Positivism (philosophy)

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For other meanings of positivism, see positivism (disambiguation).

Positivism is a family of philosophical views characterized by a highly favorable account of science and what is taken to be the scientific method. As such, the position is somewhat circular because, according to most versions of positivism, there is an identifiable scientific method that is understood to be unitary and positivistic, but all three of those claims—that there is an identifiable scientific method, that there is just one such method, and that it is positivistic—are tendentious and disputable. Nevertheless positivism came to designate a philosophical movement that became powerful in all Western countries toward the end of the nineteenth century and well into the first half of the twentieth. Moreover, positivists attempted to import the method of science into philosophy, so that philosophy should become "scientific." Another characteristic of positivism was the attempt to eliminate any metaphysical component from philosophy.

As Niccola Abbagnano has put it:

The characteristic theses of positivism are that science is the only valid knowledge and facts the only possible objects of knowledge; that philosophy does not posses a method different from science; and that the task of philosophy is to find the general principles common to all the sciences and to use these principles as guides to human conduct and as the basis of social organization. Positivism, consequently, denies the existence or intelligibility of forces or substances that go beyond facts and the laws ascertained by science. It opposes any kind of metaphysics and, in general, any procedure of investigation that is not reducible to scientific method. (Abbagnano, "Positivism," 414)

Major Figures in Positivism

Positivism has roots in the work of British philosopher Francis Bacon and the other British empiricists—Locke, Berkeley, and especially David Hume. In the nineteenth century the British utilitarians, Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill, also espoused a form of positivism. The cultural background of positivism was the industrial revolution of the eighteenth century and after, with the accompanying optimism about technology and science as being keys to social progress and the sources of genuine knowledge.

The terms "positivism" and "positive philosophy" were introduced by French philosopher Claude-Henri Saint-Simon (1760-1825) to refer to a scientific approach to the world. For Saint-Simon, the implications of this extended to social, political, educational, and religious affairs. He had the goal of bringing about reforms in each of those areas.

French philosopher Auguste Comte (1789-1857)—for seven years a student and collaborator of Saint-Simon—popularized and systematized the terms "positivism" and "positive philosophy." Comte is widely regarded as having been the first true sociologist. Comte argued that societies progress from a theological stage to a metaphysical one, and then to a scientific stage wherein the positivistic, scientific outlook and method are dominant.Brazil's national motto, Ordem e Progresso ("Order and Progress") was taken from Comte's positivism, also influential in Poland. Positivism is also the most evolved stage of society in anthropological Evolutionism, the point where science and rational explanation for scientific phenomena develops.

Positivism of the 1950s

In the 1950s, the positivism of the Vienna Circle and the Logical Positivists became the dominant form of the view in America and much of the Western World. That view came to be known to its critics as the "received view"—that term was introduced by Hilary Putnam.

Key features the "received view" were set forth by Ian Hacking:

1. A focus on science as a product, a linguistic or numerical set of statements;
2. A concern with axiomatization, that is, with demonstrating the logical structure and coherence of these statements;
3. An insistence on at least some of these statements being testable, that is amenable to being verified, confirmed, or falsified 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.)
4. The belief that science is markedly cumulative;
5. The belief that science is predominantly transcultural;
6. The belief that science rests on specific results that are dissociated from the personality and social position of the investigator;
7. The belief that science contains theories or research traditions that are largely commensurable;
8. The belief that science sometimes incorporates new ideas that are discontinuous from old ones;
9. 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.

Positivism is also depicted as "the view that all true knowledge is scientific," [Bullock & Trombley] and that all things are ultimately measurable. Because of its "close association with reductionism," [ibid] positivism and reductionism involve the view that "entities of one kind...are reducible to entities of another," [ibid] such as societies to numbers, or mental events to chemical events. It also involves the contention that "processes are reducible to physiological, physical or chemical events," [ibid] and even that "social processes are reducible to relationships between and actions of individuals," [ibid.] or that "biological organisms are reducible to physical systems." [ibid] This is precisely where many social and environmental thinkers, historians, philosophers and ecofeminists, for example, part company with science and roundly condemn the simplistic approach of science when it is inappropriately applied in the inherently more complex social sphere. In doing so, they adopt an essentially antiscience stance.

See also

• Auguste Comte's positivist philosophy
• London Positivist Society
• Legal positivism
• Logical positivism
• Psychological positivism: Behaviourism
• Social positivism
• Scientism ("positivism" in a pejorative meaning)
• The positivist calendar was a calendar reform proposal by Comte in 1849.
• Technocracy

References

ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

• Alan Bullock and Stephen Trombley, [Eds] The Fontana Dictionary of Modern Thought, London: Harper-Collins, 1999, pp.669-737

• Hacking, I. (ed.) 1981. Scientific revolutions. - Oxford Univ. Press, New York.

• Foundations of Futures Studies, Wendell Bell

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