Replicability: 21st Century Crisis of the Positivist Social Sciences

Abstract

Replicability in social research forms the essence of the positivist attempt to discover the universal and self-supporting method of the exploration of “truth”. However, the principle of replication as a meta-judge which is regarded as the legitimate baseline of science raises certain difficulties where the object of research is not independent of the researcher. The replication crisis is an ongoing methodological crisis that has emerged as a result of the failure of experiments on the repetition of social psychology-based studies. The crisis has deeply shaken the medical, natural, social, and further positivist sciences which in general work with the replicability principle. The aim of this paper is to identify the replicability issue as the latest methodological discussion in the social sciences in line with the critiques of positivism that marked the 20th century to demonstrate which scholars and schools of thought criticized the positivistic principles of replicability and universality, and to show whether these principles are still a topic of debate in 21st century social sciences. As a result of the study, it is concluded that positivist claims: replication and universality principles lose their validity in sociology due to ontological, epistemological, individual and structural aspects.