Four Ways of Knowing in Sociology: Positivism, Interpretivism, Critical Realism and Pragmatism

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Method

Sociology is not only about what we study. It is also about how we think we can know anything about the social world. In first-year lectures and methods handbooks, this often appears as a list of labels: positivism, interpretivism, critical realism, pragmatism, and so on. The labels can feel abstract. Yet they quietly shape the questions we ask, the methods we choose and the explanations we find convincing.

This article offers a foundational map of four influential ways of knowing in sociology. It does not try to decide which approach is “best”. Instead, it shows how each one answers three basic questions:

  1. What is the social world like?
  2. What does it mean to know something about it?
  3. What kinds of methods and explanations tend to follow from that?

The aim is to give undergraduate readers a practical vocabulary. You should be able to recognise different epistemological stances when you encounter them, and to think more clearly about your own choices in essays and research projects.

Positivism: Sociology as a Social Science

Positivism is often described, sometimes unfairly, as the view that sociology should copy the natural sciences.

Positivism treats society as something we can measure from the outside and analyse for patterns, a bit like a social laboratory. Its classic versions are associated with Auguste Comte and, in different ways, Émile Durkheim (Comte, 1974; Durkheim, 1982). The basic idea is that social life can be studied through careful observation, measurement and comparison, in search of regularities.

From a positivist perspective, the social world is made up of observable phenomena. These include behaviours, institutional arrangements and measurable attitudes. Sociologists should look for patterns in these phenomena and try to state generalisations or even law-like relationships. It is not enough to offer an interesting story. Claims should be open to testing, replication and critique.

In practice, positivism tends to favour quantitative methods. These include large-scale surveys, analysis of official statistics, experiments and structured observation. Explanations often take the form “X is associated with Y, once we control for other factors”. For instance, a positivist study might show that pupils from certain social class backgrounds are more likely to achieve particular exam results, even after accounting for gender and school type.

Positivism has clear strengths. It pushes researchers to be explicit about concepts and hypotheses. It encourages transparency about sampling, measurement and analysis. It can reveal large-scale patterns that are hard to see from everyday experience, such as long-term trends in fertility, crime or income inequality.

However, positivism also has well-known limitations. Critics argue that it can downplay meaning and context. People do not simply respond to external forces; they interpret situations, form intentions and act with reference to norms and symbols. Positivist work can also treat social categories – such as “race” or “intelligence” – as if they were natural kinds rather than historical and political constructions. Many contemporary, post-positivist researchers are alert to these issues and work carefully with contested categories, but the critique remains important because it highlights how measurement choices can carry political assumptions. These critiques led many sociologists to emphasise interpretive approaches.

Interpretivism: Understanding Meaning from the Inside

Interpretivism says we have to get inside people’s meanings and see the world from their point of view if we want to explain what they do. Social life is not just a set of observable behaviours. It is built up through shared meanings, symbols and understandings. To explain action, we need to grasp how people make sense of themselves and others. Counting events may not be enough.

Max Weber is a key reference point here. He argued that sociology should provide verstehen – interpretive understanding of the meanings attached to action (Weber, 1978). Later traditions such as symbolic interactionism and phenomenology developed this insight. They focused on everyday interaction, identity work and the negotiation of norms.

From an interpretivist perspective, the social world is a web of meanings. People draw on shared cultural resources – language, categories, narratives – to define situations. Knowledge involves reconstructing these meanings as actors themselves understand them, while still analysing them critically. Explanations ask questions like: How do people involved in this situation define what is happening? How do their interpretations shape what they do next?

Interpretivism tends to favour qualitative methods. These include in-depth interviews, participant observation, ethnography, and analysis of diaries, conversations and cultural texts. A study of youth subcultures, for example, might explore what particular styles, music, and slang mean to participants, and how these meanings relate to class, gender or race. The researcher may spend long periods in the field, trying to see the world from participants’ point of view.

Critics sometimes accuse interpretivism of being too relativist. If every group has its own meanings, are we left with nothing but descriptions? Others worry that a focus on micro-level interaction can neglect large-scale structures and inequalities. Interpretivists respond that without attention to meaning, explanations risk becoming thin. We may know that certain groups are more likely to be unemployed or to protest, but not why these patterns arise or how they are lived.

In many contemporary projects, elements of positivism and interpretivism are combined. Quantitative data may show broad patterns. Qualitative work then explores how people experience and interpret those patterns. Before we turn to mixing, however, it is useful to introduce two further approaches: critical realism and pragmatism.

