Positivism is the philosophy of science that
information derived from logical and mathematical
treatments and reports of sensory experience
is the exclusive source of all authoritative
knowledge, and that there is valid knowledge
only in this derived knowledge. Verified data
received from the senses are known as empirical
evidence. Positivism holds that society, like
the physical world, operates according to
general laws. Introspective and intuitive
knowledge is rejected. Although the positivist
approach has been a recurrent theme in the
history of western thought, the modern sense
of the approach was developed by the philosopher
and founding sociologist Auguste Comte in
the early 19th century. Comte argued that,
much as the physical world operates according
to gravity and other absolute laws, so also
does society.
Etymology
The English noun positivism was re-imported
in the 19th century from the French word positivisme,
derived from positif in its philosophical
sense of 'imposed on the mind by experience'.
The corresponding adjective has been used
in similar sense to discuss law since the
time of Chaucer.
Overview
Antecedents
Positivism is part of a more general ancient
quarrel between philosophy and poetry, notably
laid out by Plato and later reformulated as
a quarrel between the sciences and the humanities,
Plato elaborates a critique of poetry from
the point of view of philosophy in his dialogues
Phaedrus 245a, Symposium 209a, Republic 398a,
Laws 817 b-d and Ion. Wilhelm Dilthey popularized
the distinction between Geisteswissenschaft
and Naturwissenschaften.
The consideration that laws in physics may
not be absolute but relative, and, if so,
this might be more true of social sciences,
was stated, in different terms, by G. B. Vico
in 1725. Vico, in contrast to the positivist
movement, asserted the superiority of the
science of the human mind, on the grounds
that natural sciences tell us nothing about
the inward aspects of things.
Auguste Comte
Positivism states that all authentic knowledge
allows verification and that all authentic
knowledge assumes that the only valid knowledge
is scientific. Enlightenment thinkers such
as Henri de Saint-Simon, Pierre-Simon Laplace
and Auguste Comte believed the scientific
method, the circular dependence of theory
and observation, must replace metaphysics
in the history of thought. Émile Durkheim
reformulated sociological positivism as a
foundation of social research.
Wilhelm Dilthey, in contrast, fought strenuously
against the assumption that only explanations
derived from science are valid. He reprised
the argument, already found in Vico, that
scientific explanations do not reach the inner
nature of phenomena and it is humanistic knowledge
that gives us insight into thoughts, feelings
and desires. Dilthey was in part influenced
by the historicism of Leopold von Ranke.
Antipositivism
At the turn of the 20th century the first
wave of German sociologists, including Max
Weber and Georg Simmel, rejected the doctrine,
thus founding the antipositivist tradition
in sociology. Later antipositivists and critical
theorists have associated positivism with
"scientism"; science as ideology. Later in
his career, German theoretical physicist Werner
Heisenberg, Nobel laureate for the creation
of quantum mechanics, distanced himself from
positivism by saying:
The positivists have a simple solution: the
world must be divided into that which we can
say clearly and the rest, which we had better
pass over in silence. But can any one conceive
of a more pointless philosophy, seeing that
what we can say clearly amounts to next to
nothing? If we omitted all that is unclear
we would probably be left with completely
uninteresting and trivial tautologies.
— Werner Heisenberg, Physics and Beyond
- Encounters and Conversations,
Logical positivism and postpositivism
In the early 20th century, logical positivism
— a descendant of Comte's basic thesis but
an independent movement — sprang up in Vienna
and grew to become one of the dominant schools
in Anglo-American philosophy and the analytic
tradition. Logical positivists reject metaphysical
speculation and attempted to reduce statements
and propositions to pure logic. Strong critiques
of this approach by philosophers such as Karl
Popper, Willard Van Orman Quine and Thomas
Kuhn have been highly influential, and led
to the development of postpositivism.
In historiography
In historiography the debate on positivism
has been characterized by the quarrel between
positivism and historicism.
