History Of Positivism Research Paper

1. Positivism’s Platonic Political Roots

In terms of Western intellectual history, positivism inflects Plato’s original philosophical motivation through a secularized version of the Christian salvation story, in which Newton functions as the Christ figure. This captures both the spirit of Auguste Comte’s original project and its residual effects in twentieth century logical positivism, which dropped the overt historicism of Comte’s project, while retaining the fixation on Newton as the model for what it means to express oneself scientifically and a vague belief that greater scientific knowledge will deliver salvation. Indeed, positivism’s core conceptual problem has been to define a scientific vanguard capable of both offering guidance to the unenlightened and itself changing in light of further evidence and reflection. Its Platonic roots are worth recalling.

Plato was affected deeply by the volatile political environment created by the public dialectical encounters of Socrates and the other Sophists who mentored the leaders of his Athenian youth. Thus, after the fall of Athens, Plato was keen to restrict the dialectic to a cloistered setting, only to be unleashed to the larger society once initiates were sufficiently secure in their own knowledge and judgement that they would not be unduly swayed by popular demands. Where Plato had hoped to produce implacable philosopher-kings who would rule as absolute monarchs, positivists typically have envisaged a more differentiated but no less authoritative (authoritarian?) rule by experts, each an oligarch over their domain of knowledge. In this respect, positivism is bureaucracy’s philosophical fellow traveler.

Not surprisingly, positivism’s relationship to democracy has been chequered. Like Plato, positivists have feared protracted public disagreement most of all and hence have tended to demonize it as ‘irrational’ and ‘noncognitive.’ Their image of ‘plural’ authority presumes nonoverlapping competences, such that legislative questions are reduced to judicial ones concerning the expertise to which one should defer. This is in sharp contrast to most republican conceptions of democracy, which base representation on interest groups, each invested with a competence appropriate to the promotion of its interests but typically about matters in which other interest groups might also have competence. Since matters of public policy typically affect several such groups at once, collective decisions do not turn on identifying the right group whose judgement should hold sway. Rather, it is expected that public debate will issue in a solution that transcends all the groups’ starting points but nevertheless manages to serve their respective interests.

Thus, there is a fundamental ambiguity in positivism’s appeal to organized reason, or ‘science,’ in the public sphere. Sometimes this ambiguity is finessed by saying that positivists regard science as the main source of political unity. At the very least, this implies that it is in the interest of all members of society to pursue their ends by scientific means, as that may enable them to economize on effort and hence allow more time for the fruits of their labour to be enjoyed. Ernst Mach (discussed in Sect. 3) comes closest to defending this position in its pure form. It fits comfortably with the libertarian idea that democratic regimes should enable maximum self-empowerment.

However, many positivists have drawn a further conclusion that can thwart this libertarian impulse. From Comte onward, it has been common to argue that science can unify the polity by resolving, containing, or circumventing social conflict. Here a well-established procedure or a decisive set of facts is supposed to replace more ‘primitive’ and volatile forms of conflict resolution such as warfare and sometimes even open debate—all of which supposedly compromise the integrity of opposing viewpoints in the spirit of expedience. Accordingly, a scientific politics should not merely satisfy the parties concerned: it should arrive at the ‘correct’ solution.

To be sure, even this mentality admits of a democratic interpretation, as positivist social researchers have been in the forefront of presenting ‘data’ from parties whose voices are unlikely to be heard in an open assembly. Typically, this has occurred in surveys designed to represent the full empirical range of a target population. Nevertheless, the question remains of exactly who reaps the political benefits of these newly articulated voices: the people under investigation, the investigators themselves, or the investigators’ clients? Moreover, once a target population has been registered empirically, do its members remain ‘objects of inquiry’ or are they promoted to full-fledged inquirers capable of challenging the original investigators’ findings and methods? Probably the most sophisticated treatment of these questions in the context of positivistically inspired US social policy research is to be found in Campbell (1988).

