Positivism

• 1. Introduction

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  Positivism, a philosophy about what counts as knowledge, supplied the national motto of Brazil. Ordem e Progresso, meaning Order and Progress, was borrowed from the movement's own slogan. That is a strange fate for a theory of evidence.

  The school makes a blunt claim. Genuine knowledge is either true by definition or positive, meaning facts learned from sensory experience and worked over by reason and logic. Intuition, introspection and religious faith are rejected as ways of knowing, or written off as meaningless.

  How did a rule about evidence grow into a plan for society, a theory of history and even a rival to traditional worship? Why do so many scholars called positivists insist the label does not fit them? And why does the word still describe how many researchers argue today?

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• 2. Three Stages

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  Between 1830 and 1842, Auguste Comte released a series of texts called The Course in Positive Philosophy. Comte lived from 1798 to 1857, and this work is where modern positivism first took shape. The first three volumes surveyed sciences that already existed: mathematics, astronomy, physics, chemistry and biology. The last two argued that a science of society was on its way.

  Comte noticed that theory and observation depend on each other in a circle. Because he also sorted the sciences into an order, some regard him as the first philosopher of science in the modern sense. He called the study of human society the queen science. Physical sciences had to arrive first, he held, since society was the hardest subject of all.

  His "law of three stages" described how societies chase the truth. He meant it as a secular, scientific ideology for a Europe that was growing less religious. The first stage was theological. People explained everything by reference to God, and the church governed humanity's place in the world. Doctrine took the place of reasoned questions about existence.

  The second stage, the metaphysical, began with the Enlightenment and ran to the years just after the French Revolution. Rationalism ruled, and the central idea was that humanity holds universal rights. Democracies and dictators rose and fell while trying to protect those rights.

  The third stage was the scientific, or positive. Here individual rights outranked the rule of any single person, and humanity could govern itself with no higher power above it. Nobody could skip ahead, Comte insisted, because each stage had to be completed before the next.

  Progress was the engine. Comte believed that valuing the past and building on it was how people left the first two stages behind. Sociology, he wrote, would "lead to the historical consideration of every science". His summary of the whole program was short: "from science comes prediction; from prediction comes action".

  Anthony Giddens points to an irony. Reaching the positive stage would demand a complete understanding of the universe. Giddens argues that because people keep discovering new things through science, humanity never gets past the second stage. Comte's follow-up, A General View of Positivism, dates from 1844, though its French edition came out in 1848 and its English one in 1865.

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• 3. The Religion of Humanity

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  In 1849, Comte proposed a calendar reform that he named the positivist calendar. It was one piece of a larger project from his later life, a religion of humanity. Its job was to give positivist societies the cohesion that traditional worship once supplied.

  John Stuart Mill, a close associate, split the man in two. The "good Comte" wrote the Course in Positive Philosophy. The "bad Comte" wrote the secular-religious system. The system itself failed. Yet once Darwin's On the Origin of Species appeared, it helped inspire many secular humanist organizations in the 19th century, notably through the secularists George Holyoake and Richard Congreve.

  George Eliot and Harriet Martineau, two English followers, mostly turned away from the full gloomy panoply of the system. They did like the religion of humanity, and they liked Comte's call to "vivre pour autrui", which means live for others. The word altruism comes from that phrase. Martineau also translated many of Comte's writings into English, and some regard her as the first female sociologist.

  Comte's lasting fame owes something to Emile Littré, who founded The Positivist Review in 1867. In France, Fabien Magnin became the first working-class adherent and led a movement called Proletarian Positivism. Comte named him successor as president of the Positive Society, a post Magnin held from 1857 until he resigned in 1880. In 1863 he founded the Cercle des prolétaires positivistes, which was affiliated with the First International.

  Eugène Sémérie, a psychiatrist, opened a positivist club in Paris after the French Third Republic was founded in 1870. He called positivism "not only a philosophical doctrine" but "also a political party" that aimed to reconcile order with progress. The movement's motto, "Love as principle, order as the basis, progress as the goal", also carried weight in Poland.

