Positivism

[Yuppie Grinder]

I'm curious about Positivism. I know Engels thought favorably of it. From what little I've read about it, it seems very agreeable to me. So philosophy buffs, what's some good stuff to read to get an understanding of positivism? I'd prefer if it where available online, but books are cool too.

[Don't Swallow The Cap]

While I have not yet gotten to read it, a friend of mine really enjoyed the work of Willard Quine. Though when he first started looking into Positivism I believe he read Alfred Jules Ayer. He was quite indifferent towards him after read Quine though.

[Comrade Jandar]

Marx was an outspoken critic of positivism, at least within the realm of social sciences.

[Hermes]

Sorry for bumping a really old topic, but could anyone give suggestions for further reading into positivism?

I'm reading something else where the author critiques it quite a bit, but I don't think I can agree or disagree without further knowledge on the topic.

[TiberiusGracchus]

I would recommend reading Roy Bhaskars "A realist theory of science" which is highly critical of positivism and establishes a realist alternative, very inspired by marxist thought.

In RTS Bhaskar makes transcendental/retroductive arguments from established scientific practises. He asks and answers questions such as "What must be the case for scientific experiments to make sense?".

If we assume...

1. That experiments are a significant and reasonable aspect of natural sciences.

2. That it is people, in their role as scientists, that initiate the sequency of events noticed in the experiment, that is that the generation of event conjunctions that the experiment gives access to happens because humans have constructed and initiated the events.

3. That the conjunctions may endure in an experiment.

5. That the constant conjunctions of events that the experiment shows somehow give us epistemic access to causal laws (however percieved).

Given that we do accept these assumptions (and they are all very reasonable), then we must according to Bhaskar also accept that:

1. Reality outside of the experiment is to a significant extent an "open system", that is a system where constant conjunctions or regular sequences of events are rare, if existant. There would be no reason to constract an experiment in order to initiate repeated sequences of events of these could be registred outside the closed conditions of the experiment. In other words, the experimental initiation of sequence A-B would be superflous if A was always followed by B (and not sometimes A-C, A-D, C-B etc).

2. Causal laws must be distinguished from constant conjunctions of events. the significance in the experimental production of constant conjunction is that they give epistemic access to causal laws, but Bhaskar persists that the empirical foundations for our knowledge of causal laws must be separated from the causal laws themselves. Because if that would not be the case, we would have to percieve the experiment as a production of causal laws rather than a survey into their nature, and the scientists would be promoted to law-makers.
More, if we identify constant conjunctions of events with causal laws we would have to regard our reality as regulated by very frail laws, in general no laws at all. Because constant conjunctions of events are very rare in open systems.

Bhaskar suggests that the problem must be solved by an understanding of laws as tendencies/dispositions/powers of mechanisms that may be possessed without being actualised, actualised without being realised, and realised without being discovered.

In the open reality there's a myriade of active mechanisms that can block, nullify and modify the effects of other mechanisms. What the scientist does when he constructs an experiment is isolating mechanisms in order to study their own way of operating.

Andrew Collier has written the most accessible introduction to Critical Realism, in his book he explains what Bhaskar means with mechanisms:

"A generative mechanism, we might say, is that aspect of the structure of a ting by virtue of which it has a certain power. For example, that aspect of the structure of an oxygen atom by virtue of which it can combine with two hydrogen atoms to form a molecule of water; that aspect of a DNA molecule by virtue of which it can replicate itself; that aspect of a market economy by virtue of which it can go into an overproduction crisis; that aspect of a person's brain structure by virtue of which he or she can aquire language."

Karl Marx writes in Capital that "all science would be superfluous if the outward appearance and the essence of things directly coincided" and this is alwo the opinion of Bhaskar and CR, that the actual and empirical appearences - the events and the perceptions of them - not directly concides with the structures, mechanisms and causal powers. They might even contradict eachother, reality can be counter-phenomenal. This is a condition for science playing a liberating role.

So CR has a very different ontology than positivism. It has a differented and stratified ontology while positivism has a flat, empiricist or actualist ontology. CR understands causality very different from the positivist-empiricist understanding of causality as regular sequences of events.



In Method in Social Science critical realist sociologist Andew Sayer makes a popular summary of the assumtions of CR:

1. The world exist independently of our knowledge of it.

2. Our knowledge of that world is fallible and theory-laden. Concepts of truth and falsity fail to provide a coherent view of the relationship between knowledge and its object. Nevertheless knowledge is not immune to empirical check, and its effectiveness in informing and explaining successful material practise is not mere accident.

3. Knowledge develops neither wholly continuously, as the steady accumulation of facts within a stable conceptual framework, nor wholly discontinuously, through simultaneous and universal changes in concepts.

4. There is necessity in the world; objects - whether natural or social - necessarily have particular causal powers or ways of acting and particular susceptibilities.

5. The world is differentiated and stratified, consisting not only of events, but objects, including structures, which have powers and liabilities capable of generating events. These structures may be present even where, as in the social world and much of the natural world, they do not generate regular patterns of events.

6. Social phenomena such as actions, texts and institutions are concept-dependent. We therefor have not only to explain their production and material effects but to understand, read and interpret what they mean. Although they have to be interpreted by starting from the researcher's own frames of meaning, by large they exist regardless of researcher's interpretations of them. A qualified version of 1 therefore still applies in the social world. In view of 4-6, the methods of social science and natural sciene have both differences and similarities.

7. Science or the production of any kind of knowledge is a social practise. For better or worse (not just worse) the conditions and social relations of the production of knowledge influence its content. Knowledge is also largely - though not exlusively - linguistic, and the nature of language and the way we communicate are not incidental to what is known and communicated. Awareness of these relationships is vital in evaluating knowledge.

8. Social science must be critical of its object. In order to explain and understand social phenomena we have to evaluate them critically.

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I can also say that CR assumes materialist emergence, that is that the level of life/biology is rooted in but not reducible to the level of chemistry etc. Positivist philosophies of science have not really taken this into serious account.

It also holds that knowledge is not gained purely through contemplation or observation of the world, as positivism does. CR claim that we primarily understand the world through practise and activity - and the critical analysis of practise and activity. It agrees with Marx theses that "the question whether objective truth can be attributed to human thinking is not a question of theory but is a practical question. Man must prove the truth — i.e. the reality and power, the this-sidedness of his thinking in practice. The dispute over the reality or non-reality of thinking that is isolated from practice is a purely scholastic question" and that "all social life is essentially practical. All mysteries which lead theory to mysticism find their rational solution in human practice and in the comprehension of this practice".



So you can say that CR like positivism postulates that we can have access to the objective world and gain knowledge of it. But unlike positivism it is more qualitatively oriented. It's most favored methods are related to real abstracting, it's how you can discover structures (internally related objects or practises) and mechanisms.


If a positivist scientists would try to explain why some industries are more strike-prone than others, she would probably tackle the problem by statistical analysis in order to evaluate possible independent variables such as union membership, size of establishment, gender composition etc. A critical realist would be more interested in asking qualitative questions such as "what does strike activity presuppose?", "What is it about the size of establishments which affects propensity to strike? Is it just size per se in terms of numbers employed, or the nature of social relations and forms of management control associated with different sizes?" etc.