Arguments against positivist approaches in
historiography include that history differs
from sciences like physics and ethology in
subject matter and method. That much of what
history studies is nonquantifiable, and therefore
to quantify is to lose in precision. Experimental
methods and mathematical models do not generally
apply to history, and it is not possible to
formulate general laws in history.
In other fields
Positivism in the social sciences is usually
characterized by quantitative approaches and
the proposition of quasi-absolute laws. A
significant exception to this trend is represented
by cultural anthropology, which tends naturally
toward qualitative approaches.
In psychology the positivist movement was
influential in the development of behavioralism
and operationalism. The 1927 philosophy of
science book The Logic of Modern Physics in
particular, which was originally intended
for physicists, coined the term operational
definition, which went on to dominate psychological
method for the whole century.
In economics, practising researchers tend
to emulate the methodological assumptions
of classical positivism, but only in a de
facto fashion: the majority of economists
do not explicitly concern themselves with
matters of epistemology. In jurisprudence,
"legal positivism" essentially refers to the
rejection of natural law, thus its common
meaning with philosophical positivism is somewhat
attenuated and in recent generations generally
emphasizes the authority of human political
structures as opposed to a "scientific" view
of law.
In the early 1970s, urbanists of the positivist-quantitative
school like David Harvey started to question
the positivist approach itself, saying that
the arsenal of scientific theories and methods
developed so far in their camp was "incapable
of saying anything of depth and profundity"
on the real problems of contemporary cities.
In 1990s sociology
In contemporary social science, strong accounts
of positivism have long since fallen out of
favour. Practitioners of positivism today
acknowledge in far greater detail observer
bias and structural limitations. Modern positivists
generally eschew metaphysical concerns in
favor of methodological debates concerning
clarity, replicability, reliability and validity.
This positivism is generally equated with
"quantitative research" and thus carries no
explicit theoretical or philosophical commitments.
The institutionalization of this kind of sociology
is often credited to Paul Lazarsfeld, who
pioneered large-scale survey studies and developed
statistical techniques for analyzing them.
This approach lends itself to what Robert
K. Merton called middle-range theory: abstract
statements that generalize from segregated
hypotheses and empirical regularities rather
than starting with an abstract idea of a social
whole.
In 2000s sociology
Other new movements, such as critical realism,
have emerged to reconcile the overarching
aims of social science with various so-called
'postmodern' critiques. There are now at least
twelve distinct epistemologies that are referred
to as positivism.
Sociological positivism
Comte's positivism
Auguste Comte first described the epistemological
perspective of positivism in The Course in
Positive Philosophy, a series of texts published
between 1830 and 1842. These texts were followed
by the 1844 work, A General View of Positivism.
The first three volumes of the Course dealt
chiefly with the physical sciences already
in existence, whereas the latter two emphasized
the inevitable coming of social science. Observing
the circular dependence of theory and observation
in science, and classifying the sciences in
this way, Comte may be regarded as the first
philosopher of science in the modern sense
of the term. For him, the physical sciences
had necessarily to arrive first, before humanity
could adequately channel its efforts into
the most challenging and complex "Queen science"
of human society itself. His View of Positivism
therefore set-out to define the empirical
goals of sociological method.
"The most important thing to determine was
the natural order in which the sciences stand
— not how they can be made to stand, but
how they must stand, irrespective of the wishes
of any one....This Comte accomplished by taking
as the criterion of the position of each the
degree of what he called "positivity," which
is simply the degree to which the phenomena
can be exactly determined. This, as may be
readily seen, is also a measure of their relative
complexity, since the exactness of a science
is in inverse proportion to its complexity.
The degree of exactness or positivity is,
moreover, that to which it can be subjected
to mathematical demonstration, and therefore
mathematics, which is not itself a concrete
science, is the general gauge by which the
position of every science is to be determined.
Generalizing thus, Comte found that there
were five great groups of phenomena of equal
classificatory value but of successively decreasing
positivity. To these he gave the names astronomy,
physics, chemistry, biology, and sociology."