These delicate questions arise because ultimately positivism turns Plato on his side by converting a static hierarchy into a temporal order. Where Plato imagined that authority flowed downward from the philosopher-king in a caste-based social structure, positivists have envisaged that all of humanity may pass (at a variable rate) through a sequence of stages that retrace the socioepistemic journey from captivity to autonomy. In the positivist utopia, it is possible for everyone to be an expert over their own domain. Moreover, there is a recipe for the conversion of Platonism to positivism. It proceeds by isolating a domain of inquiry from the contingencies surrounding its manifestations so that its essential nature may be fathomed. Whereas Plato reserved such inquiry to philosopher-kings, positivists have more often turned to state-licensed professional bodies. And instead of Plato’s intellectual intuition (nous), positivists attempt to gain epistemic access by comparative historical and experimental methods.

This recipe can be illustrated in the work of Otto Neurath, an organizer of the Vienna Circle. He wanted to isolate the essence of the ‘war economy’ so that its efficient central planning mechanism can be transferred to environments where it would have more socially salutary consequences. Here Neurath anticipated what Alvin Gouldner would call the Janus-faced character of the ‘welfare-warfare state,’ whereby the same organizational structure (in this case, a concentration of resources in the nation–state) can have radically different consequences, depending on the supporting political environment. Neverthelesss, as Neurath’s many critics pointed out, positivism seems to have inherited Platonism’s political naivete, which confuses the fact that, say, the ‘war economy’ can be identified analytically as a feature of many societies and the analyst’s ability to transfer it to new social environments—bar ring the imposition of sufficient force to hold all other environmental factors constant. If anything deserves the name of the ‘positivist fallacy’ it is this too easy assimilation of the forum to the laboratory. The history of positivism can be neatly captured as a Hegelian dialectic, the three moments of which are epitomized by the work of Auguste Comte (thesis), Ernst Mach (antithesis), and the Vienna Circle (synthesis). However, these moments have historically overlapped, occasionally coming together in figures such as Neurath. The career trajectories of positivism’s standard bearers help explain the direction taken by their thought.

Comte was an early graduate of the Ecole Polytechnique who believed that its Napoleonic mission of rendering research a vehicle for societal transformation had been betrayed, once he himself failed to achieve a permanent academic post. Mach was a politically active physicist on the losing side of so many of the leading scientific debates of his day that his famous chair in Vienna, from which the logical positivists sprang, was awarded on the strength of his critical-historical studies, not his experimental work. Finally, the intellectual leader of the Vienna Circle, Rudolf Carnap, had to abandon physics for philosophy because his doctoral dissertation topic was seen as too ‘metatheoretical’ for a properly empirical discipline. For Carnap and others who came of age in World War I, physics had devolved into another specialized field of study, rather than—as it had still been for Einstein—natural philosophy pursued by more exact means.

2. Thesis: Comtean Positivism

Auguste Comte coined the word ‘positivism’ to refer to the positive side of the Enlightenment’s essentially destructive approach to traditional social and intellectual orders. Comte agreed with the Enlightenment wits that scientific rationality is the model of social rationality, the exemplar of which is Newtonian mechanics. However, according to Comte, the French Revolution had refuted the wits’ belief that people’s ‘natural reason’ would come to light once they were freed from their captivity to religion and other traditional forms of authority. Comte thus designed positivism to replace both the church and the sovereign with scientific experts who together would function as a secular priesthood for modern society. ‘Sociology,’ another of Comte’s coinages, referred at once to this political vision and the scientific project that would render it a legitimate form of authority.

Positivism in this basic sense has remained the philosophy underwriting science as a specialized profession of ‘scientists’ with an identifiable order of merit and career structure. Ironically, none of the movement’s first phase protagonists—including Comte himself, John Stuart Mill, and Herbert Spencer—ever called a university home. Nevertheless, they all earned their living from producing knowledge (some would call it ‘ideology’), unlike those for whom the pursuit of knowledge was a refined way of consuming wealth. In this important respect, positivism was aligned with the ascendant bourgeoisie and hostile to such aristocratic forms of learning as the gentleman-scientist and the academic humanist. Comte arrived at this position from his mentorship under Count Henri de Saint-Simon, a spiritual godfather of today’s management gurus, who at the dawn of the industrial age anticipated that organized knowledge would be the principal factor of economic production and political control in what Daniel Bell would call, 150 years later, ‘post-industrial society.’

