Contemporary Philosophy

Positivism
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jump to: navigation, search
For other meanings of positivism, see positivism (disambiguation).
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.

History and variants

[edit] Comte's positivism
Main article: Comtism
According to Auguste Comte (1798-1857), 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
Main article: Logical positivism
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".