— Lester F. Ward, The Outlines of Sociology,
Comte offered an account of social evolution,
proposing that society undergoes three phases
in its quest for the truth according to a
general 'law of three stages'. The idea bears
some similarity to Marx's belief that human
society would progress toward a communist
peak. This is perhaps unsurprising as both
were profoundly influenced by the early Utopian
socialist, Henri de Saint-Simon, who was at
one time Comte's mentor. Comte intended to
develop a secular-scientific ideology in the
wake of European secularisation.
Comte's stages were the theological, the metaphysical,
and the positive. The theological phase of
man was based on whole-hearted belief in all
things with reference to God. God, Comte says,
had reigned supreme over human existence pre-Enlightenment.
Humanity's place in society was governed by
its association with the divine presences
and with the church. The theological phase
deals with humankind's accepting the doctrines
of the church rather than relying on its rational
powers to explore basic questions about existence.
It dealt with the restrictions put in place
by the religious organization at the time
and the total acceptance of any "fact" adduced
for society to believe. Comte describes the
metaphysical phase of humanity as the time
since the Enlightenment, a time steeped in
logical rationalism, to the time right after
the French Revolution. This second phase states
that the universal rights of humanity are
most important. The central idea is that humanity
is invested with certain rights that must
be respected. In this phase, democracies and
dictators rose and fell in attempts to maintain
the innate rights of humanity.
The final stage of the trilogy of Comte's
universal law is the scientific, or positive,
stage. The central idea of this phase is that
individual rights are more important than
the rule of any one person. Comte stated that
the idea of humanity's ability to govern itself
makes this stage inherently different from
the rest. There is no higher power governing
the masses and the intrigue of any one person
can achieve anything based on that individual's
free will. The third principle is most important
in the positive stage. Comte calls these three
phases the universal rule in relation to society
and its development. Neither the second nor
the third phase can be reached without the
completion and understanding of the preceding
stage. All stages must be completed in progress.
Comte believed that the appreciation of the
past and the ability to build on it towards
the future was key in transitioning from the
theological and metaphysical phases. The idea
of progress was central to Comte's new science,
sociology. Sociology would "lead to the historical
consideration of every science" because "the
history of one science, including pure political
history, would make no sense unless it was
attached to the study of the general progress
of all of humanity". As Comte would say: "from
science comes prediction; from prediction
comes action." It is a philosophy of human
intellectual development that culminated in
science. The irony of this series of phases
is that though Comte attempted to prove that
human development has to go through these
three stages, it seems that the positivist
stage is far from becoming a realization.
This is due to two truths: The positivist
phase requires having a complete understanding
of the universe and world around us and requires
that society should never know if it is in
this positivist phase. Anthony Giddens argues
that since humanity constantly uses science
to discover and research new things, humanity
never progresses beyond the second metaphysical
phase.
Comte's fame today owes in part to Emile Littré,
who founded The Positivist Review in 1867.
As an approach to the philosophy of history,
positivism was appropriated by historians
such as Hippolyte Taine. Many of Comte's writings
were translated into English by the Whig writer,
Harriet Martineau, regarded by some as the
first female sociologist. Debates continue
to rage as to how much Comte appropriated
from the work of his mentor, Saint-Simon.
He was nevertheless influential: Brazilian
thinkers turned to Comte's ideas about training
a scientific elite in order to flourish in
the industrialization process. Brazil's national
motto, Ordem e Progresso was taken from the
positivism motto, "Love as principle, order
as the basis, progress as the goal", which
was also influential in Poland.
In later life, Comte developed a 'religion
of humanity' for positivist societies in order
to fulfil the cohesive function once held
by traditional worship. In 1849, he proposed
a calendar reform called the 'positivist calendar'.
