Positivism
Positivism is the codeword for a package of philosophical ideas that most likely no one has ever accepted in its entirety. These ideas include a distrust of abstraction, a preference for observation unencumbered by too much theory, a commitment to the idea of a social science that is not vastly different from natural science, and a profound respect for quantification.
Positivism is the label for a series of claims rather than any single claim. Moreover, many of these claims are analytically separable and do not entail one other so that it is entirely possible to accept some and not the rest.
Positivism was coined by Auguste Comte, but even for him it has several different connotations. It refers, in part, to a theory of history according to which every branch of knowledge passes through three stages (the theological, the metaphysical, and the positive state—when explanations by appeal to unobservable entities are finally abandoned) and which asserts that improvements in knowledge are responsible for historical progress.
However, the most iconic version of positivism is associated with the Vienna Circle and the school of logical positivism that emerged from it along with an affiliated group in Berlin. The circle’s 1929 manifesto emphasizes two fundamental commitments: to empiricism (i.e., there is knowledge only from experience) and to logical analysis, by means of which philosophical problems and paradoxes would be resolved and the structure of scientific theory made clear. It is, of course, the second of these commitments that represents logical positivism’s distinctive contribution to the empiricist tradition.
The logical analysis component of positivism has been based on developments in formal logic since the 19th century. Instead of a system of generalizations about psychological processes, logic was now seen as a formal symbolic language, empty of any empirical content that could be used to define precisely the conceptual relations between sentences. This development provided the logical positivists (or so they believed) with a means of translating theoretical sentences into sets of statements about experience and enabled them to organize the whole of scientific knowledge into an axiomatic system.
Like empiricism, then, positivism is a family of claims and concepts on which different authors have placed varying degrees of emphasis. It shares with empiricism a commitment to making experience the test of all knowledge and is skeptical about the idea of an unobservable reality that includes entities and forces not discoverable in experience, a skepticism that extends even to laws of nature. In its later forms, positivism adds to empiricism an enthusiasm for statistics—indeed, for quantification in general—and the assumption that if a statement is meaningful, then it can, by definition, be subject to scientific testing and verification (an assumption subsequently weakened or dropped).
It also attempts to translate what is known into formal languages, including mathematics, and to organize scientific theory into logical structures. However, if there is an overlap with empiricism, there is also common ground with American pragmatism, which had a similar preference for experience, verifiability, antirealism, and operationalism. This common ground largely explains why the logical positivists were accorded such a favorable reception in the United States following their flight from Nazi Europe in the 1930s.
In contemporary methodological writing, positivism is apparently dead, yet it still receives constant criticism; it is significant that the most influential examples of modern social theory, such as critical realism, constructivism, hermeneutics, and structuration theory, take a critique of positivism as their premise.