Breaking down the question
The directive verb is examine, which asks for more than description. It calls for an exposition of the postulates of each position followed by a critical appraisal of how post-positivism revises and answers positivism. Two bodies of thought must be handled, and — crucially — the relationship between them.
Basic postulates signals that the examiner wants the foundational assumptions set out cleanly: for positivism, the unity of scientific method, empiricism, the search for causal laws, objectivity and value-freedom; for post-positivism, the critical response that concedes much to science while abandoning naive certainty. A frequent error is to treat post-positivism as identical with interpretivism or as a flat rejection of science. It is neither. Post-positivism retains the ambition of a rigorous, objective social science but chastens its epistemology.
The topic — Sociology as Science — anchors the discussion. The postulates matter because they answer the standing question of whether and how sociology can be scientific.
How to approach it
Begin by defining positivism through its founders and stating its postulates as a connected system, drawing on the account of sociology as a science. Then present post-positivism not as an unrelated school but as the disciplined critique that grew out of positivism's difficulties — associated above all with Popper's falsificationism and with the recognition that observation is theory-laden.
Structure the body in two clear halves, postulate against postulate, so the examiner sees exactly what post-positivism revises. Close by assessing what survives: an objective social science that is fallible, self-correcting and modest about certainty.
Model answer
Positivism is the doctrine, founded by Auguste Comte, that the methods of the natural sciences are the only path to genuine knowledge and that they can and should be applied to the study of society. Its basic postulates form a tight system. First, the unity of scientific method: there is one logic of enquiry, and sociology must follow the model of physics and chemistry. Second, empiricism: valid knowledge derives only from what can be observed through the senses and measured; metaphysical and theological speculation is discarded. Third, the search for causal laws: like nature, society is governed by invariant regularities, and the task of sociology is to discover general laws linking cause and effect, permitting explanation and prediction. Fourth, objectivity and value-freedom: the researcher stands outside the object, keeping personal values out of enquiry so that facts alone speak. Fifth, phenomenalism and nominalism: only phenomena and their relations count as knowledge, and abstract concepts are admitted only in so far as they refer to observables.
Durkheim gave these postulates their most influential sociological expression. His insistence that social facts be treated "as things", external to and constraining the individual, and his statistical demonstration of the social causes of suicide, showed how a positivist sociology might actually be practised — objective, empirical, law-seeking.
Positivism, however, ran into deep difficulties, and post-positivism is the considered response to them. It is not a return to metaphysics nor a surrender to pure subjectivity; it retains positivism's commitment to objectivity, evidence and the possibility of a scientific sociology, while abandoning its more confident and untenable claims. Its postulates may be set against those of positivism.
First, against naive empiricism, post-positivism holds that observation is theory-laden. There are no pure, presuppositionless facts; what the researcher perceives and records is shaped by prior concepts, expectations and theoretical commitments. Data do not simply announce their meaning. Second, against the search for certain, verified laws, Karl Popper substituted falsification. No number of confirming instances can prove a universal law, since the next observation may refute it; a statement is scientific only if it is refutable, and science advances by bold conjectures exposed to rigorous attempts at refutation. Knowledge is therefore provisional and fallible rather than certain. Third, against the claim to complete objectivity, post-positivism accepts that the researcher's values and social location inevitably influence enquiry, so objectivity is reconceived as a regulative ideal pursued through the critical scrutiny of a community of researchers rather than possessed by any individual. Bias is controlled not by pretending it is absent but by exposing findings to public criticism and replication. Fourth, in place of a rigid deductive-nomological model, post-positivism favours critical realism in some versions — the view that there are real underlying structures and mechanisms generating observable events, which science seeks to uncover even though they are not directly observable.
The relationship between the two is thus one of continuity within revision. Positivism supplied the aspiration to a systematic, objective, evidence-based science of society. Post-positivism accepted that aspiration but recognised that its epistemology was too confident: that facts are not theory-free, that laws cannot be conclusively verified, that the knower cannot be wholly detached, and that all knowledge is open to correction. The result is a chastened but still scientific stance — objectivity as a disciplined, communal, self-correcting practice rather than a god's-eye guarantee.
Assessment. Examined together, the two positions map the mainstream debate over sociology's scientific status. Positivism's enduring contribution is its insistence on evidence, measurement and the disciplined testing of claims, without which sociology would drift into mere opinion. Its weakness is a scientism that mistook the human, meaning-laden social world for a field of inert facts and overstated the certainty of its laws. Post-positivism preserves the strengths while curing the excesses: it keeps sociology answerable to evidence and to the community of critics, yet acknowledges the fallibility, theory-dependence and value-involvement of all enquiry. It represents not the abandonment of a scientific sociology but its maturation.
Examiner's perspective
The decisive discriminator on this question is whether the candidate grasps that post-positivism is a critique from within science, not a synonym for interpretivism or a wholesale rejection of objectivity. Scripts that equate post-positivism with Verstehen or with anti-science relativism misread the term and forfeit marks.
Examiners reward a clean, systematic statement of positivism's postulates — empiricism, causal laws, objectivity, unity of method — grounded in Comte and Durkheim, followed by a point-by-point account of how post-positivism revises each, with Popper's falsification and the theory-ladenness of observation as the anchors.
The best answers present the two as a continuity-in-revision rather than as opposites, and close with a balanced judgement: post-positivism keeps sociology scientific while making it modest, fallible and self-correcting. Precision with the key terms, rather than breadth of name-dropping, marks out the top band.