Given its explicitly anticlerical posture, positivism was more often found in medical schools and poly-technic institutes than traditional universities. (French universities did not become fully secular institutions until the Third Republic in 1870.) The medical interest is noteworthy because, in the nineteenth century, positivism was used to legitimize everything from phrenological and psychosomatic research to the experimental approach to medicine championed by Claude Bernard. What they all shared was the recognition that physical constitution plays a significant role in defining psychic, or spiritual, life. This basic assumption was sufficient to challenge religion’s ministerial monopoly.

More generally, positivism’s anticlericalism has been among its most powerful export values, especially in Latin America (where Comte’s motto ‘Order and Progress’ remains emblazoned on the Brazilian flag). Without a thoroughgoing Protestant Reformation, Latin Americans found Comte’s secularized version of Catholicism much less utopian than did their European counterparts. To be sure, background cultural allegiances divided positivist loyalties, with Francophile Latin Americans (e.g., Brazil) preferring Comte and Anglophile ones (e.g., Argentina) Spencer. In either case, though, positivism was equally likely to justify authoritarian and democratic regimes. Perhaps the most lasting intellectual residue of positivism’s Comtean origins has been the default association that social scientists make between reliable knowledge and statistically significant empirical correlations. Hempel (1942), the canonical positivist account of historical explanation, placed the Vienna Circle’s distinctive stamp on this point. Nowadays, its import is easily lost in methodological discussions that trivialize correlations as deficient accounts of causation, proof that positivism owes too much to Francis Bacon. However, following Karl Pearson, perhaps the first self-declared positivist to hold a professorship in Britain, the appeal to correlations served at least four distinct functions.

First, correlations enabled an economy of thought by summarizing observations already made. This would decrease the likelihood of ‘re-inventing the wheel,’ thereby expediting overall human progress. Second, correlations forced investigators to look beyond the singular striking success to more generalizable, albeit mundane, tendencies. Here the positivism helped moderate the hype surrounding new inventions and discoveries. Third, the focus on correlations implied that scientific work could be mechanized by treating individual experiences as instances of more general types. This helped dispel the idea that scientists must have a special ‘genius’ for finding hidden causes beneath the welter of data. Fourth and probably most significant in Pearson’s own turn-of-the-century context, the appeal to correlations echoed the ‘uniformitarian’ approach to natural history championed by Darwin, whose theory of evolution presupposed that all biological change has occurred by principles that emain in effect today. Thus, there was no need for either a divine creator behind the scenes whose actions transcend observed correlations or a mystification of statistically extraordinary events as ‘miracles.’

3. Antithesis: Machian Positivism

Ernst Mach symbolized the second moment of positivism’s dialectic: he gave the movement a dose of its own medicine, namely, a scientific sense of science’s own limitations. Mach’s counsel emerged in the midst of the ironic, perhaps perversely self-defeating, character of fin de siecle Viennese culture, whereby Karl Kraus’s quip that psychoanalysis is the disease for which it is cure was eventually incorporated into positivistic lore as Ludwig Wittgenstein’s dark saying that philosophy is the ladder that must be climbed in order to be discarded (Janik and Toulmin 1973).

In the long term, this sense of scientific self-restraint has made its strongest impression in the dual doctrines of ‘value neutrality’ and ‘academic freedom,’ which are most closely associated in the social sciences with Max Weber. Although these doctrines normally are treated as separate, it is difficult to motivate either without examining their historical interconnection. The missing link is the idea that, absent further empirical demonstration, the value of theoretical discourse—the most obvious epistemic marker distinguishing experts from the lay public—is purely heuristic. Theory enables those who already know something to know much more; however, it obscures the vision of those who have yet to know anything.