Critical Realism: Layers, Mechanisms and Context

Critical realism emerged partly as a reaction against both naive positivism and strong relativism. Associated with Roy Bhaskar and later developed in sociology and human geography, it argues that the social world has real underlying structures and mechanisms, but that these cannot be read off directly from surface observations (Bhaskar, 1979; Sayer, 2000). It is a form of post-positivist realism: it takes reality to exist independently of our descriptions, yet treats all knowledge claims as fallible, theory-laden attempts to understand that reality.

Critical realists often talk about the world as stratified. One way to express this is to distinguish between the empirical, the actual and the real. The empirical is what we experience or measure. The actual is the wider set of events that happen, whether or not anyone notices them. The real consists of underlying structures and mechanisms – such as class relations, institutional rules or gender norms – that generate tendencies.

From a critical realist perspective, a pattern in the data is a clue to a deeper story, not the end of the analysis. Imagine we observe a persistent class gradient in health outcomes. A realist explanation does not stop at describing that gradient. It asks what mechanisms have to be in place for the gradient to arise. These might include working conditions, housing, environmental exposures, unequal treatment in healthcare and so on. It also asks why similar mechanisms sometimes produce different outcomes in different contexts.

For critical realists, the social world is structured, but open. Structures have causal powers, yet their effects depend on how they combine in particular situations. Knowledge involves identifying plausible mechanisms and describing how they operate across time and place. Explanations are often mechanistic and contextual rather than purely correlational or purely interpretive.

Critical realism is compatible with both quantitative and qualitative methods. A realist might use survey data to map patterns, then draw on interviews, case studies or document analysis to explore mechanisms. The distinctive feature is not the technique but the question: what must be going on, beneath the surface, for these events or experiences to make sense? A separate article on this site, Critical Realism Explained: A Guide for Sociology Students, develops these ideas in more depth. Here, the aim is simply to position critical realism as one way of answering the question “what does it mean to explain something sociologically?” alongside the other approaches.

Pragmatism: Knowledge as a Tool

Pragmatism asks whether an idea helps people deal with real problems; if it does, it is useful knowledge. It emerged from American philosophy, especially the work of William James, John Dewey and George Herbert Mead (Dewey, 1938). Pragmatists are less interested in abstract debates about truth and more interested in how ideas help people navigate the world.

From a pragmatist perspective, the social world is open-ended. It is made and remade through action. Problems arise, people try out responses, and over time certain habits and institutions stabilise. Knowledge is evaluated in terms of its usefulness for dealing with these problems. An idea is not just true or false. It is more or less helpful for understanding a situation, anticipating consequences and guiding action.

Pragmatism does not come with a fixed method. Instead, it encourages methodological flexibility. Researchers ask which combination of approaches is most likely to shed light on the problem at hand and to be meaningful to those involved. A study of community responses to flooding, for example, might combine household surveys, interviews with residents, workshops with local officials and participatory mapping. The goal is to produce knowledge that local actors and policy-makers can use, rather than to test a single grand theory.

Critics worry that pragmatism can slide into a narrow “what works” mentality that leaves underlying structures and injustices untouched. If the definition of “the problem” is set entirely by powerful actors, then pragmatic solutions may simply help institutions manage dissent or increase efficiency without addressing harm. Pragmatists reply that their approach can be combined with critical theory. One can still ask who defines the problem, whose interests are served by particular solutions and whose voices are heard in evaluations. In participatory and community-based research, for example, pragmatist ideas are sometimes used to reframe problems from the standpoint of marginalised groups, unsettling existing power relations rather than reinforcing them. In sociology, pragmatism is helpful as a reminder that theories and methods are not ends in themselves. They are tools that can be judged, at least partly, by their consequences.

Choosing and Combining Ways of Knowing

One way to think about these approaches is as different lenses: each brings some features into sharp focus and leaves others blurred.

These four ways of knowing are not watertight boxes. In practice, sociologists often draw on more than one, sometimes consciously and sometimes without naming it. Recognising the differences can still be useful.

Positivism is strongest when we need to map broad patterns and show that something is happening on a scale that matters. Interpretivism is strongest when we need to understand how people make sense of their worlds. Critical realism is strongest when we need to link patterns and meanings to underlying structures and mechanisms. Pragmatism is strongest when we need to think about how research can feed into problem-solving and practice.