For close associate John Stuart Mill, it was
possible to distinguish between a "good Comte"
and a "bad Comte". The system was unsuccessful
but met with the publication of Darwin's On
the Origin of Species to influence the proliferation
of various Secular Humanist organizations
in the 19th century, especially through the
work of secularists such as George Holyoake
and Richard Congreve. Although Comte's English
followers, including George Eliot and Harriet
Martineau, for the most part rejected the
full gloomy panoply of his system, they liked
the idea of a religion of humanity and his
injunction to "vivre pour autrui".
The early sociology of Herbert Spencer came
about broadly as a reaction to Comte; writing
after various developments in evolutionary
biology, Spencer attempted to reformulate
the discipline in what we might now describe
as socially Darwinistic terms.
Durkheim's positivism
The modern academic discipline of sociology
began with the work of Émile Durkheim. While
Durkheim rejected much of the details of Comte's
philosophy, he retained and refined its method,
maintaining that the social sciences are a
logical continuation of the natural ones into
the realm of human activity, and insisting
that they may retain the same objectivity,
rationalism, and approach to causality. Durkheim
set up the first European department of sociology
at the University of Bordeaux in 1895, publishing
his Rules of the Sociological Method. In this
text he argued: "[o]ur main goal is to extend
scientific rationalism to human conduct...
What has been called our positivism is but
a consequence of this rationalism."
Durkheim's seminal monograph, Suicide, a case
study of suicide rates amongst Catholic and
Protestant populations, distinguished sociological
analysis from psychology or philosophy. By
carefully examining suicide statistics in
different police districts, he attempted to
demonstrate that Catholic communities have
a lower suicide rate than Protestants, something
he attributed to social causes. He developed
the notion of objective sui generis "social
facts" to delineate a unique empirical object
for the science of sociology to study. Through
such studies, he posited, sociology would
be able to determine whether a given society
is 'healthy' or 'pathological', and seek social
reform to negate organic breakdown or "social
anomie". Durkheim described sociology as the
"science of institutions, their genesis and
their functioning".
Accounts of Durkheim's positivism are vulnerable
to exaggeration and oversimplification: Comte
was the only major sociological thinker to
postulate that the social realm may be subject
to scientific analysis in exactly the same
way as natural science, whereas Durkheim saw
a far greater need for a distinctly sociological
scientific methodology. His lifework was fundamental
in the establishment of practical social research
as we know it today - techniques which continue
beyond sociology and form the methodological
basis of other social sciences, such as political
science, as well of market research and other
fields.
Antipositivism and critical theory
At the turn of the 20th century, the first
wave of German sociologists formally introduced
methodological antipositivism, proposing that
research should concentrate on human cultural
norms, values, symbols, and social processes
viewed from a subjective perspective. Max
Weber argued that sociology may be loosely
described as a 'science' as it is able to
identify causal relationships—especially
among ideal types, or hypothetical simplifications
of complex social phenomena. As a nonpositivist,
however, one seeks relationships that are
not as "ahistorical, invariant, or generalizable"
as those pursued by natural scientists. Weber
regarded sociology as the study of social
action, using critical analysis and verstehen
techniques. The sociologists Georg Simmel,
Ferdinand Tönnies, George Herbert Mead, and
Charles Cooley were also influential in the
development of sociological antipositivism,
whilst neo-Kantian philosophy, hermeneutics
and phenomenology facilitated the movement
in general.
Karl Marx's theory of historical materialism
and critical analysis drew upon positivism,
a tradition which would continue in the development
of critical theory. However, following in
the tradition of both Weber and Marx, the
critical theorist Jürgen Habermas has critiqued
pure instrumental rationality as meaning that
scientific thinking becomes something akin
to ideology itself. Positivism may be espoused
by 'technocrats' who believe in the inevitability
of social progress through science and technology.
New movements, such as critical realism, have
emerged in order to reconcile postpositivist
aims with various so-called 'postmodern' perspectives
on the social acquisition of knowledge.
