I think the way Noesti explains positivism borders on scientism. A prominent feature of positivism is merely that knowledge can only be obtained through science as the sole source of authentic information due to its ability to be positively verified. This begs a ton of questions about verification in science. Nonetheless, it was an important part of the social scientific development because it looked the very trite notion that "the natural sciences are successful and can positively verify their results through scientific method; social science can use scientific method to verify their results." Notice how this begs a huge questions about how scientific theories can be verified by the instance of any experiment, and it assumes a continuum between physical and social phenomena in a very big way. Extending this, but certainly within its own lineage, came the logical positivists that sought to stay away from the sort of ontological commitments that make positivism seem so much like scientism in the way Noesti expounded--i.e., that because the only authentic knowledge is scientific, science is the only source of reality. This implies that ontology is founded in epistemology, which it need not be. Logical positivists instead focus on logic as the foundation of scientific reasoning and inference. They accept the positivist epistemology, make no ontological commitments, but only seek to find logical foundations. The key in the logical positivist philosophy is not verification per se, but logical certainty in our assertions. In fact, this is a bolder claim than the positivists could make! It is widely accepted that Karl Popper did a good job dislodging PoS from this view by recognizing the importance of falsification. In particular, this led PoS to look at "what is science?" and try to find what merits are required for an activity to be considered "scientific." Positive verification can never lead one to justify their theory. It is entirely question begging or moot. Of course, the extreme of Popper's position is that we cannot make any verification, only falsification, and all that is necessary is falsification. Kuhn, Lakatos, Lauden, and Feyerabend, among others, critiqued this over the decades revealing that our view of what is "science" is quite diverse and how one goes from evidence to theory and back again is not as objective and rigorous as the logical positivists would have us believe: there is no inductive logic. These postpositivist critiques are not uniform because it's like trying to say atheism as an anti-doctrine of religion is an ideology. It isn't, it's just a rejection of one. Postmodern critiques, however, do have certain features that are important to notice as they are a result of specifically critiquing the positivist and early responses. They highlight that facts don't speak for themselves and they must be interpreted. This requires semantic assumptions about our ways in which we analyze information. Method does not happen in a vacuum. It comes from a semantic structure with a provided syntax that defines what is grammatically correct and what each piece of the vocabulary means. Not every fact, therefore, is objective, because it is biased by the default position one takes regarding the facts, the assumptions behind their models of the world and theory, what other information they have been exposed to, and the community of science at that time. Kuhn especially focused on the cultural aspects of science, and that has played out as a large part of the postmodernist critique, as many people who use it as a pejorative usually do so in the sense that they're implying you think "anything goes because it's whatever people collectively say is true." That's obviously a strawman and ignores the significance of the critique. But now that I've ran along this train of thought for this long, I'll leave you all to
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tl;dr
Thinking about it now, it's kind of disgusting how many books on it I've read (especially if I include PoS generally) lol