  Herbert Spencer's early sociology arose as a reaction to Comte. Writing after advances in evolutionary biology, Spencer tried, in vain, to rebuild the discipline in terms we would now call socially Darwinistic.

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• 4. Social Facts

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  In 1895, Émile Durkheim set up the first European department of sociology, at the University of Bordeaux. Durkheim lived from 1858 to 1917, and the same year he published Rules of the Sociological Method. He threw out much of Comte's detail but kept the method. The social sciences, he held, continue the natural sciences into human activity, with the same objectivity and approach to causes. His stated aim was to "extend scientific rationalism to human conduct".

  His monograph Suicide, from 1897, became the model case. Durkheim compared suicide statistics across police districts and tried to show that Catholic communities had a lower rate than Protestant ones. He credited social causes rather than individual or psychological ones.

  To give sociology a subject of its own, Durkheim developed the idea of objective "social facts" that stand on their own. With them, he thought, a society could be judged healthy or pathological. Reformers could then work against what he called social anomie. He described sociology as the "science of institutions, their genesis and their functioning".

  David Ashley and David M. Orenstein, writing in a Pearson Education textbook, suggest that Durkheim's positivism is often exaggerated and oversimplified. In their telling, Comte was the only major sociological thinker to claim that society can be analyzed exactly like nature. Durkheim saw a much greater need for a distinctly sociological method.

  Whatever the label, his lifework helped establish practical social research as we know it. Those techniques now underpin political science and other social sciences, and they reach as far as market research.

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• 5. History Speaks

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  "It is not I who am speaking, but history itself." The French historian Fustel de Coulanges said this as a self-declared positivist. Historical, or documentary, positivism holds that historians should let sources speak for themselves, without added interpretation. The heavy weight on documents produced the methods of source criticism, which aim to strip out bias and recover original sources in pristine condition.

  The school is tied above all to the 19th-century German historian Leopold von Ranke. He urged historians to describe the past "wie es eigentlich gewesen ist", which means as it actually was. Georg Iggers, who has studied the concept's history, argues that its development owed more to Ranke's followers than to Ranke.

  In Weimar Germany, Ernst Kantorowicz warned that positivism risks turning Romantic. A positivist who claims to find "the Blue Flower of truth" without any preconceptions, he said, is chasing a dream. In postwar France, Raymond Aron and Michel Foucault went further. Both held that interpretations are always multiple, so no final objective truth waits to be recovered.

  Historicist critics added practical points. History differs from physics and ethology in both subject and method. Much of what it studies cannot be counted, and counting would cost precision. Experimental methods and mathematical models rarely apply, so general laws of history are out of reach.

  The English historian R. G. Collingwood made the sharpest case in The Idea of History, published after his death in 1946. Historical facts, he said, are inferred and cannot be confirmed by repetition, unlike scientific ones. The fixation on collecting facts had given historians "unprecedented mastery over small-scale problems" but "unprecedented weakness in dealing with large-scale problems".

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• 6. Vienna and Falsification

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  Before World War I, a group later called the First Vienna Circle gathered at the Café Central. After the war, Hans Hahn, one of its members, helped bring Moritz Schlick to Vienna. Schlick's Vienna Circle and Hans Reichenbach's Berlin Circle spread the new doctrines in the 1920s and early 1930s. The result was logical positivism, which pairs empiricism with a version of rationalism.

  Otto Neurath's advocacy made the movement self-conscious and better known. In 1929, Neurath, Hahn and Rudolf Carnap wrote a pamphlet summarizing the Circle's doctrines. It opposed all metaphysics, rejecting it not as wrong but as meaningless, because it could not be tested by observation. Its criterion of meaning came from the early work of Ludwig Wittgenstein, who later set out to refute it.

  The pamphlet also wanted all knowledge written in a single standard language of science. Its larger project, called rational reconstruction, would gradually replace everyday concepts with sharper equivalents. That project is widely considered a failure. Carnap, after moving to the United States, proposed a replacement in Logical Syntax of Language. By the late 1930s, the shared platform was being called logical empiricism in its American exile.

  In 1934, Karl Popper published The Logic of Scientific Discovery and attacked verificationism. No one can verify that all swans are white, because no one can know that every swan has been observed. A single black swan, however, would falsify the claim. Popper also held that scientific theories describe how the world really is, not merely what scientists experience.

