This short paper addresses the evolution of social inquiry in the planning actions. To shed some light on the social inquiry subject and its development in the planning field Logical Positivism, Phenomenology, and Critical Theory approaches will be examined in detail. These three perspectives will be compared and contrasted in each other to obtain similarities and differences in what is seen as knowledge and how they reach the true knowledge in real world in the following sections. To make more logical flows in rationality the paper starts to elaborate each of them with Logical Positivism perspective and continues Phenomenology and Critical …show more content…
This philosophical perspective was developed by Vienna Circle including thinkers, sociologists, and scientists so forth in the 1920s. This notion has many similarities with positivism concept however, it has also some key distinguishes from the positivist approach in its essence. In logical positivism, all human knowledge should be based on scientific and logical foundations, so metaphysics or any phenomena impossible to explaining the science and making verification are rejected. The knowledge should be obtained verifiable resources or statements, which means that all meaningful information is either analytic or conclusively verifiable by experiment or observations (synthetically) in this perspective. The verifiability principle is one of the basic doctrine underlying the logical positivist …show more content…
It proposes only one language and unique model for covering all real sciences. Moreover, ethics and values are also considered to some extent as meaningless in this concept because ethic and values are unverifiable on the scientific ground and no room for in scientific observations for explaining or defining them. Therefore, the ethic and value issues in logical positivist thinking is a very significant point for revealing logical positivism’s viewpoint toward any planning approaches and actions. Logical positivism ignores all aspect of urban systems regarding values and ethical issues (social phenomena) and embraces a mechanical consideration for any urban planning