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are ethical dilemmas associated with the social scientist's privileged position owing to their potential to influence the social environment. Again, from an embedded position, the social scientist may appear to redefine and modify that which socially viable. In reply, we can consider three different approaches, each having their own response to these ethical considerations associated with the problem of objectivity: positivism, interpretivism and the via media.

Although most positivist approaches would not expect all theoretical terms and assumptions to refer directly to observables, there is a commitment to the view that substantive hypotheses must be able to be falsified using a call for empirical evidence. For Hay, positivism is therefore simply unable to handle the social responsibility, he identifies as essential to social science. This is because to achieve epistemic security and conceptual clarity it tightly demarcates what can count as knowledge - a statement is not valid unless it is possible to explain what would count as falsifying it (Williams, 2001). Rather than a damaging criticism, at this point Hay's study constitutes a description of the aims of positivism: to specify exactly what influence we can given to our knowledge claims is a key strength of the approach, even if it means we have to exclude certain types of information.

Although it is difficult to determine, 'interpretivism' can be regarded as a variety of social research which represents profound scepticism towards claims to objectivity and a prosperous access to information. Thus, in these terms, it would appear that interpretivism suitably accounts for Hay's problem of objectivity. To take seriously the challenge presented by post-modernist critics to social science is to recognize the value-laden and normative content of many or its assumptions and much of its language (Rosenberg, 1988). However for Hay (2002), interpretivism cannot accurately be thought of as making a substantive contribution to social analysis. Its ontological view that the world can be viewed from a variety of perspectives, along with its normative commitment to according them equal respect, means that interpretivism is drawn inevitably towards a suspicion of all epistemological foundations. This degree of relativism is just as dangerous as positivism to the social scientist's ethical responsibilities. The interpretivist approach does not fix the function of normative question because it rejects the assertion that there are fundamental metaphysical truths beyond appearances. In short, positivism deliberately confuses reality with knowledge and interpretivism reacts by removing the possibility of knowledge (Trigg, 2001). Thus, we are in search of an alternative to positivism's blindness to ethical considerations and interpretivism pessimism and fatalism (Hay, 2002). In response, the via media take seriously the ethical responsibilities that come with an acknowledgement that epistemology cannot determine social learning claims while still accepting the possibility of making them. For Hay, this means social scientists must acknowledge the automatically normative content of their duties and clarify their normative assumptions as straightforward as possible. We should not deny empirical study altogether because it provides the grounding for our descriptive analysis, but as soon as we move from this statement we go from the realm of science to that of interpretation