ABSTRACT
Positivism is a philosophy of science which sees science as a purely objective enterprise. The post positivistic approach suggests that there is a social nature to science. When most people think of a psychologist, they think of a person sitting in an office listening to another person, perhaps reclined on a couch, talk about their problems. The scientist is completely independent of the subject being investigated. Gradually during the seventeenth century, more and more astronomers came to accept the truth of Copernicuss approach, and the new paradigm eventually replaced the old. The notion that science is a social enterprise leads some to argue that scientific knowledge itself is a social construction: that the objects and events about which information is acquired through scientific research do not exist independently of that research. In addition, science now means the search for naturalistic mechanisms that can explain the operations of the natural and physical world.