Thus, the various Mach-inspired positivist projects of ‘reducing’ theoretical discourse to its empirical bases have been motivated by a keen sense of the contingency of when and where new scientific insights arise. The distinction that Hans Reichenbach and Karl Popper drew between the contexts of discovery and justification canonized this point for contemporary philosophy of science. The unique means by which a discovery is made is neither necessary nor sufficient for demonstrating its validity. Elementary logic textbooks demonize the failure to abide by this point as the ‘genetic fallacy.’ For Mach, the contingent nature of discovery places a special burden on scientists to render their insights as widely as possible, without denying themselves the right to follow it up in their own way. The Vienna Circle positivists may be seen as having compromised this legacy by limiting the con- text of justification to the received canons of inductive and deductive reasoning. But perhaps they had good reason.

Mach may have been too keen to let the lay public draw whatever conclusions they wished from their studies of science. The second moment of positivism enabled the conversion of scientific knowledge into a pure instrument detached from any prior theoretical or normative commitment. In practice, this ‘neutral’ stance made science available to the highest bidder, who in turn could hold a monopoly over its use (or nonuse). Consider the fate of the law of diminishing marginal utility (LDMU), which states that if there is enough of a good to satisfy a basic level of need, then each additional increment of the good satisfies the need less than the previous increment. LDMU first appeared in John Stuart Mill’s normative political economy, the source of modern welfare economics. The German translation of Mill’s System of Logic in 1849 had introduced the first phase of positivism to Mach and such contemporaries as Wilhelm Wundt and Wilhelm Dilthey, initiating the long-standing debates over the reducibility of the methods of the Geisteswissenschaften (Dilthey’s rendering of Mill’s ‘moral sciences’) to those of the Naturwissenschaften. While Mill’s later work, On Liberty, would inspire Mach’s own views linking academic freedom to the right of dissent, Mach refused to follow Mill in drawing normative conclusions from putatively scientific facts, even though Mill’s aim of removing the accumulated advantage of the rich was close to Mach’s own heart.

Mill treated LDMU as a scientific basis for redistributionist social policies. He inferred that each additional increment of income earned by the rich would improve their lives less than the same increment transferred to the poor. Mill presumed a common standard of interpersonal utility and the idea that different interpersonal endowments could be explained as reversible historical accidents. Moreover, he modeled LDMU on a certain interpretation of Newton’s laws, which holds them to be true in an ideal physical medium but not in actual physical reality. Thus, Mill made the ideality of the scientific laboratory stand for the normative basis of social reform. What is now called the ‘marginalist revolution’ in economics reinterpreted the Newtonian precedent for LDMU in the value-neutral terms that captured the social situation of Mach and other second generation positivists who called a university home.

In the 1870s, Mill’s academic nemesis, William Stanley Jevons, had begun interpreting LDMU as the emergent product of interactions between agents whose respective utilities are in principle incalculable, that is, an empirically stable resolution of unknowable constitutive forces. Today we would say that LDMU is a macrolevel market effect, in which the parameters of the relevant market are left unspecified. Thus, cases that fail to conform to LDMU do not force a difficult normative judgement about whether the law or the case is at fault; rather, one casts around for an appropriately defined market to which LDMU might apply, since one may not have considered all the effects over a large enough scale, over a long enough period.

Second generation positivists came to regard LDMU as holding no clear implications for social policy. This opened the door to the curious twentieth century ‘noninterventionist’ policies that Milton Friedman and others have used to oppose scientific justifications of the welfare state. Here positivism’s antitheoretical and antinormative stance is explicitly identified with the inductively self-organizing order of the so-called invisible hand. The shift from Jevons to Friedman is indicative of what logicians call the ‘modal fallacy’: The denial that X implies Y is interpreted to mean that X implies not Y, where X = LDMU; Y =State-managed redistribution of income. Thus, an economic principle that was seen originally as not necessarily licensing a particular policy intervention came to be seen as an outcome that obviates the need for any policy intervention whatsoever.