A study of racialised policing, for instance, might combine all four. Researchers might use positivist tools to analyse stop-and-search statistics and identify disparities. They might adopt an interpretivist stance in interviews, exploring how officers and residents understand encounters. They might be guided by critical realism in identifying mechanisms such as institutional racism, informal norms or media narratives that help to explain those patterns. They might take a pragmatist interest in how the findings could support campaigns, legal challenges or policy reforms.

For students, the key is not to memorise labels but to ask three questions of any project or article.

First, what kind of thing is the social world assumed to be here? Is it treated mainly as a set of observable behaviours, as a web of meanings, as a structured system of mechanisms, or as a field of practical problem-solving? Different assumptions push us towards different forms of explanation.

Secondly, what seems to count as a good explanation in this piece of work? Is the goal prediction and control, empathic understanding, identification of mechanisms, or practical guidance? In some studies, more than one goal is in play, which can create tensions.

Thirdly, how do the methods used fit these assumptions? If a study claims to be interpretivist but relies solely on a brief tick-box survey, there may be a mismatch. If a project presents itself as pragmatic but pays little attention to how participants understand the problem, it may miss important dimensions.

Being explicit about these epistemological questions does not mean locking yourself into a single camp for the rest of your studies. It does, however, make it easier to design coherent projects and to explain your choices in essays and dissertations. It can also help you read existing research more critically, by noticing not only what authors conclude but also what they assume about knowledge and the social world.

Epistemology as a Practical Resource

Epistemology can sound forbidding. It is often presented in philosophy texts as a set of technical debates about realism and relativism, objectivity and subjectivity. For sociologists, however, epistemology is also a practical resource. It gives us language for thinking about what we are doing when we do research, and for justifying our approaches to others.

This article has focused on four broad ways of knowing that are especially visible in undergraduate methods teaching and are often grouped, alongside explicitly critical paradigms, under the heading of “research paradigms” in methods textbooks. Many sociologists would also add explicitly critical paradigms – including Marxist, feminist and decolonial approaches – which put questions of power, ideology and emancipation at the centre. These critical perspectives often cut across the four approaches discussed here, shaping how researchers use them and what they hope their work will achieve.

Positivism, interpretivism, critical realism and pragmatism each offer different answers to questions about what the social world is like, what it means to know something about it and how we should go about explaining it. Knowing these differences can help you navigate methods modules, design more thoughtful projects and make sense of disagreements in the literature.

You do not need to declare lifelong allegiance to one approach. Many sociologists shift emphasis between projects, or combine elements in creative ways. What matters is that the combinations make sense. Being able to say, even in simple terms, “this study is mainly interpretivist, but I also draw on realist ideas about mechanisms” or “this project is broadly positivist, but I am using qualitative work to deepen the patterns” is already a significant step.

Thinking sociologically about ways of knowing does not remove the hard work of reading, designing and analysing. It can, however, make that work more coherent. It can also make debates about method and theory easier to follow. When you encounter a sharp disagreement in the literature, it is often helpful to ask: are these authors really arguing about the same thing, or are they starting from different assumptions about what counts as knowledge? Having a clearer map of epistemological traditions will help you answer that question.

Undergraduate readers who want to explore these issues further might find it useful to start with a clear introductory text, such as Crotty’s The foundations of social research (1998), and then move on to a more advanced overview like Blaikie and Priest’s Approaches to social enquiry (2019), which situate different paradigms within the broader philosophy of social science.

References

  • Bhaskar, R. (1979). The possibility of naturalism: A philosophical critique of the contemporary human sciences. Harvester Press.
  • Blaikie, N., & Priest, J. (2019). Approaches to social enquiry: Advancing knowledge (3rd ed.). Polity.
  • Collins, R. (1994). Four sociological traditions. Oxford University Press.
  • Comte, A. (1974). The positive philosophy (H. Martineau, Trans.). AMS Press. (Original work published 1830–1842)
  • Crotty, M. (1998). The foundations of social research: Meaning and perspective in the research process. SAGE.
  • Dewey, J. (1938). Logic: The theory of inquiry. Henry Holt.
  • Durkheim, É. (1982). The rules of sociological method (W. D. Halls, Trans.). Macmillan. (Original work published 1895)
  • Sayer, A. (2000). Realism and social science. Sage.
  • Weber, M. (1978). Economy and society: An outline of interpretive sociology (G. Roth & C. Wittich, Eds.). University of California Press.

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