Contemporary positivism
In the original Comtean usage, the term "positivism"
roughly meant the use of scientific methods
to uncover the laws according to which both
physical and human events occur, while "sociology"
was the overarching science that would synthesize
all such knowledge for the betterment of society.
"Positivism is a way of understanding based
on science"; people don't rely on the faith
of god but instead of the science behind humanity.
"Antipositivism" formally dates back to the
start of the twentieth century, and is based
on the belief that natural and human sciences
are ontologically and epistemologically distinct.
Neither of these terms is used any longer
in this sense. There are no fewer than twelve
distinct epistemologies that are referred
to as positivism. Many of these approaches
do not self-identify as "positivist", some
because they themselves arose in opposition
to older forms of positivism, and some because
the label has over time become a term of abuse
by being mistakenly linked with a theoretical
empiricism. The extent of antipositivist criticism
has also become broad, with many philosophies
broadly rejecting the scientifically based
social epistemology and other ones only seeking
to amend it to reflect 20th century developments
in the philosophy of science. However, positivism
remains the dominant approach to both the
research and the theory construction in contemporary
sociology, especially in the United States.
The majority of articles published in leading
American sociology and political science journals
today are positivist. This popularity may
be because research utilizing positivist quantitative
methodologies holds a greater prestige in
the social sciences than qualitative work.
Such research is generally perceived as being
more scientific and more trustworthy, and
thus has a greater impact on policy and public
opinion.
Logical positivism
Logical positivism is a school of philosophy
that combines empiricism, the idea that observational
evidence is indispensable for knowledge of
the world, with a version of rationalism,
the idea that our knowledge includes a component
that is not derived from observation.
Logical positivism grew from the discussions
of a group called the "First Vienna Circle"
which gathered at the Café Central before
World War I. After the war Hans Hahn, a member
of that early group, helped bring Moritz Schlick
to Vienna. Schlick's Vienna Circle, along
with Hans Reichenbach's Berlin Circle, propagated
the new doctrines more widely in the 1920s
and early 1930s. It was Otto Neurath's advocacy
that made the movement self-conscious and
more widely known. A 1929 pamphlet written
by Neurath, Hahn, and Rudolf Carnap summarized
the doctrines of the Vienna Circle at that
time. These included: the opposition to all
metaphysics, especially ontology and synthetic
a priori propositions; the rejection of metaphysics
not as wrong but as meaningless; a criterion
of meaning based on Ludwig Wittgenstein's
early work; the idea that all knowledge should
be codifiable in a single standard language
of science; and above all the project of "rational
reconstruction," in which ordinary-language
concepts were gradually to be replaced by
more precise equivalents in that standard
language. However, the project is widely considered
to have failed:
The secondary and historical literature on
logical positivism affords substantial grounds
for concluding that logical positivism failed
to solve many of the central problems it generated
for itself. Prominent among the unsolved problems
was the failure to find an acceptable statement
of the verifiability criterion of meaningfulness.
Until a competing tradition emerged, the problems
of logical positivism continued to be attacked
from within that tradition. But as the new
tradition in the philosophy of science began
to demonstrate its effectiveness — by dissolving
and rephrasing old problems as well as by
generating new ones — philosophers began
to shift allegiances to the new tradition,
even though that tradition has yet to receive
a canonical formulation.
In the early 1930s, the Vienna Circle dispersed,
mainly because of fascist persecution and
the untimely deaths of Hahn and Schlick. The
most prominent proponents of logical positivism
emigrated to the United Kingdom and to the
United States, where they considerably influenced
American philosophy. Until the 1950s, logical
positivism was the leading school in the philosophy
of science. After moving to the United States,
Carnap proposed a replacement for the earlier
doctrines in his Logical Syntax of Language.
This change of direction, and the somewhat
differing beliefs of Reichenbach and others,
led to a consensus that the English name for
the shared doctrinal platform, in its American
exile from the late 1930s, should be "logical
empiricism."
