Search results for "positivismi"
showing 3 items of 3 documents
Demystifying the Influential IS Legends of Positivism
2018
Positivism has been used to establish a standard that Information Systems (IS) research must meet to be scientific. According to such positivistic beliefs in IS, scientific research should: 1) be generalizable, 2) focus on stable independent variables, 3) have certain ontological assumptions, and 4) use statistical or quantitative methods rather than qualitative methods. We argue that logical positivist philosophers required none of these. On the contrary, logical positivist philosophers regarded philosophizing in general and ontological considerations in particular as nonsense. Moreover, the positivists’ preferred empirical research method was not a survey, but rather a qualitative observa…
Demystifying the Influential IS Legends of Positivism : Response to Lee’s Commentary
2020
We respond to Lee’s (forthcoming) commentary on our article “Demystifying the Influential IS Legends of Positivism” (Siponen & Tsohou [S&T], 2018). Lee offers four arguments against our analyses and conclusions in S&T (2018). First, because logical positivism (LP) has been discredited, he contends it cannot be used as a normative standard in IS. We clarify that our conclusions in S&T (2018) point to (1) the lack of justification for certain IS beliefs, and (2) a misunderstanding rather than legitimacy of LP as a philosophy of science. Second, Lee argues that IS researchers characterizing positivism never said they were following the tenets of LP. We provide evidence to show some influential…