Positivism

The coining of the word ‘positivism’ is often attributed to Auguste Comte. Unjustifiably, it seems. While he did make up the word ‘sociology’ (and its predecessor, ‘social physics’), he cannot be credited with ‘positivism’. We are on safer ground in seeing Comte as a populariser of the word, especially through the Societe Positiviste, which he founded in 1848. Populariser is an apt term to use here, for positivism undoubtedly became a vogue word and soon replaced the earlier usages ‘positive science’ and ‘positive philosophy’.

These latter terms were used by Comte himself, following his mentor Henri de Saint-Simon. One of Comte’s major works is the six-volumed Cours de philosophie positive, which appeared between 1830 and 1842. However, by the time Comte began talking of positive philosophy and positive science, the terms already had a very long history. They can be found centuries earlier in the writings of Francis Bacon (1561-1626).

‘Positive science’ sounds strange to our ears. We may have to resist the temptation to ask what negative science would look like. Yet, if positive is not being used here in contradistinction to negative, in what sense is it being used? To answer that question, we need to look to the traditional use of the word in comparable terms such as ‘positive religion’ and ‘positive law’. There the word serves to distinguish positive religion from natural religion and positive law from natural law.

Natural religion? This is religion that people reason their way to. They work out the existence of God (or of many gods), the duty of divine worship, and so on, by rational argument based on their knowledge of the world. It is styled ‘natural’ because it is seen to stem from the nature of things. Positive religion, to the contrary, is not the outcome of speculation. It is essentially something that is posited. What is posited, thereby forming the starting point and foundation for positive religion, is divinely revealed truth. Positive religion is not arrived at by reasoning. It is a ‘given’.

Positive law, too, finds its basis in something that is posited. In this case, what has been posited is legislation enacted by a lawgiver. Drawing its authority from an existing code of prescriptions and proscriptions, positive law contrasts sharply with the traditional notion of natural law. While the concept of natural law has a long and ambiguous history, for our purposes here it can be seen as a complex of responsibilities and obligations that, starting from the nature of the world and human nature within the world, people reason their way to. Once again, it is ‘natural’ because it is seen to stem from the nature of things. Thus, actions seen as wrongful in terms of natural law are considered to be wrong by their very nature. As the old principle has it, such acts are ‘prohibited because they are evil’ (prohibita quia mala). On the other hand, an action considered wrongful in terms of positive law is not regarded as wrong in itself. It is wrong because it has been forbidden by a legislator. In other words, acts of that kind are ‘evil because they are prohibited’ (mala quia prohibita). The concept of positive law is very different. Here there is no cerebral process reasoning about nature or natures. Positive law, like positive religion, is founded on a ‘given’.

What does all this have to do with science? Quite a lot, as it happens. Those speaking and writing of ‘positive science’ were using the word in the same vein. They were talking of a science—scientia, ‘knowledge’— that is not arrived at speculatively (as in the metaphysics of philosophical schools) but is grounded firmly and exclusively in something that is posited. The basis of this kind of science is direct experience, not speculation. Rather than proceeding via some kind of abstract reasoning process, positive science proceeds by a study of the ‘given’ (in Latin datum or, in the plural, data).

For many adherents of positive science (‘positivists’, therefore), what is posited or given in direct experience is what is observed, the observation in question being scientific observation carried out by way of the scientific method. This is certainly the understanding of positivism that prevails today. Although this contemporary understanding assigns a quite definite meaning to positivism, it is not in itself a univocal concept. As many as twelve varieties of positivism have been distinguished by some authors. There is not scope here to deal with the whole bewildering array of positivisms, but we can perhaps touch on some important historical forms that positivism has assumed.

1. COMTE’S POSITIVISM

Auguste Comte (1798-1857) saw himself at all times as a scientist. A largely self-taught and independent scientist, to be sure, for his formal training was short-lived and he never held an academic post of any standing. In 1814 he began studies at France’s leading scientific school, the Ecole Polytechnique in Paris. Less than two years after his enrolment, student unrest led to the closure of the school and a far- reaching reorganisation of its program. When it opened its doors once more, Comte did not seek readmission but devoted himself instead to private tutoring in mathematics.