Most philosophers consider logical positivism
to be, as John Passmore expressed it, "dead,
or as dead as a philosophical movement ever
becomes". By the late 1970s, its ideas were
so generally recognized to be seriously defective
that one of its own main proponents, A. J.
Ayer, could say in an interview: "I suppose
the most important [defect]...was that nearly
all of it was false."
Further thinkers
Within years of the publication of Comte's
book A General View of Positivism, other scientific
and philosophical thinkers began creating
their own definitions for positivism. They
included Émile Zola, Emile Hennequin, Wilhelm
Scherer, and Dimitri Pisarev. Émile Zola
was an influential French novelist, the most
important example of the literary school of
naturalism, and a major figure in the political
liberalization of France.
Emile Hennequin was a Parisian publisher and
writer who wrote theoretical and critical
pieces. He "exemplified the tension between
the positivist drive to systematize literary
criticism and the unfettered imagination inherent
in literature." He was one of the few thinkers
who disagreed with the notion that subjectivity
invalidates observation, judgment and prediction.
Unlike many positivist thinkers before him,
he believed that subjectivity does play a
role in science and society. His contribution
to positivism pertains not to science and
its objectivity, but rather to the subjectivity
of art and the way artists, their work, and
audiences interrelate. Hennequin tried to
analyze positivism strictly on the predictions,
and the mechanical processes, but was perplexed
due to the contradictions of the reactions
of patrons to artwork that showed no scientific
inclinations.
Wilhelm Scherer was a German philologist,
a university professor, and a popular literary
historian. He was known as a positivist because
he based much of his work on "hypotheses on
detailed historical research, and rooted every
literary phenomenon in 'objective' historical
or philological facts". His positivism is
different due to his involvement with his
nationalist goals. His major contribution
to the movement was his speculation that culture
cycled in a six-hundred-year period.
Dimitri Pisarev was a Russian critic who showed
the greatest contradictions with his belief
in positivism. His ideas focused around an
imagination and style though he did not believe
in romantic ideas because they reminded him
of the oppressive tsarist government under
which he lived. His basic beliefs were "an
extreme anti-aesthetic scientistic position."
He focused his efforts on defining the relation
between literature and the environment.
Stephen Hawking is a recent high profile advocate
of positivism, at least in the physical sciences.
In The Universe in a Nutshell he writes:
Any sound scientific theory, whether of time
or of any other concept, should in my opinion
be based on the most workable philosophy of
science: the positivist approach put forward
by Karl Popper and others. According to this
way of thinking, a scientific theory is a
mathematical model that describes and codifies
the observations we make. A good theory will
describe a large range of phenomena on the
basis of a few simple postulates and will
make definite predictions that can be tested…
If one takes the positivist position, as I
do, one cannot say what time actually is.
All one can do is describe what has been found
to be a very good mathematical model for time
and say what predictions it makes.
However, the claim that Popper was a positivist
is a common misunderstanding that Popper himself
termed the "Popper legend." In fact, he developed
his beliefs in stark opposition to and as
a criticism of positivism and held that scientific
theories talk about how the world really is,
not, as positivists claim, about phenomena
or observations experienced by scientists.
In the same vein, continental philosophers
like Theodore Adorno and Jürgen Habermas
regarded Popper as a positivist because of
his alleged devotion to a unified science.
However, this was also part of the "Popper
legend"; Popper had in fact been the foremost
critic of this doctrine of the Vienna Circle,
critiquing it, for instance, in his Conjectures
and Refutations.
In science today
The key features of positivism as of the 1950s,
as defined in the "received view", are:
A focus on science as a product, a linguistic
or numerical set of statements;
A concern with axiomatization, that is, with
demonstrating the logical structure and coherence
of these statements;
An insistence on at least some of these statements
being testable; that is, amenable to being
verified, confirmed, or shown to be false
by the empirical observation of reality. Statements
that would, by their nature, be regarded as
untestable included the teleological; thus
positivism rejects much of classical metaphysics.
