The persistent hegemony of positivist empiricism within numerous sectors of the social sciences warrants a critical re-evaluation of its foundational epistemological and ontological suppositions. This methodological framework, predicated on the verifiability of phenomena through direct observation and the application of quantifiable metrics, axiomatically privileges a vision of social reality as an aggregate of discrete, externally verifiable facts. Such a perspective, however, proves profoundly inadequate when confronted with the non-linear, context-dependent phenomena endemic to complex human social systems. By circumscribing the domain of legitimate inquiry to that which is empirically measurable, positivism systematically marginalizes the interpretive dimensions of social action, thereby engendering a deeply reductive understanding that fails to capture the nuanced interplay of meaning, intentionality, and power dynamics. This exclusion is not a neutral procedural choice but an active theoretical commitment with significant consequences for what is deemed knowable. The hermeneutic counterpoint posits that social reality is not merely discovered but is perpetually constituted through language and intersubjective interpretation. From this standpoint, any analytical framework that eschews a thorough investigation of these constitutive processes is rendered inherently incomplete. The very aspiration toward complete objectivity and what is often termed axiological neutrality, a central tenet of the positivist creed, is itself a normative stance, freighted with unexamined teleological assumptions about the nature and purpose of scholarly inquiry. The insistence on a methodology ostensibly commensurate with the natural sciences betrays a fundamental misapprehension of the subject matter, conflating the study of reflexive human agency with the causal analysis of inert physical objects. This categorical error ultimately subverts the framework’s claim to superior intellectual rigor, exposing it as an ideologically constrained paradigm rather than a universally applicable pathway to veridical knowledge.