Hi Alvaro,

The 'brave' and less blinkered positivists embrace the post-positivist era. It is alive and well - and the days of the positivist-only dinosaurs of 'yesteryear' are well on their way to extinction. Physical science, as with any science (and come to think of it Humanities etc) should not be dependant on any singular paradigm view. Quantitative and qualitative approaches are equally important in all disciplines. Add the rich mix of mixed methods approaches - and you have the best of both worlds. There is never a MUST in academic research - just a common-sense approach without paradigmatic tension

I think the problem with 'positivism' is that it is an idea constructed using a whole lot of words about other ideas that have no very stable meaning across contexts and users - truth, sensation, cause etc. It is a recipe for going on a Wittgensteinian language holiday. I think it may be more useful to discuss specific examples of where science may have too limited a perspective.

In what has been called the Copernican revolution in the philosophy of science - Bhaskar rejects the positivist regularity conception of causation as constant conjunctions of events and replaces it with structures with the capacity to produce  causal mechanisms and  specific outcomes. He shows why the natural sciences let alone the social sciences could never be positivist

Bhaskar, R., 1975 [1997], A Realist Theory of Science: 2nd edition, (London, Verso).

Bhaskar, R., 1998, The Possibility of Naturalism: A Philosophical Critique of the Contemporary Human Sciences: Third Edition, (London, Routledge)

Collier, A, 1994, Critical Realism: An Introduction to Roy Bhaskar's Philosophy, (London, Verso).

Sayer, A. (1992) Method in Social Science: A Realist Approach, (London, Routledge)

I have found this approach to be  practically  useful in providing philosophical underpinning for how I practice quantitative social science as in

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/256801634_The_practice_of_quantitative_methods?ev=prf_pub

Chapter The practice of quantitative methods

Physics was born BEFORE positivism (with Comte in the mid-nineteenth century) and has lasted AFTER the demise of positivism. You can date physics in its formal sense back to Aristotle, who wrote four physical treatises: "Physics" (Physica), "On the Heavens," "On Generation and Corruption," and "Meteorology." Positivism privileged information based on the five senses.  After the demise of positivism, it was determined that human beings rely on eleven senses, including heat, cold, and pain. So if physical science depends on experimental evidence based on the senses, then it would be a contradiction today to make it dependent on mere classical positivism, with its limitations.

Positivism as emerged from the Bacon's "Novum Organon"  Berekely,Hume and other philosophers left the human science merely based on "Experiment", any statement supposed to be scientific (e.g.physical) when could be verified by experimental tests, otherwise it is Metaphysical.Certainly this method will not work properly without "non experimental" approaches including statistics, case study etc. In this sense the experiment part of science is the basic pillar of science and says No to Aristotelian approaches. Consequently the answer to your question is yes, Because for example Higgs Boson had not been categorized as a scientific truth unless it  was observed at LHC.

For me the key distinguishing feature of positivism (that makes it different from empiricism as say in Bacon) is the regularity conception of causation.  It is this Humean "constant conjunction of events) equals (indeed is) causation that is now seen to be untenable.

The Functionalist paradigm holds an objective view of reality, concerned with explaining how organizations and society maintain order, Burrell and Morgan (1979). 

Positivism, which is one view as to how knowledge is created and which is highly favoured by researchers,  theorizes that behaviour can be predicted and that cause-and-effect relationships are clear and pervasive Burrell and Morgan (1979). 

  Functionalism strongly emphasises the pre-eminence of the social whole over the individual parts (human actors).  This  contrasts sharply with the Interpretivist paradigm which holds a subjective view of reality and its anti-positivist epistemology which is concerned with explaining individuals’ perception of organizations and society and which seeks to understand the subjective individual and organizational processes that shape and control behaviour. In the interpretivist paradigm, explanations of human behaviour and all aspects of organizational life, are socially constructed, also known as  the perspective of constructivism.  

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/236941623_Building_a_knowledge_society_one_individual_at_a_time_a_multi-level_review

Consequently, in order to understand the processes that constructed an individual’s behaviour, researchers must gather data that reveal an individual’s subjective experiences, the interpretive lenses that give meaning to that experience, as well as the organizational factors and contexts that create these expressions. 

Knowledge therefore flows from the objectivist or subjectivist metal frames of individuals.   Individuals construct "small-scale models", in their minds, of the entities and relationships which they perceive to form the external reality in order to anticipate and explain events, Craik, (1943).

Functionalists take an objective perspective and tend to have a realist ontology, a positivist epistemology, a deterministic view of individuals, and a nomothetic methodology.   Interpretivists  on the other hand, take a subjective perspective and tend to have a nominalist ontology, an anti-positivist epistemology, a voluntarist view of individuals, and a ideograpic methodology, (Grant and Perrin, 2002).  

Working Paper Building a knowledge society one individual at a time: a mul...