The belief that science is markedly cumulative;
The belief that science is predominantly transcultural;
The belief that science rests on specific
results that are dissociated from the personality
and social position of the investigator;
The belief that science contains theories
or research traditions that are largely commensurable;
The belief that science sometimes incorporates
new ideas that are discontinuous from old
ones;
The belief that science involves the idea
of the unity of science, that there is, underlying
the various scientific disciplines, basically
one science about one real world.
The belief that science is nature and nature
is science; and out of this duality, all theories
and postulates are created, interpreted, evolve,
and are applied.
Positivism is elsewhere defined as the belief
that all true knowledge is scientific, and
that all things are ultimately measurable.
Positivism is closely related to reductionism,
in that both involve the belief that "entities
of one kind... are reducible to entities of
another," such as societies to configurations
of individuals, or mental events to neural
phenomena. It also involves the contention
that "processes are reducible to physiological,
physical or chemical events," and even that
"social processes are reducible to relationships
between and actions of individuals," or that
"biological organisms are reducible to physical
systems."
While most social scientists today are not
explicit about their epistemological commitments,
articles in top American sociology and political
science journals generally follow a positivist
logic of argument. It can be thus argued that
"natural science and social science [research
articles] can therefore be regarded with a
good deal of confidence as members of the
same genre".
Criticisms
Historically, positivism has been criticized
for its reductionism, i.e. for contending
that all "processes are reducible to physiological,
physical or chemical events," "social processes
are reducible to relationships between and
actions of individuals," and that "biological
organisms are reducible to physical systems."
Max Horkheimer criticized the classic formulation
of positivism on two grounds. First, he claimed
that it falsely represented human social action.
The first criticism argued that positivism
systematically failed to appreciate the extent
to which the so-called social facts it yielded
did not exist 'out there', in the objective
world, but were themselves a product of socially
and historically mediated human consciousness.
Positivism ignored the role of the 'observer'
in the constitution of social reality and
thereby failed to consider the historical
and social conditions affecting the representation
of social ideas. Positivism falsely represented
the object of study by reifying social reality
as existing objectively and independently
and labor actually produced those conditions.
Secondly, he argued, representation of social
reality produced by positivism was inherently
and artificially conservative, helping to
support the status quo, rather than challenging
it. This character may also explain the popularity
of positivism in certain political circles.
Horkheimer argued, in contrast, that critical
theory possessed a reflexive element lacking
in the positivistic traditional theory.
Some scholars today hold the beliefs critiqued
in Horkheimer's work, but since the time of
his writing critiques of positivism, especially
from philosophy of science, have led to the
development of postpositivism. This philosophy
greatly relaxes the epistemological commitments
of logical positivism and no longer claims
a separation between the knower and the known.
Rather than dismissing the scientific project
outright, postpositivists seek to transform
and amend it, though the exact extent of their
affinity for science varies vastly. For example,
some postpositivists accept the critique that
observation is always value-laden, but argue
that the best values to adopt for sociological
observation are those of science: skepticism,
rigor, and modesty. Just as some critical
theorists see their position as a moral commitment
to egalitarian values, these postpositivists
see their methods as driven by a moral commitment
to these scientific values. Such scholars
may see themselves as either positivists or
antipositivists.
Positivism has also come under fire on religious
and philosophical grounds, whose proponents
state that truth begins in sense experience,
but does not end there. Positivism fails to
prove that there are not abstract ideas, laws,
and principles, beyond particular observable
facts and relationships and necessary principles,
or that we cannot know them. Nor does it prove
that material and corporeal things constitute
the whole order of existing beings, and that
our knowledge is limited to them. According
to positivism, our abstract concepts or general
ideas are mere collective representations
of the experimental order — for example;
the idea of "man" is a kind of blended image
of all the men observed in our experience.
