Positivism is the philosophy that the only authentic knowledge is knowledge that is based on actual sense experience. Such knowledge can come only from affirmation of theories through strict scientific method. Metaphysical speculation is avoided. Though the positivist approach can be traced back to the beginnings of scientific method in Ibn al-Haytham's Book of Optics,[1] the concept was first coined by Auguste Comte, widely considered the first modern sociologist,[2] in the middle of the 19th century. In the early 20th century, logical positivism—a stricter and more formal version of Comte's basic thesis—sprang up in Vienna and grew to become one of the dominant movements in American and British philosophy. The positivist view is sometimes referred to as a scientistic ideology, and is often shared by technocrats[3] who believe in the necessity of progress through scientific progress, and by naturalists, who argue that any method for gaining knowledge should be limited to natural, physical, and material approaches. In psychology, a positivistic approach is favoured by behaviourism.
As an approach to the philosophy of science deriving from Enlightenment thinkers like Pierre-Simon Laplace (and many others), positivism was first systematically theorized by Comte, who saw the scientific method as replacing metaphysics in the history of thought, and who observed the circular dependence of theory and observation in science. Comte was thus one of the leading thinkers of the social evolutionism thought.
Comte was highly influential in some countries. Brazilian thinkers turned to his ideas about training a scientific elite in order to flourish in the industrialization process. Brazil's national motto, Ordem e Progresso ("Order and Progress") was taken from Comte's positivism, also influential in Poland. Positivism is the most evolved stage of society in anthropological evolutionism, the point where science and rational explanation for scientific phenomena develop.
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According to Auguste Comte, society undergoes three phases in its quest for the truth according to the aptly named Law of three stages. These are the theological, the metaphysical and the positive phases.[4]
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 (or place of worship) 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.[5]
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.[6]
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 the idea that humanity is able to govern itself is what makes this stage innately different from the rest. There is no higher power governing the masses and the intrigue of any one person than the idea that one can achieve anything based on one's individual free will and authority. The third principle is most important in the positive stage.[7]
These three phases are what Comte calls 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.[8]
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 complete understanding of the universe and world around us and requires that society should never know if it is in this positivist phase. Giddens argues that since humanity is constantly using science to discover and research new things, humanity never progresses beyond the second metaphysical phase. Thus, some believe Comte’s positivism to be circular.[9]
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 were attached to the study of the general progress of all of humanity".[10] As Comte would say, "from science comes prediction; from prediction comes action".[11] It is a philosophy of human intellectual development that culminated in science.
In 1849, Comte proposed a calendar reform called the positivist calendar.
Logical positivism (later and more accurately called logical empiricism) 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 having no meaning; 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. In the early 1930s, the Vienna Circle dispersed, mainly because of political upheaval and the untimely deaths of Hahn and Schlick. The most prominent proponents of logical positivism emigrated to United Kingdom and United States, where they considerably influenced American philosophy. Until the 1950s, logical positivism was the leading school in the philosophy of science. During this period of upheaval, Carnap proposed a replacement for the earlier doctrines in his "Logical Syntax of Language". This change of direction and the somewhat differing views 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".
Comte's ideas of positivism have intrigued many. Within years of his book A General View Of Positivism (1856) 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 on theoretical and critical pieces. He "exemplified the tension between the positivist drive to systemize literary criticism and the unfettered imagination inherent in literature". He is one of the few thinkers that disagrees with the notion that subjectivity invalidates observation, judgments and predictions. Unlike many positivist thinkers before him he cannot agree that subjectivity does not play a role in science or any other form in society. His contribution to positivism is not one of science and its objectivity but rather the subjectivity of art and the way the artist, work, and audience view each other. 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 publiste, 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 it reminded him of the tsarist oppressive government he lived in. His basic beliefs were "an extreme anti-aesthetic scientistic position". His efforts were focused on defining the relation between literature and the environment.
Stephen Hawking has been regarded by some as an advocate of modern postivism, at least in the physical sciences. In The Universe in a Nutshell (p. 31) 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 Friedrich Hayek and 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". Popper in fact developed his views 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. On the other hand, modern continental philosophers like Theodore Adorno and Jürgen Habermas regard Popper as a positivist because of his devotion to a unified science.
The key features of positivism as of the 1950s, as defined in the "received view"[12], are:
Positivism is also depicted as "the view that all true knowledge is scientific,"[13] and that all things are ultimately measurable. Positivism is closely related to reductionism, in that both involve the view that "entities of one kind... are reducible to entities of another,"[13] 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,"[13] and even that "social processes are reducible to relationships between and actions of individuals,"[13] or that "biological organisms are reducible to physical systems."[13]
Historically, positivism has been criticized for its universalism, contending that all "processes are reducible to physiological, physical or chemical events,"[13] "social processes are reducible to relationships between and actions of individuals,"[13] and that "biological organisms are reducible to physical systems."[13]
Max Horkheimer and other critical theorists criticized positivism on two grounds. First, 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 of those whose action 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.
Among most social scientists and historians, orthodox positivism has long fallen out of favor. While in agreement on the important role of the scientific method, social scientists realize that one cannot identify laws that would hold true in all cases when human behavior is concerned, and that while the behaviour of groups may at times be predicted in terms of probability, it is much harder to explain the behaviour of each individual or events. Today, practitioners of both the social sciences and physical sciences recognize the role of the observer can unintentionally bias or distort the observed event.
In some quarters of social science, positivism has been replaced by a contrary view, antipositivism. Many sociologists today operate somewhere between positivism and antipositivism, arguing that human behavior is more complex than animal behavior or the movements of planets. Others reject positivism as a fundamental misunderstanding of social reality, that it is ahistorical, depoliticized, and an inappropriate application of theoretical concepts. A similar distinction is often made in the critique of analytic philosophy made by continental philosophers. Some argue humans have free will, imagination and irrationality, so that our behavior is at best difficult to explain by rigid 'laws of society'.
Positivism has also come under fire on religious and philosophical grounds, whose practitioners assert 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, the latter is more precise as collective images are more or less confused, become more so as the collection represented increases; an idea by definition remains always clear.
Habermas faults positivism for ignoring all humanly significant and interesting problems, citing its refusal to engage in reflection; it gives to a particular methodology an absolutist status and can do this only because it has partly forgotten, partly repressed its knowledge of the roots of this methodology in human concerns.[14]
"In reforming optics he as it were adopted ‘‘positivism’’ (before the term was invented): we do not go beyond experience, and we cannot be content to use pure concepts in investigating natural phenomena. Understanding of these cannot be acquired without mathematics. Thus, once he has assumed that light is a material substance, Ibn al-Haytham avoids discussing its nature further, confining himself to considering its propagation and diffusion. In his optics ‘‘the smallest parts of light," as he calls them, retain only properties that can be treated by geometry and verified by experiment; they lack all sensible qualities except energy."
Luso-Brazilian Review > Vol. 36, No. 1 (Summer, 1999), pp. 87-94
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