  W. V. O. Quine and Pierre Duhem pushed the doubt further. Their thesis says a hypothesis cannot be tested in isolation, since every test leans on background assumptions. In 1962, Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions argued that whole worldviews, not just single theories, must sometimes shift.

  Out of this came postpositivism, which reforms positivism instead of rejecting science. It keeps objective truth and experiment as goals. It accepts that a researcher's theories and values shape what is observed, and it pursues objectivity by recognizing those biases. Unlike positivists, it counts qualitative methods as valid alongside quantitative ones.

  In the early 1960s, a quarrel called the positivism dispute pitted critical theorists against critical rationalists. The critical theorists accused their opponents of positivism, which fed what Popper called the "Popper Legend", the mistaken belief that he was a positivist himself.

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• 7. Humanist Objections

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  In 1725, G. B. Vico argued that physical laws might be relative, and that social science could be even more so. He ranked the humanities above natural science, because natural science tells us nothing about the inward side of things. Wilhelm Dilthey later took up the same argument. Scientific explanations, he said, never reach the inner nature of events, while humanistic knowledge shows us thoughts, feelings and desires.

  Around the turn of the 20th century, German sociologists made the objection formal as methodological antipositivism. Max Weber, one of them, allowed that sociology is loosely a science, since it can identify causal relationships among ideal types. But he wanted sociologists to look for relationships less "ahistorical, invariant, or generalizable" than those of natural scientists. He defined sociology as the study of social action, using critical analysis and verstehen techniques. Georg Simmel, Ferdinand Tönnies, George Herbert Mead and Charles Cooley also shaped the movement.

  Karl Marx's theory of historical materialism drew on positivism, yet the Marxist tradition went on to feed critical theory. Max Horkheimer faulted classic positivism on two grounds. First, so-called social facts do not sit "out there" in the world. They are products of human consciousness shaped by history and society, and positivism ignores the observer who helps constitute social reality.

  His second charge was political. The picture of social reality that positivism paints is artificially conservative, he said, because it props up the status quo. That, he suggested, may explain its appeal in certain political circles.

  Jürgen Habermas pressed the point from another side. He treated pure instrumental rationality as a form of scientism, with science acting "as ideology". Positivism, in his view, suits "technocrats" who believe science and technology make social progress inevitable.

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• 8. A Label Nobody Wants

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  Late in his career, the physicist Werner Heisenberg, a Nobel laureate for his work in quantum mechanics, distanced himself from positivism. He mocked its advice to stay silent about whatever cannot be said clearly. Could anyone imagine, he asked, "a more pointless philosophy"? In the early 1970s, the urbanist David Harvey made a similar complaint about quantitative methods in his own field.

  A 1927 book, The Logic of Modern Physics, coined the term operational definition. Positivist thinking helped make it the dominant method in psychology for the rest of the century. In economics, researchers tend to follow classical positivist assumptions without discussing them. Friedrich Hayek rejected positivism in the social sciences as hopelessly limited.

  The irony is that Stephen Hawking embraced the label in The Universe in a Nutshell. He called a scientific theory a mathematical model that codifies observations and makes testable predictions. Taking the positivist position, he wrote, "one cannot say what time actually is". He credited the approach to Popper, though Popper's own followers were accused of positivism.

  In sociology and political science, the picture is similar. Paul Lazarsfeld is often credited with institutionalizing this kind of sociology, through large-scale survey studies and statistical techniques for analyzing them. Robert K. Merton called its output middle-range theory. Most articles in leading American sociology and political science journals are positivist, at least in being quantitative. Such work carries prestige and is seen as more scientific, though non-positivist scholars contest that judgment.

  The word itself has become slippery. There are no fewer than twelve distinct epistemologies called positivism. Some do not use the name because they arose against older forms, and for others it has become a term of abuse. One scholar suggests each side defines the other by what it is not.

  What looks like a single debate may be two arguments. One is an antipositivist critique of scientism. The other is a positivist push for reliable research methods. A proposal called strategic positivism aims to bridge the two.

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