This runs contrary to a Platonic or Christian
ideal, where an idea can be abstracted from
any concrete determination, and may be applied
identically to an indefinite number of objects
of the same class. From the idea's perspective,
Platonism is more precise. Defining an idea
as a sum of collective images is imprecise
and more or less confused, and becomes more
so as the collection represented increases.
An idea defined explicitly always remains
clear.
Experientialism, which arose with second generation
cognitive science, asserts that knowledge
begins and ends with experience itself.
Echoes of the "positivist" and "antipositivist"
debate persist today, though this conflict
is hard to define. Authors writing in different
epistemological perspectives do not phrase
their disagreements in the same terms and
rarely actually speak directly to each other.
To complicate the issues further, few practicing
scholars explicitly state their epistemological
commitments, and their epistemological position
thus has to be guessed from other sources
such as choice of methodology or theory. However,
no perfect correspondence between these categories
exists, and many scholars critiqued as "positivists"
are actually postpositivists. One scholar
has described this debate in terms of the
social construction of the "other", with each
side defining the other by what it is not
rather than what it is, and then proceeding
to attribute far greater homogeneity to their
opponents than actually exists. Thus, it is
better to understand this not as a debate
but as two different arguments: the "antipositivist"
articulation of a social meta-theory which
includes a philosophical critique of scientism,
and "positivist" development of a scientific
research methodology for sociology with accompanying
critiques of the reliability and validity
of work that they see as violating such standards.
See also
In sociology
Antipositivism
Middle range theory
Philosophy of social science
Social evolutionism
In philosophy
Analytic philosophy
A. J. Ayer
Bertrand Russell
Gödel's incompleteness theorems
Hyperreality, in postmodern philosophy the
inability of distinguishing reality from its
simulation
Logical positivism
Postpositivism
Vladimir Solovyov
Regional histories
London Positivist Society
Positivism in Poland
Other areas
Legal positivism
Nature versus nurture, an ongoing debate concerning
what's more influencing: innate qualities
or personal experiences
Scientific politics
Pejorative treatment
Scientism
The New Paul and Virginia
Notes
References
Amory, Frederic."Euclides da Cunha and Brazilian
Positivism", Luso-Brazilian Review. Vol. 36,
No. 1, pp. 87–94.
Giddens, Anthony. Positivism and Sociology.
Heinemann. London. 1974.
Gilson, Gregory D. and Irving W. Levinson,
eds. Latin American Positivism: New Historical
and Philosophic Essays 197 pages; Essays on
positivism in the intellectual and political
life of Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico,
Kremer-Marietti, Angèle. L'Anthropologie
positiviste d'Auguste Comte, Librairie Honoré
Champion, Paris, 1980.
Kremer-Marietti, Angèle. Le positivisme,
Collection "Que sais-je?",Paris, PUF, 1982.
LeGouis, Catherine. Positivism and Imagination:
Scientism and Its Limits in Emile Hennequin,
Wilhelm Scherer and Dmitril Pisarev. Bucknell
University Press. London: 1997.
Mill, John Stuart. Auguste Comte and Positivism.
Mises, Richard von. Positivism: A Study In
Human Understanding. Harvard University Press.
Cambridge; Massachusetts: 1951.
Pickering, Mary. Auguste Comte: An Intellectual
Biography. Cambridge University Press. Cambridge,
England; 1993.
Richard Rorty Consequences of Pragmatism
Schunk, Dale H. Learning Theories: An Educational
Perspective, 5th. Pearson, Merrill Prentice
Hall. 1991, 1996, 2000, 2004, 2008.
"Positivism." Marxists Internet Archive. Web.
23 Feb. 2012. .
Whetsell, Travis and Patricia M. Shields "The
Dynamics of Positivism in the Study of Public
Administration: A Brief Intellectual History
and Reappraisal, Administration & Society.
External links
Quotations related to Positivism at Wikiquote
Parana, Brazil
Porto Alegre, Brazil
Present positivistic Sociological theory
Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Posnan, Poland
Positivists Worldwide
Maison d'Auguste Comte, France
