However this is not part of my professional discourse because of the way I define myself and consequently how others define me. I could write an academic paper about the riffs of Chuck Berry but it has probably already been done and the Research Assessment Exercise would ignore it because I have already defined myself as an engineer and they will only accept me in that role. I think some post-modernist thought may offer us a way through this. The eclecticism embraced by some post-modernists allows for a polymathic approach. And it is becoming permissible to allow the discourses to inform each other.
Positivism is a paper tiger which is fair game for any small game hunter who wants to shoot it down.
Method in the natural sciences owes little to the positivist model that has been ascribed to it. Once the positivism half of the positivism - hermeneutics binary has been removed the hermeneutics half begins to look a bit solitary. The study of human activity has tried to follow the natural sciences model but there is little to follow. When knowledge is advanced there is a problem in that it becomes obscurantist and is exclusive to a small number of people who are engaged in the discourse. As people enter a discourse they become their own gatekeepers and subject themselves to the discipline of the discourse.