Nevertheless, the transition between the first two moments of positivism was neither smooth nor clearly separated from the third. Free market liberals continued to invoke Comte’s original sense of positivism to stigmatize large-scale, usually Marx-inspired, social planning of the economy (e.g., Hayek 1952). A target of these studies was Vienna Circle organizer, Otto Neurath, who supposed that a specialist understanding of the persistent underlying structures of political economy provides a better handle on social policy than the spontaneously aggregated experiences of individual producers and consumers. While Neurath’s Marxist orientation to social planning was close to Comte’s privileging of expert over lay judgement, he also accepted the Machian view that useful knowledge should be spread as widely as possible. In that sense, Neurath’s interest in designing an ideographic language (‘Isotype’) to enable the populace to understand capitalism’s inequities was born of the same impulse as his debates with Rudolf Carnap over the construction of the ‘protocol statements’ that constitute the fundamental language of science. Here the second moment of positivism naturally shades into the third.

4. Synthesis: The Vienna Circle

The Vienna Circle was started by Moritz Schlick, another physics-trained philosopher who succeeded Mach to the chair of the history of inductive sciences at the University of Vienna. Much has been made of the Vienna Circle’s preoccupations with the conceptual and empirical foundations of science, the demarcation of science from nonscience, and the unification of the special sciences under a single metaphysical and/or methodological rubric. Less has been said to explain the Circle’s partial return to positivism’s communitarian and authoritarian origins, especially after Mach had made positivism virtually synonymous with the liberalization of epistemic authority. Nevertheless, there were few true liberals in the Vienna Circle: Schlick and Wittgenstein were conservatives, Carnap and Neurath socialists. Popper, the Circle associate closest to Mach’s own politics, was not easily accepted into the fold.

This antiliberal turn can be explained by changes in science’s social relations in the German-speaking world over the first quarter of the twentieth century. Seen against this background alone, the Vienna Circle appears utopian and even prone to nostalgia; but with Nazism’s ascendancy in the 1930s, the ‘logical positivist’ movement quickly acquired a defiant and progressive cast. At first, the Circle recoiled from Machian positivism because of the ease with which Mach’s neutral instrumentalism allowed scientists, especially chemists, to harness their knowledge for aggressive military–industrial ends. Consequently, Germany’s humiliating defeat in World War I paved the way for the antiscientific backlash of Weimar culture that formed the backdrop to the Circle’s meetings. In recognizably Platonic fashion, the Circle forged a philosophy that protected science from this backlash, while divesting it of any potentially corrupting links to technology. The key was the idea that a genuine science must satisfy certain logical and empirical criteria relating to the public testability of knowledge claims. The model for this requirement was ongoing debates over the foundations of mathematics, which Carnap and Reichenbach had already transferred to debates over the presuppositions of relativity and quantum theory.

However, one decidedly anti-Platonic insight that the Vienna Circle retained from Mach, which increased in importance over the years, was that esoteric forms of knowledge must be ‘reducible’ to their core ‘cognitive’ components so as to facilitate both their evaluation and utilization. Specifically, the Vienna Circle aimed to demystify ‘metaphysical’ jargon that encoded prejudice without extending insight. (Carnap famously cited Heidegger in this respect.) At the peak of its popularity in the 1940s, logical positivism was linked with such American best sellers of the ‘general semantics movement’ as Hayakawa (1978). Here the foe had shifted from Heidegger to Hitler, with the positivists arguing against the irrationalism of mass propaganda. Perhaps the most famous single work of the positivist movement, Ayer (1936), written by the British observer at the Vienna Circle, can be seen as a transitional work between these two phases.

Given this history, logical positivism appears in a rather ironic light in the highly publicized Positivis-musstreit that transpired in 1961–8 between Karl Popper and Frankfurt School doyen, Theodor Adorno. It turns out that both Popper and Adorno demonized ‘positivism’ in social science for the exact same ills as the logical positivists had demonized Heidegger and Hitler a quarter-century earlier, namely, a ‘jargon of authenticity’ and its contribution to an ‘authoritarian personality’ (two relevant Adornian phrases). Moreover, the two antagonists presupposed the logical positivists’ ideal of unified inquiry and the inadequacy of defining society as simply the totality of ‘social facts.’ Where Popper and Adorno clearly differed from the positivists was over the latter’s promotion of a sharp fact-value distinction, whereby the presumed unity of factual knowledge offsets the irreducible plurality of value orientations. Here positivism courted a ‘relativism’ that both antagonists strongly opposed. Nevertheless, the ascendancy of relativism, in the guise of ‘postmodernism,’ would render Popper and Adorno’s wranglings over ‘critical reason’ beside the point by the 1980s.

