Anti-Positivism - Positivism: The Epistemological Debate
Positivists believe that one can seek to explain and predict what happens in the social world by searching for patterns and relationships between people. They believe one can develop hypotheses and test them, and that knowledge is a cumulative process.
Anti-positivists reject that observing behavior can help one understand it. One must experience it directly. They reject that social science can create true objective knowledge of any kind.