Positivism is a specific historical stance. Simplifying, it entails at its heart a commitment to a belief that the only "cognitively meaningful" statements (propositions) must be either:
(a) logically deductive (e.g., all bachelors are unmarried men)
(b) empirically verifiable (e.g., natural scientific evidence)
Interpretativist traditions do not make this commitment.
Incidentally, positivism has been so widely discredited that basically no one commits to the stance above any more. Post-positivists, following thinkers like Popper, Quine, and Kuhn, hew as closely to traditional positivism as possible, but acknowledge the role of the social construction of theory and the ways that it grounds the possibility of inquiry. In other words, not even the remnants of positivism are properly positivists any more.
Ken is far from that position, as are his primary sources (as he cites them).
I know of no knowledge discipline that doesn't care about evidence. In literary criticism, for example, if one makes a claim about a novel, one is expected to point to passages in that novel. An art historian is expected to point to this or that daub of paint to justify an interpretation (e.g., "this is fauvist"). This is evidence, but it is far from positivism. The positivists held that one cannot make cognitively meaningful statements about aesthetics or ethics.
For more, see: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/vienna-circle/
Best,
Jeffrey
--
Jeffrey Bardzell, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Informatics
Human-Computer Interaction/Design
Affiliated Faculty of the Kinsey Institute for Sex, Gender, and Reproduction
Indiana University School of Informatics and Computing
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