the idea that we can observe the world and evaluate those observations in relation to facts
3. positivism - which focuses on the observations themselves, attentive more to claims about facts than to facts themselves
4. postmodernism - which regards facts as fluid and elusive, and recommends focusing only on observational claims.