[cornelis]

"Suppose it is true that positivism as the basis for scientific method is completely flawed, what should I use instead when conducting a survey or perfoming any other measurement?" I'll never forget the instructor's spirited exclamation: "I don't know; you tell me!"

Okay, but this misses the point. The thesis of scientism is that ITS object of study is the ONLY object of study.

[Aurelius]

I love those old movies with the vampires, werewolves, etc., where some character says, about some really spooky phenomenon which has just occured. "But there must be a scientific explanation." Well of course there is a scientific explanation. Give us an occurence, and name your ideology, and we can provide an "explanation" in terms of your ideology. That is the purpose of ideologies, to explain everything in their terms. That is what an explanation is, an interpretation of what has occured in terms of the ideology of the explainer.