Positivism (redirected from Positivism (philosophy))

positivism (pŏ`zĭtĭvĭzəm), philosophical doctrine that denies any validity to speculation or metaphysics. Sometimes associated with empiricism, positivism maintains that metaphysical questions are unanswerable and that the only knowledge is scientific knowledge. The basic tenets of positivism are contained in an implicit form in the works of Francis Bacon, George Berkeley, and David Hume, but the term is specifically applied to the system of Auguste Comte, who developed the coherent doctrine. In addition to being a dominant theme of 19th-century philosophy, positivism has greatly influenced various trends of contemporary thought. Logical positivism is often considered a direct outgrowth of 19th-century positivism.

Bibliography

See L. Kołakowski, The Alienation of Reason (tr. 1968) and Positivist Philosophy (tr. 1972); C. Bryant, Positivism in Social Theory and Research (1985).

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positivism

Any philosophical system that confines itself to the data of experience, excludes a priori or metaphysical speculations, and emphasizes the achievements of science. Positivism is closely connected with empiricism, pragmatism, and logical positivism. More narrowly, the term designates the philosophy of Auguste Comte, who held that human thought had passed inevitably through a theological stage into a metaphysical stage and was passing into a positive, or scientific, stage. Believing that the religious impulse would survive the decay of revealed religion, he projected a worship of mankind, with churches, calendar, and hierarchy.

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positivism

1. a strong form of empiricism, esp as established in the philosophical system of Auguste Comte, the French mathematician and philosopher (1798--1857), that rejects metaphysics and theology as seeking knowledge beyond the scope of experience, and holds that experimental investigation and observation are the only sources of substantial knowledge

2. the jurisprudential doctrine that the legitimacy of a law depends on its being enacted in proper form, rather than on its content

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Positivism 

a philosophical trend based on the thesis that all genuine, “positive” knowledge can be obtained only through the individual specialized sciences or through their synthesis, and that philosophy as a separate discipline, claiming to study reality independently, has no right to exist.

Positivism took shape as a distinct trend in the 1830’s. During its history of more than a century, positivism has evolved steadily toward expressing more clearly and carrying to a logical conclusion its inherent tendency toward subjective idealism.

The term “positivism” was introduced by the French philosopher A. Comte, the founder of the positivist school, who proclaimed his decisive break with the philosophical (“metaphysical”) tradition. He believed that science has no need for guidance from philosophy. In the opinion of the positivists, however, this does not exclude the existence of a synthesis of scientific knowledge, to which the term “philosophy” may be applied. Thus, philosophy is reduced to a set of general conclusions drawn from the natural and social sciences. Inasmuch as positivism has nothing to do with metaphysical problems, it rejects both idealism and materialism. The claim that causes and essences can be discovered is attributed by Comte to the vestiges of metaphysics, which, in his opinion, ought to be eliminated from science. Science does not explain phenomena but describes them, answering the question “how,” not “why.” By consistently developing this thesis, Comte arrived at a phenomenalist point of view. However, the subjective idealist tendencies in Comtean positivism continued to coexist with certain elements of natural scientific materialism, which stemmed from the traditions of the French Enlightenment of the 18th century. Like the Enlightenment thinkers, Comte stated his conviction that science has an infinite capacity for development.

In addition to Comte, the representatives of the first, “classical” form of 19th-century positivism included E. Littré, G. N. Vyrubov, P. Laffitte, H. Taine, and E. Renan in France and J. S. Mill and H. Spencer in Great Britain. As positivism developed, its phenomenalist and subjective idealist tendencies became clearer (for example, the works of Mill and Spencer and, in Russia, the works of V. V. Lesevich, M. M. Troitskii, V. N. Ivanovskii, P. L. Lavrov, and N. K. Mikhailovskii). Basing his generalizations on new discoveries in the natural sciences in the second half of the 19th century, Spencer studied problems of classification in the sciences, developing the agnostic doctrine that objective reality is unknowable and that the essence of reality can be penetrated only by religion and not by science.

Especially in the latter half of the 19th century, positivism had a considerable influence on the natural sciences and on the social sciences, including sociology, law, political economy, historiography, and literary theory and criticism.

At the end of the 19th century, positivism went through a crisis caused by the radical breakdown of many concepts in physics at the turn of the century, as well as by progress in the natural sciences, which canceled out or reduced the importance of many of the “synthetic” generalizations viewed by positivism as eternal and unquestionable attainments of science. The crisis in positivism was promoted by the intensive development of research in psychology, which forced scientists to analyze “ultimate” philosophical questions of knowledge—the very questions that positivism had always done its utmost to avoid. In addition, the crisis was fostered by the failure of all attempts to find the objective basis for the positivist system of values in mechanistic and metaphysical sociology. (The positivist criterion of what is scientific makes it impossible to introduce the consideration of values into scientific research and to deduce “what should be” from “what is.”)

As a result of all of these developments, it became necessary to reassert the question of philosophy’s role in the sciences. Transformed, positivism entered a new, second stage of its evolution with the appearance of Machism (empiriocriticism). The Machist trend has been further developed in the current, or third stage in the evolution of positivism—neopositivism, which emerged during the 1920’s (seeVIENNA CIRCLE, , and ANALYTIC PHILOSOPHY). Retreating from the attempt to solve fundamental philosophical problems, neopositivism concentrates on concrete logical and methodological research on language or immediate experience.

REFERENCES

Lenin, V. I. Poln. sobr. soch., 5th ed., vol. 18.
Gulyga, A. V. “Vozniknovenie pozitivizma.” Voprosy filosofii, 1955, no. 6.
Narskii, I. S. Ocherki po istorii pozitivizma. Moscow, 1960.
Kon, I. S. Pozitivizm ν sotsiologii. Leningrad, 1964.
Charlton, D. G. Positivist Thought in France During the Second Empire, 1852–1870. Oxford, 1959.
Simon, W. M. European Positivism in the Nineteenth Century. Ithaca, N.Y., 1963.

V. A. LEKTORSKII