Much more influential than his year or two at the Ecole Polytechnique was his association from 1817 to 1824 with Henri de Saint-Simon. A bizarre, yet fascinating, figure in French intellectual life around the turn of the nineteenth century, Saint-Simon had a long­standing concern for the reconstruction of society. He was convinced that no worthwhile social reorganisation could take place without the reconstruction of intellectual understanding. What Comte imbibed from Saint-Simon was, above all else, this concern for the emergence of a stable and equitable society—and therefore for the development of its sine qua non, a valid and comprehensive social science. Despite his bitter parting from Saint-Simon and a total rejection of his mentoring, this goal continued to inspire all of Comte’s subsequent endeavours. To the positivism of his science he brought a passionate zeal for social reform. His dedication to society’s wellbeing was as fervent as that of any religious zealot and led him in the end to promulgate an utterly secular Religion of Humanity, incorporating a priesthood and liturgical practice all its own. For all the disdain he evinced for the ‘theological stage’ of societal development and for the religious aspirations of Saint-Simon’s latter days, and notwithstanding his eagerness for a thoroughly ‘positive’ science to replace the ratiocinations of the philosophers, there are metaphysical and quasi-religious assumptions aplenty in what Comte wrote and did. It was certainly on the basis of a well-elaborated worldview that he felt able to call upon all people to become positivists and thereby play their part in establishing the just society.

The kind of social reorganisation Comte envisages requires the human mind to function at its very best. This, he feels, can happen only when all have embraced one scientific method. True enough, there is no one general law obtaining in all the sciences to give them substantive unity. Comte is no reductionist. Nevertheless, there is a universality of method that can unify the practice of science. The scientific method he has in mind is the method emanating from positivism. Not that it is a uniform method to be woodenly applied. Rather, it is a flexible method that succeeds in remaining homogeneous in a multitude of contexts. It is this desire for unity-via-method that moves Comte to set all the sciences in a hierarchy, leading from the most basic science—mathematics— through astronomy, and then physics, to chemistry and biology, culminating in what he sees as the highest science of all, his beloved sociology. Hence Comte’s belief that scientific method retains the same essential features whether one is speaking of the natural sciences or the human sciences.

What are these essential features of the scientific method?

Given the contemporary identification of positivism with quantitative methods of research, and in view of Comte’s known skills in mathematics, one might be forgiven for expecting the essential features of his scientific method to be couched in mathematical terms. That would be a mistake, nonetheless.

When Comte talks about positivism, it cannot too often be stressed that he means an attitude of mind towards science and the explanation of man, nature, and society, and not some predilection for mathematical precision, especially not in sociology. In fact, Comte expressly makes a distinction between the search for certainty in science and the mistaken search for numerical precision. (Simpson 1982, p. 69)

Comte, in fact, warns against the dangers of an overly mathematical approach. ‘The most perfect methods may, however, be rendered deceptive by misuse and this we must bear in mind. We have seen that mathematical analysis itself may betray us into substituting signs for ideas, and that it conceals inanity of conception under an imposing verbiage’ (in Simpson 1982, p. 80).

Nor is Comte to be linked to some crude kind of objectivism. For him, scientific knowledge is not a matter of grasping an objective meaning independent of social thought and social conditions. Comte recognised, like Marx (and like Hegel before Marx), that human consciousness is determined by ‘the social’. There is an interdependence here, as Simpson points out in expounding Comte’s thought on this matter:

Only long struggles for positivistic ideology by men of foresight serve to achieve social conditions under which metaphysical propositions give way to positivistic ones. Conversely, the positivistic stage is reached in any science—and especially in sociology—through a continual reorganization of society made possible by the pursuit of sociology and its application to practical problems, particularly problems in the organization of knowledge, its propagation, and its being passed on from

 Comte’s quarry is the order he believes can be found in the world. Not for him the quest for first causes and last ends so beloved of the metaphysicians. Whether one is focused on nature or society, his positive science bids us look instead to ‘laws’ that can be scientifically established; that is, to facts that regularly characterise particular types of beings and constant relationships that can be shown to obtain among various phenomena. The direct methods whereby these laws can be established scientifically are observation, experiment and comparison.

At long last! This is finally beginning to sound like what we have always known as positivism. Yet even here we find Comte warning us, ‘No social fact can have any scientific meaning till it is connected with some other social fact; without such connection it remains a mere anecdote, involving no rational utility’ (in Simpson 1982, p. 78). Nor by ‘experiment’ does he necessarily mean what we know today as controlled experimentation. He includes under this rubric the study of events that just happen to happen and over which the sociologist has no control. And the ‘comparison’ he suggests is multifaceted: it includes cross-cultural comparison and especially historical comparison. Comte is, in fact, eminendy historical in his approach. As Raymond Aron puts it (1965, p. 70), Comte holds that ‘the different phases of human history are characterized by their way of thinking, and the present and final stage will be marked by the universal triumph of positive thought’.

Auguste Comte is seen as the founder of positivism. He did not see himself in that light. As he understood his role, it was that of passing on a torch that had been lit centuries before his time. Certainly, what he had to say about observation and experiment and the establishment of scientific laws can be found centuries earlier in Bacon. Yet, whether we see Comte as the source or merely the channel, it appears clear enough that positivism has changed dramatically since he first appropriated the word. One of the factors in its evolution has been its passing from the hands of working scientists to those of theoretical scientists and philosophers. The former are anxious to determine whether they can use in the human sciences the methods that are being used in the natural sciences. The latter’s concern is different. It has to do direcdy with epistemology and logic. It is a concern to determine what truth claims can be made about scientific findings—or, indeed, about anything.

2. THE VIENNA CIRCLE AND LOGICAL POSITIVISM

The roots of the Vienna Circle lie in discussions that began in the first decade of the twentieth century, involving social philosopher Otto Neurath, mathematician Hans Hahn and physicist Philip Frank. The Circle came to prominence in the 1920s when Moritz Schlick assumed its leadership. Schlick, who had begun his academic life as a physicist, turned to philosophy and in 1922 was appointed to the chair of philosophy of the inductive sciences at the University of Vienna. It was the discussions that took place within the Vienna Circle, and between the Vienna Circle and its counterparts at Warsaw and Berlin, that gave birth to the philosophy of logical positivism.

The Vienna Circle flourished throughout the 1920s but the coming of Nazism spelled its doom, most of its members being Jewish or Marxist (or both). Many went abroad in the early 1930s, Schlick was assassinated on the steps of the University of Vienna in 1936, and the Circle was officially dissolved in 1938. Its voice was not stifled, however. In fact, the scattering of Circle members—Rudolf Carnap to Chicago, Kurt Godel to Princeton, Otto Neurath and Friedrich Waisman to Oxford, and so on—served to ensure that logical positivism had world-wide impact. Even before the demise of the Vienna Circle, its philosophy had been popularised in the English-speaking world by A.J. Ayer’s Language, Truth and Logic, which appeared in 1936.

What was the Vienna Circle’s focus of interest, then? As we have seen, Comte and his associates wanted to introduce the methods of the natural sciences to the practice of the social sciences. Now the Vienna Circle was seeking to introduce the methods and exactitude of mathematics to the study of philosophy (as had already happened in the field of symbolic logic).

The Circle certainly appeared to have the expertise it needed for this task. Within its membership, besides an array of empiricist philosophers, there were a number of individuals with outstanding expertise in the field of mathematics (Godel, for one) and logic (Rudolf Carnap, for instance). There were also eminent scientists whose science was highly mathematical in character.

The work of Gotdob Frege, Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead provided the Vienna Circle with an infrastructure for their discussions in the field of logic. An even more important influence on its developing philosophy was the thought of Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889- 1951). Wittgenstein, a native of Vienna, came into contact with the Circle in the late 1920s. His Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, published in 1921, had been studied intensely by several members of the Vienna Circle and the Circle shared his interest in the logical analysis of propositions. Wittgenstein’s thought was probably not fully understood within the Vienna Circle and, in any case, he went on to reverse his position quite radically, as his posthumous work Philosophical Investigations dramatically reveals. All this notwithstanding, the early Wittgensteinian position was a crucial influence in the development of the Circle’s viewpoint. Its membership constructed from it a basis for linking truth to meaning in a way that allows no pathway to genuine knowledge other than that of science. Thereby they excluded metaphysics, theology and ethics from the domain of warrantable human knowledge.

One of the notions drawn from Wittgenstein was what came to be known as the Verification principle’ (or ‘principle of verifiability’). Schlick and Ayer embraced this principle enthusiastically and made it a central tenet of logical positivism. According to the verification principle, no statement is meaningful unless it is capable of being verified.

How does one verify a statement, then? As logical positivism would have it, there are only two ways.

In some cases, a statement can be verified because what is predicated of the subject is nothing more than something included in the very definition of the subject. A very obvious instance of this would be the statement, ‘A doe is a female deer’. This can be verified simply by examining the definition of a doe. Mathematical statements can also be seen in this light. Two-plus-two equals four’, or ‘three-plus-one equals four’, is a statement in this category, since the term ‘four’ is one that we have created to stand for ‘two-plus-two’ and ‘three-plus-one’. Following terminology that derives from Immanuel Kant, such statements are known as analytic statements. An analytic proposition is one whose ascription of a predicate to a subject can be verified, and its meaningfulness thereby established, simply via an analysis of what the subject is.

