Introduction to Positivism

My name is William Mouth. Wait. I'm retired emeritus professor of sociology

from Newcastle University.

And before that I was at the University of Sussex in Brighton for a long time

and I'll be talking about positivism, its historical development,

its influence on sociology

and where we are today.

Positivism comes in basically two waves. The first begins nearly 200 years ago. Now

with Auguste can't in France, uh,

developing a positive philosophy and then what he called a positive polity.

A plan for political organisation, also based on positive principles

positive by positive,

really means just that I'm positive that it's Monday Today that degree of certainty

and his conception

was of a sort of broad historical

development of human knowledge

from a theological stage when, for example,

thunder is explained by the anger of the gods

to a metaphysical phase when it's explained in terms of

mysterious forces that we don't quite know how to explain

and

what he calls a positive stage in which we know about the electrical

causes of lightning and thunder, uh, in cloud formations.

So that kind of movement a three stage progress of knowledge and

which all the sciences passed through uh, initially, mathematics and physics,

then the other sciences and finally, sociology, which in his conception,

was the kind of culminating point that sociology

becomes positive in the form of himself.

Really?

Abuse count. Um,

so that was his model

and

the idea of this kind of knowledge then, uh, extending to the social world.

He invented both the term positivism or positive philosophy

and the term sociology. So he's kind of founding father, if you like. Of both.

His influence was

somewhat weakened by

the later development of his thought when he

developed a slightly wacky religion of humanity.

And that was the point when John Stuart Mill

in this country in Britain lost enthusiasm for him.

But he was very influential,

particularly on a meal dot com who was writing around the turn of the century

dark times notion of social facts,

the idea that they should be

studied as things external to individuals

and explained in terms of other social facts, not in terms of individual behaviour.

That principle

was central to Dirk Homes thought and is

something which I think he derived from Kant.

So that whole tradition developed by dark, um,

and then continued by the dark jaime in school

in France through the 20th century.

So that's That's the first wave of positivism.

The second begins, uh, in the 19 teens 19 twenties with a rather more, uh, strident,

an extreme form of positivism,

which rejects. Kant doesn't like. He doesn't like to call itself positive ists.

They tended to call themselves logical empiricist. So

these are the philosophers and theorists of the so called Vienna Circle.

There was also a group in Berlin operating along similar lines,

logical empiricism saying that retaining the content idea of

positive knowledge but rejecting courts speculative conception as they saw it

in favour of a much more down to earth, scientifically grounded

conception.

So for them, knowledge basically falls into two categories.

Proper knowledge, real knowledge,

empirical knowledge about matters of fact.

So, for example, if I wonder how many apples there are in the bowl in my kitchen,

I can go and count them.

Um, that's empirical truths, uh, factual truths,

and the other is mathematical knowledge.

If I know I've got four green apples and for red apples,

I know without X without inspecting them that I've

got eight apples because four plus four equals eight.

So mathematical truths also, uh, count as proper knowledge.

What doesn't count as proper knowledge

is moral judgments. So genocide is appalling and wrong

is just an expression of point of view and can't be

grounded because there's nothing in external reality that sustains that claim

and statements of that kind, which can't be verified.

As they said so they wanted to to stray stress. The the

the meaning in sense of an empirical statement is the meaning of its verification.

So the meaning of the statement that there are four apples in my bowl is

reducible to me,

actually going to the kitchen and checking how many apples there are.

So that's their conception of knowledge. And that generates a critique of

moral philosophy, of religion, of, um,

political judgments and the whole set of of other other

bits of what they would say. Well, ultimately, nonsense.

So this is a much harder edged version of positivism,

and that also has an important influence on the development of sociology,

which is getting going in a more substantial way in the mid 20th century

and is shaped very much by this conception of science.

The Vienna Circle in the Berlin group are dissolved by Hitler's coming

to power in 1933 and the incorporation of Austria in 1938.

So you could think of that as Hitler's development aid to the rest of the world,

expanding most of the most creative philosophers and social thinkers, uh,

many of them coming to the to the United States,

a smaller number also coming to this country.

And so

logical empiricism becomes taken up

on in the English speaking countries,

and that becomes a major focus.

There's some independent development as well in

the United States before the immigration wave,

but a lot of it was

driven by that wave of exiles.

Um,

what happens then is that rather like Stalinist economic planning,

which gets established in the 19 thirties around about the same time

people start to to weaken it, to try to make it more sophisticated,

more sensitive to smooth off the rough edges.

So Karl Popper, who was part of the Vienna Circle, uh,

said that the notion of verification

doesn't really make sense. What we should be going for instead is

falsification to see whether our statements about reality

stand up to testing

and to abandon them if they don't.

So that's the way science should should

operate by falsification rather than verification.

Uh, and then there's a whole set of people who start to say, Well,

this conception is too individualistic.

It doesn't make take account of the fact

that our scientific theories come as a package,

not as individual statements.

And

Thomas Kuhn, in particular writing the history of science,

said that this is really not the way scientists operate.

They operate within frameworks, which he called paradigms,

and they're not going to abandon their paradigm

just because there's a nasty bit of evidence that

seems to cast doubt on it.

They're more likely to say that there was some

particular reason why that experiment turned out badly.

So a gradual sort of weakening of positivism

under the impact of its critics.

And similarly, in the social sciences and particularly in sociology, uh,

there's a hole in the 19 seventies, a whole wave of anti positive ist moves, uh,

partly in the interpretive tradition that I'll talk about separately,

but also people feeling that the original pursuit of a scientific sociology

was a little bit old fashioned