We explain what positivism is in philosophy, its characteristics and fundamental principles. Also, its main representatives.
What is positivism?
Positivism is a philosophical current that maintains that scientific knowledge is the only authentic knowledge. It represents a critical attitude towards traditional philosophy, especially metaphysics and ontology.
Heir to empiricism and epistemology, positivism was born in the middle of the 19th century and was consolidated from the thought of Henri Saint-Simon (1760-1825) and Auguste Comte (1798-1857). He maintained that the only authentic knowledge to which one can aspire is that which arises from the application of the scientific method.
For positivism there are two types of genuine knowledge:
- positive knowledge. It is the knowledge given a posterioriand is derived exclusively from natural experience, its properties and relationships.
- True knowledge by definition. It is analytical and tautological knowledge, and it emerges from previous premises already considered true. It is independent of experience.
However, the limitations of this perspective generated a negative reaction known as “antipositivism” or “negativism”, which denied the use of the scientific method in the social sciences. In the long run, This rejection allowed the emergence of qualitative research approaches and not exclusively quantitative, as was more common in positivism.
History of positivism
Some philosophers and scientists maintain that positivism can be traced to the Platonic position regarding philosophy and poetry. This dispute was taken up by Wilhelm Dilthey in the form of natural sciences and humanities.
However, in formal terms, positivism was born in the 19th century by Henri de Sain-Simon Pierre-Simon Laplace and Auguste Comte. These thinkers believed in the scientific method, observation as verification of theory and the unreliability of metaphysics to constitute thought.
Comte described the epistemological perspective of positivism in his works Positive philosophy course (1842) and Speech on the positive spirit (1844). In them he developed an analysis of the scientific knowledge to date, necessary to be able to bring the scientific method to a new social science, mother of all sciences.
The evolutionary idea of knowledge was, for Comte, a series of three steps: theological knowledge, metaphysical knowledge and positive knowledge. These consisted of the passage from belief through faith to the use of reason, until reaching the stage in which human beings could govern themselves.
Relying on Comte, other thinkers developed their own ideas of positivism. Among them are Émile Zola, Emile Hennequin, Wilhelm Scherer and Dimitri Pisarev. This movement was the one that ended up determining sociology as Émile Durkheim understood it.
Durkheim took up Comte's method and refined it by orienting it to sociology. The same happened with logical positivism, founded by the Vienna Circle, which resulted in the work of Otto Neurath and Rudolf Carnap, essential thinkers of the movement.
Characteristics of positivism
Positivism can be characterized, in a general way and beyond its variants, by a series of features.
- He defended the scientific method as the only possible method to obtain valid knowledge, regardless of the type of science it was about.
- He criticized and distanced himself from any form of metaphysics, subjectivism or considerations that were not objective in empirical terms.
- Its central purpose was to causally explain the phenomena of the universe through the formulation of general and universal laws.
- He argued that inductive methods were the only useful ones for obtaining knowledge. He weighed the documentary evidence against any form of general interpretation.
Positivist vision of the history of knowledge
Auguste Comte understands the history of knowledge as the evolutionary development from a belief to a fact. Broadly speaking, it divides the evolution of knowledge into three major stages:
- Theological knowledge. In the beginning of humanity, explanations for the world were mediated by mythology, theology, and belief in the supernatural.
- Metaphysical knowledge. At its midpoint, also called “Enlightenment”, the human being transferred the answer to his concerns to the realm of metaphysics and speculative philosophy. This period is characterized by the search for “why.”
- positive knowledge. It is the maturation of the human being, which is characterized by the use of the scientific method, as well as trust in physics and biology to explain the order of the world.
This consideration of science as the definitive and absolute perspective on things is, precisely, the positivist view. According to her, everything that does not conform to these precepts should be considered pseudoscience.
Representatives of positivism
The main representatives of positivism were:
- Henri de Saint-Simon. Philosopher, economist and socialist theorist of French origin, his work (known as “Saint-Simonism”) influenced the fields of politics, sociology, economics and the philosophy of science.
- Auguste Comte. French philosopher and founding father of sociology and positivist thought, he was initially secretary of Count Henri Saint-Simon, with whom he later fell out due to conceptual and personal differences. His work is considered heir to that of Francis Bacon.
- Emile Durkheim. French sociologist and philosopher, he channeled sociology into the realm of academic discipline. He reformulated Comte's method and oriented it to the study of the social sciences.
- John Stuart Mill. Philosopher, economist and politician of British origin, he is a representative of the classical school of economics and one of the theorists of utilitarianism, along with Jeremy Betham. A distinguished member of the liberal party, he was a great critic of State intervention and a defender of the female vote.
logical positivism
Positivism should not be confused with logical positivism or logical empiricism, also called “neopositivism” or “rational empiricism.”
Logical empiricism emerged during the first third of the 20th century among the scientists and philosophers who made up the so-called Vienna Circle.
This current It is part of those belonging to the philosophy of science which limit the validity of the scientific method to that which is empirical and verifiable, that is, that which has its own verification method or, in any case, analytical. This was known as verificationism.
Logical positivism was much stricter in its defense of the sciences as the only viable route to knowledge than positivism itself, and was one of the strongest movements within analytical philosophy. His fields of study also included logic and language.
Reception and influences of positivism
Positivism gave rise to many currents in different fields of knowledge, such as, among others:
- Juspositivism. It is a current of legal thought that proposes a conceptual separation of law and morality, and rejects any link between the two. It states that the exclusive object of study of law should be positive law.
- behaviorism. It is a current of psychological thought that proposes the objective and experimental study of behavior. It served as a channel for more than ten variants of behaviorism that emerged between the 19th and 20th centuries, which more or less moved away from concepts such as “mind”, “soul” and “consciousness”, to focus on the relationship between subjects and their environment.
- empiriocriticism. It is a philosophical current created by the German philosopher Richard Avenarius (1843-1896), which proposes the study of experience in itself, without attending to any other form of metaphysical thought, that is, aspiring to a “pure experience” of the world.
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References
- Kraft, V. (1977). The Vienna Circle. Taurus.
- Adorno, Th. (1973). The dispute over positivism in German philosophy. Grijalbo.
- Frick, J. P. (1990). Auguste Comte, ou La République positive. Presses universitaires de Nancy.
- Giddens, A. (1974). Positivism and Sociology.
- Comte, A. (1965). Speech on the positive spirit. Aguilar.
- Comte, A. (1875). Principles of positive philosophy. imp. of the Lib. of Mercury.
- “Positivism” on Wikipedia.
- “Logical empiricism” on Wikipedia.
- “Positivism” in Filosofía.org.
- “Positivism” in Online Philosophical Encyclopedia.
- “Positivism” (video) in Educatina.
- “Positivism (philosophy)” in The Encyclopaedia Britannica.