Analytic statements are far from earth-shattering. They do no more than spell out what is already contained, or not contained, in the definition of the subject. To say that ‘A’ is ‘A’, or that ‘not-A’ is not ‘A’ is hardly an almighty contribution to human knowledge. Logical positivists would agree. Analytic propositions are either tautologies or contradictions. Nothing more, nothing less. On this accounting, logic and mathematics are merely formal in character. They are quite empty of factual content. In the language of the early Wittgenstein, their content is ‘senseless’.

‘Senseless’ does not mean ‘nonsense’. The early Wittgenstein and the logical positivists reserve the latter epithet for non-analytic, or synthetic, statements that prove incapable of verification. As one would expect from what has been said already, synthetic statements are propositions in which what is predicated of the subject is not included in its definition. Something new is being said about the subject, therefore. Not surprisingly, it is in synthetic statements that logical positivism is primarily interested.

Can synthetic statements be verified and thereby rendered meaningful? If so, how? The logical positivists have a clear-cut answer. Synthetic propositions are verified by experience—and only by experience. Experience? Here too logical positivism is quite definite. Experience means sense-data. What we experience through our senses (immediately, or by way of the instruments of science that extend the operation of our senses) is verified knowledge. This knowledge is ‘factual’—and facts are what logical positivism is concerned with before all and above all.

It is, of course, the role of science to establish facts. Philosophy has the task of clarifying and analysing propositions made in the wake of scientific findings.

This line of thought excludes metaphysics, ethics, aesthetics and religion from the purview of genuine philosophy. Metaphysical viewpoints, ethical values, aesthetic judgments and religious beliefs are, as such, unverifiable in the empirical manner demanded by logical positivism. They do not deal in facts and are therefore of no interest to logical positivism. Emotionally, perhaps even spiritually, they may be of great value to people, but cognitively they are meaningless—nonsense, even.

From the viewpoint of logical positivism, the philosopher and the scientist must remain ever alert to the cognitive meaninglessness of views and beliefs of this kind. A clear disjunction must be maintained at all times between fact and value. If we want to deal in human knowledge that has validated meaning, the pathway is that of observation and experiment invoking the evidence of the senses. We need to be thoroughgoing empiricists. (Logical positivism is also known as logical empiricism, although some reserve this latter term more stricdy for the combination of traditional empiricism and symbolic logic, whether in logical positivism or elsewhere.)

Since physics is the science where such thoroughgoing empiricism is most obvious, we should not be surprised that logical positivism makes particular use of its language. It uses the language of physics both as a tool for analysing and clarifying philosophical issues and as a way to unify scientific terminology. This reflects a certain reductionism within logical positivism: the other disciplines or areas of study are considered to be built upon, and to derive their validity from, the findings of empirical science.

3. Positivism today

Quite clearly, the meaning of the term ‘positivism’ has changed and grown over time. So much so that, from the standpoint of the Vienna Circle and in terms of the contemporary understanding of positivism, its acknowledged founder, Auguste Comte, hardly makes the grade.

In the history of ideas, the pathway trodden by positivism turns out to be long, tortuous and complex. Logical positivism has obviously played a major role in developing the concept of positivism that obtains at the present time. For a while, logical positivism looked set not only to dominate the understanding of science but also, in some places at least, to occupy centre stage within the discipline of philosophy itself. Of course, there have been many other factors in the development of the contemporary understanding of positivism. Rather than tracing that development in close detail, we will have to be content to set down positivism’s principal features as it is most generally understood today.

One thing is certain: positivism is linked to empirical science as closely as ever. The logical positivists have always been great lovers of science. It has been said of them that they are infatuated with science. Be that as it may, the positivist spirit at the present time continues to adhere to a philosophy of science that attributes a radical unity to all the sciences and sets few bounds to what science is capable of achieving.

Since the time of the Enlightenment, a melioristic spirit has been abroad. There is a widespread notion that we are on a path of inevitable progress. ‘Every day, in every way, I’m getting better and better’—Emile Coue’s famous dictum parallels a comparable optimism at the societal and even global level. Positivism not only shares this optimistic faith in progress but also presents scientific discovery, along with the technology it begets, as the instrument and driving force of the progress being achieved.