In detecting positivism’s latent relativism, Popper and Adorno not only anticipated the future; they also recalled the ‘value neutrality’ that had originally turned Machian positivism into a vehicle of power politics. In the social sciences, Max Weber’s distinction between charisma and bureaucracy as modes of legitimation enabled both politicians and scientists to turn a blind eye to each other’s activities, as the two groups were supposedly driven by radically different normative orientations: the politician acts, while the scientist provides reasons. Similar criticisms have been made of other movements in the social sciences affiliated with positivism, most notably Hans Kelsen’s legal positivism and B. F. Skinner’s radical behaviorism. Yet, even Neurath was happy to call his project ‘neutral Marxism.’

These cases are united by a refusal to blur the boundary between science and politics, which in practice has meant a rejection of social democratic, welfare-state policies in favor of more extreme political stances: either complete withdrawal or outright authoritarianism. Once again, positivism would seem to have fallen victim to the modal fallacy: because politics and science can contaminate each other, therefore they inevitably will, and hence each must be left to its own devices.

5. Final Assessment: Does Positivism Have A Future?

After the leading members of the Vienna Circle migrated to the US in the 1930s, logical positivism seeded that country’s analytic philosophy establishment for the second half of the twentieth century. However, this is the only context in which positivism possibly dominated an established discipline. For the most part, positivism has been embraced by disciplines that have yet to achieve academic respectability, even in the natural sciences, where Mach found his strongest support among chemists, biomedical scientists, and psychologists—not physicists. (It is often overlooked that positivism’s reliance on Newtonian mechanics as the model for all science generally was not appreciated by a physics community jealous to guard its guild privileges.) Unsurprisingly, positivism’s most ardent supporters have been social scientists, not for the Comtean reason that sociology is the pinnacle of all science but for the more mundane reason that positivism seemed to offer a strategy for rendering one’s activities ‘scientific.’

These matters came to a head with the publication of Kuhn (1970), which Carnap enthusiastically endorsed as the final instalment of the logical positivists’ International Encyclopedia of Unified Science. It provided an account of scientific change based largely on the history of physics that was quickly embraced by social scientists, as Kuhn stressed science’s self-organization over its larger societal impact. However, unlike previous positivist accounts, Kuhn’s explicitly fixated on particular scientific disciplines (or ‘paradigms’) without presuming that science as a whole is heading toward a unified understanding of reality. By implication, then, all scientific standards are disciplinerelative. Kuhn’s approach suited what is now called the ‘postmodern condition,’ which the Positivismusstreit had desperately tried to stave off.

In retrospect, the popularity of Kuhn (1970) is better understood as signifying positivism’s decadent phase than, as it was originally seen, a fundamental challenge to positivism. The decadent state of contemporary positivism can be gleaned from the ongoing debates over the scientific status of ‘sociobiology.’ Each side of the debate captures part of the positivist legacy: proponents like E. O. Wilson hark back to positivism’s Comtean vision of unified knowledge in aid of societal transformation, while opponents like Richard Lewontin draw on positivism’s more recent restriction of the bounds of science to disciplinespecific criteria.

If positivism has a future, it lies in rekindling a sense of ‘Science’ that transcends the boundaries of particular scientific disciplines. This is how Comte originally thought about the discipline he called ‘sociology.’ He claimed that it was the last to develop, not simply because of the complexity of its human subject matter, but more importantly, sociology had to reconstitute the (natural) sciences that historically preceded it. Too often the history of positivism’s quest for unified science has been interpreted as exclusively a matter of applying the methods of physics to less developed sciences. The reciprocal movement is really more important, namely, the application of sociological findings to the future direction of science as a whole. Such interdisciplinary projects as ‘social epistemology’ and the ‘science of science’ have tried to fulfill this side of the Comtean promise, which may be redeemed once the present intellectual climate changes.

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