ABSTRACT
The most common controversy in the social sciences arises from the competing claims of positivism and perspectivism, these being rival accounts of how we go about social science. As Fay (1996) says, the positivist aim is to arrive at knowledge that mirrors an objective world, believing we can attain a system of objective knowledge that reflects Reality as it is.1 In marketing, positivism is associated with those who seek to follow the methodology of the natural sciences, with its strong emphasis on causal analysis, quantification, and experimentation. Perspectivism is the popular alternative.