This supreme confidence in science stems from a conviction that scientific knowledge is both accurate and certain. In this respect scientific knowledge contrasts sharply with opinions, beliefs, feelings and assumptions that we gain in non-scientific ways. The principal point of difference is the alleged objectivity of scientific knowledge. It is unlike the subjective understandings we come to hold. Those subjective understandings may be of very great importance in our lives but they constitute an essentially different kind of knowledge from scientifically established facts. Whereas people ascribe subjective meanings to objects in their world, science really ‘ascribes’ no meanings at all. Instead, it discovers meaning, for it is able to grasp objective meaning, that is, meaning already inherent in the objects it considers. To say that objects have such meaning is, of course, to embrace the epistemology of objectivism. Positivism is objectivist through and through. From the positivist: viewpoint, objects in the world have meaning prior to, and independendy of, any consciousness of them.

From this same viewpoint, scientists are required to keep the distinction between objective, empirically verifiable knowledge and subjective, unverifiable knowledge very much in mind. It emerges as the distinction between fact and value and founds the goal of value-neutral science, which positivistically minded scientists tend to uphold with a significant degree of fervour.

What kind of world, then, is the world of the positivist? Were we to answer, ‘A mathematised world’, we would find ourselves in good company. We would be following the lead given by Edmund Husserl, the founder of phenomenology. Husserl (1970b) attributes this alleged mathematisation of the world to Galileo, in the first instance. He recalls how Galileo dealt with attributes in which there is a clearly subjective element. Such attributes (colour, taste and smell, for instance) he refused to accept as real properties, dismissing them instead as mere secondary properties and not the concern of the scientist. For Galileo, the primary properties of things—‘real’ properties, therefore—are those that can be measured and counted and thereby quantified. Size, shape, position, number—only properties like these make the grade scientifically. The real world, for the Galilean scientist, is a quantifiable world.

This scientific world is not, of course, the everyday world that people experience. Not even scientists experience it that way in their everyday mode of being. Various authors have considered the example of Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler standing together on a hill at sunrise. These two seventeenth-century astronomers held very different views. Brahe thought that the sun circles the earth; Kepler believed that the earth circles the sun. As they watch the sun appear at daybreak, what do they see? Does Brahe see the sun move above the earth’s horizon, while Kepler sees the horizon dip below the sun? Norwood Russell Hanson (1972) makes a case for this being so. Others, such as Gerhart and Russell (1984) demur, asserting that, whatever the differences in their scientific stance, Brahe’s and Kepler’s human experience of a sunrise will be the same in this respect. Most would surely agree. We may believe that the earth is round, and ‘Flat Earthers’ may be our favourite epithet for people we judge to be behind the times—yet, unless we are doing something like buying a round-the-world air ticket, we do think and act as if the earth were flat. And we are expected to do so. In buying a road map for my trip from Adelaide to Cairns, I would be looked at askance were I to complain to the supplier that the map I am given is flat and not curved.

In other words, the world addressed by positivist science is not the everyday world we experience. As Husserl points out, the scientific world is an abstraction from the ‘lived’ world; it has been distilled from the world of our everyday experiences, distances us from the world of our everyday experiences, and takes us further still from the world of immediate experience lying behind our everyday experiences. Science imposes a very tight grid on the world it observes. The world perceived through the scientific grid is a highly systematic, well-organised world. It is a world of regularities, constancies, uniformities, iron-clad laws, absolute principles. As such, it stands in stark contrast with the uncertain, ambiguous, idiosyncratic, changeful world we know at first hand.

Making this scientific abstraction from lived reality is not to be criticised. It serves eminendy useful purposes, as the history of science and the development of technology witness so forcefully. While there is a downside to the achievements of science and this needs to be kept in mind as well, most of us have abundant reason to be grateful to science.

If we want to quarrel with the positivist view, our quarrel will not be, in the first instance, with what positivist science does. Rather, it will have to do with the status positivism ascribes to scientific findings. Articulating scientific knowledge is one thing; claiming that scientific knowledge is utterly objective and that only scientific knowledge is valid, certain and accurate is another. Since the emergence of positivist science, there has never been a shortage of philosophers and social scientists calling upon it to rein in its excessive assumptions and claims. Many of these philosophers and social scientists have operated out of a quite different epistemology and worldview. As the twentieth century got underway, however, more and more scientists ‘from within’ added a chorus of their own. Without necessarily jettisoning the objectivism inherent in positivism, these insiders have challenged its claims to objectivity, precision and certitude, leading to an understanding of scientific knowledge whose claims are far more modest. This is a less arrogant form of positivism. It is one that talks of probability rather than certainty, claims a certain level of objectivity rather than absolute objectivity, and seeks to approximate the truth rather than aspiring to grasp it in its totality or essence.

This more or less attenuated form of positivism is known today as post-positivism.³

Source: Michael J Crotty (1998), The Foundations of Social Research: Meaning and Perspective in the Research Process, SAGE Publications Ltd; First edition.