Positivism Essay ⋆ Sociology Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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While it has been customary to distinguish between the quasi-political movement called ”positivism” originated by Auguste Comte in the 1830s and the more strictly philosophical movement called ”logical positivism” associated with the Vienna Circle of the 1930s, both held that the unchecked exercise of reason can have disastrous practical consequences. Thus, reason needs ”foundations” to structure its development so as not to fall prey to a self-destructive scepticism. The history of positivism can be neatly captured as three moments in a Hegelian dialectic epitomized by the work of Auguste Comte (thesis), Ernst Mach (antithesis), and the Vienna Circle (synthesis).

Comte, an early graduate of the Ecole Polytechnique, believed that its Napoleonic mission of rendering research a vehicle for societal transformation had been betrayed, once he failed to achieve an academic post. Mach was a politically active physicist on the losing side of so many of the leading scientific debates of his day that his famous chair in Vienna, from which the logical positivists sprang, was awarded for his critical-historical studies, not his experimental work. Finally, the intellectual leader of the Vienna Circle, Rudolf Carnap, abandoned physics for philosophy because his doctoral dissertation topic was seen as too ”metatheoretical” for a properly empirical discipline. For Carnap, physics had devolved into another specialized field of study, rather than – as it had still been for Einstein – natural philosophy pursued by more exact means.

Positivism’s appeal to organized reason, or ”science,” in the public sphere is fundamentally ambiguous. On the one hand, it implies that it is in everyone’s interest to pursue their ends by scientific means, so as to economize on effort and hence allow more time for the fruits of their labor to be enjoyed. On the other hand, science can unify the polity by authoritatively resolving, containing or circumventing social conflict. Here a well-established procedure or a decisive set of facts is supposed to replace more ”primitive” and volatile forms of conflict resolution. A scientific politics should not merely satisfy the parties concerned: it should arrive at the ”correct” solution.

Positivist social researchers have put a democratic spin on such politics by presenting survey data from parties whose voices are unlikely to be heard in an open assembly. But exactly who reaps the political benefits of these newly articulated voices: the people under investigation; the investigators themselves; or the investigators’ clients?

After the leading members of the Vienna Circle migrated to the USA in the 1930s, logical positivism seeded the analytic philosophy establishment for the second half of the twentieth century. However, this is the only context in which positivism possibly dominated an established discipline. Otherwise positivism has been embraced by disciplines that have yet to achieve academic respectability, not least the social sciences. Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, published in 1962 as the final instalment of the logical positivists’ International Encyclopedia of Unified Science, substantially altered all this. Unlike previous positivist accounts, Kuhn’s was explicitly a model of knowledge production within particular scientific disciplines (or ”paradigms”) that did not presume that science as a whole is heading toward a unified understanding of reality. Kuhn’s approach anticipated what is now called the ”postmodern condition.” However, if positivism has a future, it lies in rekindling a sense of ”Science” that transcends the boundaries of particular scientific disciplines. This was how Comte originally thought about the discipline he called ”sociology.”

Bibliography:

Adorno, (ed.) (1976) The Positivist Dispute in German Sociology. Heinemann, London.
Fuller, S. (2006) The Philosophy of Science and Technology Studies. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL.
Kolakowski, L. (1972) Positivist Philosophy. Penguin, Harmondsworth.
Proctor, R. (1991) Value-Free Science? Purity and Power in Modern Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA.