Positivism

Auguste Comte, founder of positivist doctrine.

Positivism or positive philosophy is a philosophical theory that maintains that all genuine knowledge is limited to the interpretation of “positive” findings, that is, real, perceptible sensorially and verifiable. According to this position, all genuine knowledge is either positive —a posteriori and derived exclusively from the experience of natural phenomena and their properties and relationships— or true by definition, that is, analytical and tautological.. Thus, the information derived from sensory experience, interpreted through reason and logic, constitutes the exclusive source of all true knowledge. The verified data (positive facts) received from the senses are known as empirical evidence; thus, positivism is the logical evolution of empiricism.

This line of thought can be found as far back as Greek antiquity. As a new development of the 19th century, it stood in opposition to the traditionally prevailing scholastic visions of a transcendental philosophy. These latter perspectives asserted instead that knowledge is generated by eternally valid—and ultimately God-created—properties of mind or reason. This could be demonstrated on the basis of positive results.

In the context of the inventions, discoveries, and expansion of scientific knowledge during the Renaissance, these traditional attempts at philosophical-religious explanation had long since become questionable. This probably led to the positivist demand that positive findings be interpreted without appeal to theological or metaphysical explanations, in contrast to the usual practice up to then.

Subsequently, different positivist approaches arose, associated, among others, with the following philosophers: Auguste Comte (1798-1857), Hippolyte Taine (1828-1893), Jean-Marie Guyau (1854-1888), James Mill (1773- 1836), Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832), John Stuart Mill (1806-1873), Charles Darwin (1809-1882), Herbert Spencer (1820-1903), Roberto Ardigò (1828-1920), Ludwig Feuerbach (1804-1872), Eugen Dühring (1833-1921), Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), Ernst Mach (1838-1916), Ernst Laas (1837-1885), Richard Avenarius (1843-1896), Hans Vaihinger (1852-1933), Friedrich Jodl (1849-1914), or Theodor Ziehen (1862-1950).

The term positivism dates back to Auguste Comte (1798-1857). He and his successors elaborated his approach into a social-scientific-humanist approach. Sociological positivism holds that society, like the physical world, operates according to general laws. Introspective and intuitive knowledge is rejected, as well as metaphysics and theology, as metaphysical and theological claims cannot be verified by sense experience.

Although the positivist approach has been a recurring theme in the history of Western thought, the modern approach was formulated by the philosopher Auguste Comte at the turn of the century XIX. Comte argued that just as the physical world operates according to gravity and other absolute laws, so does society.

History

Comte and the three stages

Auguste Comte first described the epistemological perspective of positivism in Positive Philosophy Course, a series of texts published between 1830 and 1842. These texts were followed by the 1844 work, An overview of positivism. The first three volumes of the Course dealt mainly with the already existing physical sciences (mathematics, astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology), while the last two emphasized the inevitable advent of the social sciences. For Comte, the physical sciences necessarily had to come first, before humanity could properly channel its efforts towards the "queen science"; most challenging and complex of human society itself. His Vision of Positivism, therefore, set out to define the empirical objectives of the sociological method.

Comte offered an explanation of social evolution, proposing that society goes through three phases in its search for truth according to a "law of three states" general. The idea bears some similarity to Karl Marx's belief that human society would progress towards communism (see dialectical materialism), although Marx was a critic of positivism. This similarity is due to both being influenced by the socialist Henri de Saint -Simon.

For Comte, the three stages were:

• Theological state: man appeals to personified deities. At this stage, human beings think that natural disasters are acts of supernatural divinity. Comte divided this stage into 3 substages:
  • Fetishism: primitive people believe that inanimate objects have a living spirit in them (see animism).
  • Politheism: fetishism generated doubts in people, which caused people to go to political positions where the explanation of things are referred to multiple gods that control the various natural manifestations.
  • Monotheism: it's the last soap. In this sub-stage, people believe that a single theistic entity is responsible for the existence of the universe.
• Metaphysical state: it is an extension of the theological stage. At this stage, people characterize God as an abstract being discarding a particular God. The explanations of things are given by impersonal abstract concepts.
• Scientific or positive state: explanations are given through the scientific method. For Comte, this is the highest and most evolved stage in society. At this stage humanity governs itself, there is no higher power that governs the masses.

According to Comte, these three rules govern the development of society. Each stage is reached once the previous stage is finished, being completed in progress scale.

Expansion of positivism

Caricature of Émile Littré and Charles Darwin represented as monkeys acting as they break credulity, superstitions, errors and ignorance.

The expansion of Comte's ideas was thanks to the action of the philosopher Émile Littré, who founded The Positivist Review in 1867. Reading Comte's works was for Littré " the cardinal point of his life". Comte's writings soon began to be translated into other languages. His works were translated into English by the British Whig writer Harriet Martineau.The Chilean Jorge Lagarrigue would translate the Principles of Positive Philosophy into Spanish and publish in the Chilean Magazine a defense of positivism.

Positivism and scientism

According to certain meanings, positivism has been interpreted as a philosophical current that affirms that the only authentic knowledge is scientific knowledge and that such knowledge can only arise from the scientific method, the ideal example being the physical sciences that clearly triumph in the field. mastery of nature and the technical applications derived from it. This position is known as scientism.

As a consequence of this position, positivists criticize metaphysics and theology as pseudoscience for seeking what is beyond science. One line of criticism was based on what was called "language traps", which led to an interest in the study of language both in its formal dimension, logical empiricism, and as a natural language, studying "language games". », and gave rise to analytical philosophy.

Positivism derives from empiricism and the epistemology that emerged at the beginning of the XIX century by French thinkers Henri de Saint-Simon and Auguste Comte, and the British John Stuart Mill. It spread and developed throughout the rest of Europe in the second half of the century. From an extreme positivism to an almost idealistic positivism, the 19th century and the beginning of the XX offer a rich panorama of authors and schools all under the positivist denomination. The common feature that characterizes all of them is the acceptance of scientific knowledge as the only form of legitimate knowledge and the rejection of metaphysics and theology as pseudoscience.

Positivism arose as a way to legitimize the naturalistic scientific study of the human being, both individually and collectively. According to different versions, the need to scientifically study the human being arose from the unparalleled experience of the French Revolution, which forced for the first time to see society and the individual as objects.

The application of positive philosophy to different sciences and research objects, as well as the rigidity in which empiricist principles are considered, gave rise to very different types of empiricism and positivism.

Features

Auguste Comte.

John Stuart Mill.

These currents have as differentiating characteristics the defense of a methodological monism (theory that affirms that there is a single method applicable in all sciences). The scientific explanation must have the same form in any science if it aspires to be science, specifically the method of study of the physical-natural sciences. In turn, the objective of knowledge for positivism is to causally explain phenomena by means of general and universal laws, which leads it to consider reason as a means to other ends (instrumental reason). The way it has to know is inductive, disregarding the creation of theories from principles that have not been objectively perceived. In historical methodology, positivism fundamentally prioritizes documented evidence, underestimating general interpretations, which is why works of this nature tend to have excessive documentary accumulation and little interpretive synthesis.

In the middle of the XIX century, Auguste Comte formulated the idea of creating sociology as a science dealing with society as its object of study. Sociology would be a knowledge free of all relations with philosophy and based on empirical data to the same extent as the natural sciences.

One of his most outstanding proposals is that of empirical research for the understanding of social phenomena, structure and social change (which is why he is considered the father of sociology as a scientific discipline). Comte presents human history in three phases:

1. Theological or magical phase: this corresponds to the childhood of humanity; at this time people give magical explanations of natural phenomena. They also believe that certain phenomena are caused by supernatural beings or gods.
2. Metaphysical or philosophical phase: at this stage man ceases to believe in supernatural beings and now begins to believe in ideas. So the explanations are rational, the reason for things is sought, and the gods are replaced by abstract entities and metaphysical terms.
3. Scientific or positive phase: it is the definitive one. At this stage, according to Comte the human mind renounces the search for absolute ideas and instead, it is now dedicated to studying the laws of phenomena. Knowledge is based on observation and experimentation, and is expressed with the use of mathematics. The knowledge of the Laws of Nature is sought for its technical domain.

He also affirms that it is not possible to reach a knowledge of realities that are beyond what is given, of the positive, and denies that philosophy can give information about the world: this task corresponds exclusively to the sciences.

Within this, from the perspective of Leopold Von Ranke, it is said that the historian is impartial, since he is capable of overcoming phobias, predilections or emotions.

According to classical positivism: it is enough to gather a certain amount of documented facts for the science of history to emerge.

Positivism assumes quantification so that historians can be sure of their statements by measuring historians, although when this becomes the only solution, the problem of denying the veracity of everything that is not quantified or proven appears.

Reaction

During the XIX century, based on the studies of Bertrand Russell and others, the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein elaborated the text Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, which serves as inspiration for the emergence of the Vienna Circle, a group of intellectuals whose objective was to definitively distance science from metaphysics, from the development of Russell's logic. This proposal proposes a method based on experimentation, observation and objective data collection in order to seek explanations for the causes that originate the phenomena.

Positivist currents

Among the positivist currents we can mention ideological positivism, empiriocriticism, methodological or conceptual positivism, analytical positivism, sociological positivism, realistic positivism, iuspositivism and neopositivism (logical empiricism or logical positivism). The sociological approaches in philosophy of science and epistemology have traditionally been the main critics of positivism, although both positions are not necessarily contradictory.

In the field of law, the so-called legal positivism or iuspositivism is not originally related to philosophical positivism, but rather to the concept of positive law (the consideration of law as a creation of the human being).

Currently, multiple schools coexist in psychology, many of which are based on positivism for the study of the human being. Among these schools or approaches, the cognitive-behavioral stands out. It is worth mentioning the advancement of neuroscience, which addresses mental issues that previously seemed inscrutable from a naturalistic point of view.