Positivism

A belated (C.19th) philosophical byproduct of the Age of Enlightenment, positivism is attributed chiefly to Comte but is strongly foreshadowed by British Empiricist thinking (Hume, Locke et al) and rooted through logic to classical antiquity (Aristotle, Megarian Stoics et al). Positivism, in all its varieties, rejects metaphysics. It propounds a worldview that awards meaning only to the tangible and quantifiable, calls for proof and proposition by logic, and promotes science and scientific methods as the tools of testing truth claims and acquiring worthwhile knowledge. Positivism, like empiricism (Locke, Hume, Mill), maintains that knowledge is derived from experience. Naturalism is another forebear. To the naturalist, knowledge is never present a priori, but develops from systematic exploration (i.e. science), and every thing is natural and independently comprehensible without recourse to supernatural causation. Echoing the scientific trends of its century, positivism emphasizes hierarchies and taxonomies, regards human beings as objects for scientific study (social determinism was a 19th century forerunner of scientific sociology), lionizes the scientific method, exalts theory, and demands formality in experimental reporting.

Not surprisingly, positivism is the dominant scientific philosophy. To positivists, theories describe the conditional relationships linking variables. Bodies of experimental findings coalesce into laws. Hammersley (2005) claimed that theory itself is a positivist concept, regardless of the method (qualitative or quantitative). used to generate or test theory. The positivist’s typical epistemology is nomothetic: positivists design tests for measurement, quantification, and generalization. Positivist researchers are concerned with systematically eliminating bias and confounding variables. The positivist believes that phenomena are substantial and isolable; effective research design supplies definitions and controls the interaction of one discreet object upon another. The positivist contends that science must be value-free, and observation detached and impersonal.

The positivist landscape testifies to a steady evolution: instrumentalists such as Mach and Schlick (Hanfling, 1981) posited that theories are merely predictive tools to be disregarded when superior evidence is presented; logical positivists such as Carnap and Ayer (Hanfling, 1981; Schilp, 1963), who became known as “the 20th century positivists”, stressed the fundamentality of logical expression in language and are therefore associable with later linguistic movements (e.g. Wittgenstein and the Oxford linguists). Poincaré claimed that assumptions in science and mathematics are validated by convention rather than proof (Alexander, 1964). Russell had similar thoughts and propounded that even rudimentary arithmetic assumptions should be tested logically. Duhem, another philosopher of mathematics, wrote (1969) that exploration of mathematical structures more than atomistic mechanisms (the “pulleys and ropes” of British empiricism) yields a superior epistemology. If these later philosophers of mathematics/science are indicative, the trend in modern positivism is introspection and self-validation, i.e. increasingly granular application of the positivist tenets of systematic truth testing to positivist tenets themselves.

Popper’s falsifiability criterion of hypotheses bears positivistic impressions: it endeavours to expose “pseudoscience” by demanding that any hypothesis proposed could be falsified. That is, the experimental subject can be demonstrated to be untrue or true. To the positivist, this has value – non falsifiable hypotheses can be rejected before empirical steps are taken. However, falsifiability represents a potential weakness in positivist doctrine: the scientific method provides more probabilities than facts. Popper, by calling for theories to be routinely subjected to doubt and revised in light of counter-evidence, advocated that science is better suited to disproving than proving claims, a negative assertion that potentially undermines the “positive” that positivists contend distinguishes science.

Also challenging the modernist confidence coursing through positivism, Kuhn (1971) argued that evidence “underdetermines” theory. Empirical evidence is not the pure measure that positivists claim. Kuhn (1962) showed that scientists reference a spectrum of background assumptions about phenomena and interpret evidence (data) in terms of those assumptions (Chalmers, 1988). The relationship between theory and evidence lauded by positivists is vulnerable to inversion. Kuhn contended that data is seldom the impartial motivator of theoretical revisionism. Scientists, according to Kuhn, resist adjusting or abandoning theory when data are non-compliant. The possibility that theory is grounded in evidence is more ideal than typical.