POSITIVISM

Positivism can be define in scientific method as the preferable or desirable towards a good result or achievement based on subjective and or unobservable mental states. Auguste Comte, whom was an early sociologist, came out with this kind of methodology, has maintained the application of the methods and assumptions of the natural sciences of the "positive sciences" of society. Therefore, resulting the tenants of positivism or the positivist perspective.

Positivism can be classified into two; logical positivism and legal positivism.

Legal positivism - is an idea or law merely based on government official decision. Anything to do with moral or emotion simply cannot become a base on how the society gonna react with an official decided law. Legal positivism purified the view of exactness over the different opinion believing in society. 

Normally, law were viewed as an extension of moral norms that exactly already existed in society. Legal positivism prioritize to obey the law (which has been officially authorize) itself even it is not necessary justified or ethically. That is because there may be thousand slightly different view of moral and ethics and thus could cause mess and chaos. That is why legal positivism is necessary to maintain order in society.

Logical positivism - is the most popular style of thinking and may have been existed for over thousand years; starting with the very first generation of human society. It is more to distinguish the truth or false of a certain philosophy statement which attempted to make a philosophy become more rigid. Verifiability become its main criteria for any statement and come from two different type of sources:

1. Empirical statement - comes from science knowledge and theories.
2. Analytical truth - true or false analytical based from definition.

These concept may have been influencing philosophy of  science, logic, and language but nowadays, it has been seen as overly simplistic approach as new philosophy replace them. This is because this philosophy mainly regard the view of true, false or meaningless as the main aspect as the best way to look over a statement. Meanwhile nowadays they only see a philosophy based from truth or falsity of a statement in probabilistic. 

The clash of philosophy resulting conflict as logical positivist claim that this is more to be a cluster philosophy rather than a monolithic code. Briefly to understand, logical positivist are rejecting ethic and aesthetics as being unverifiable and not regard as a part of philosophy. A statement must be proof based on either empirical data or analytical truth. Honestly, logical positivist connecting philosophy more to science and has been playing a vital part in the formulation of philosophical ideas throughout the 20th century.

PHENOMENOLOGY

“Phenomenology advocates the scientific study of immediate experiences and focuses on events, occurrences and happenings as one experiences them, with a minimum of regard for the external, physical reality” (Fellows and Liu, 2008, p.70)

 In other word, phenomenology means of an event or experience. Phenomenology or we can call phenomena inclusive of role and function in many kind of aspect, which we can refer as the way of thinking. As the phenomenology itself is the one method way of thinking, "a way of looking things".

 The main advantages and disadvantages associated with positivism and phenomenology are presented on the following table by Armstrong (2010) as taken from Easterby-Smith et al (1991).

ADVANTAGE	DISADVANTAGE
Wide coverage of the range of situations	Methods tend to be flexible and artificial
Can be fast and economical	Not very effective in understanding processes or the significance people attach to actions
May be relevant to policy decisions when statistics are exaggerated in large samples	Not very helpful in generating theories
	Because it focuses on what is or what has been recently, it makes it hard for policy makers to infer what actions should take place in the future
PHENOMOLOGY
Gather data which is seen as natural rather than artificial	Data gathering can take up a great deal of time and resources
Contribute to the development of new theories	The analysis and interpretation of data may be difficult
Help to adjust to new issues and ideas as they emerge	May be harder than positivist approach to control pace, progress and end points
Help to understand people’s meanings	Policy-makers may give low credibility to a phenomenological study
Can look at change processes over time

 

The reality is?

 

Despite of many kind of ways to interpret philosophy of positivism, the application is still the same. Through many numerous and countless experienced by the society, it resulted in either by expected result or they experience the loss which eventually bring benefit to former in future. In other word, there will be something to achieve if we keep with the spirit of positive throughout the entire live. Even so, being positive bluntly without any concrete statement or gold in future are extremely prohibit because it is nature of human to not afford of any vain on their action.