Positivism

Positivism (from Latin positivus — relating to what is “posited”, given, factual) — A philosophical orientation that restricts legitimate knowledge to observable facts and the relations (laws) between them, rejecting as illegitimate metaphysical questions about first causes, essences, or unobservable substances. The name derives from the emphasis on “positive” knowledge — what is given positively by experience, as opposed to the speculative or transcendent.

Auguste Comte (1798–1857) is the founder of Positivism as a systematic philosophical movement. In the Cours de philosophie positive (6 volumes, 1830–1842), he proposes the Law of Three Stages: every branch of human knowledge necessarily passes through three historical phases — the theological (phenomena explained by supernatural wills), the metaphysical (explained by abstract forces and essences), and the positive (scientific: explained by laws governing the relations between observable phenomena). The positive stage is the mature and definitive one. Comte sees sociology — a science he names — as the apex of the hierarchy of sciences, charged with rationally organising society. In his later phase, he developed the “Religion of Humanity” — a cult of humanity as the supreme collective entity — which generated controversy even among his own followers.

John Stuart Mill (1806–1873) represents an empiricist version of positivism: in A System of Logic (1843), he holds that all logic and all factual knowledge derive from induction from experience. Mill was more sceptical than Comte about claims regarding the structure of history, but shared the centrality of empirical observation.

Ernst Mach (1838–1916) developed a phenomenalist version of positivism: science economically describes the relations between sensations — theoretical entities such as “atom” or “field” are useful constructions, not independent realities. Mach directly influenced the Vienna Circle (Wiener Kreis), a group formed in Vienna in the 1920s around Moritz Schlick (1882–1936), including Rudolf Carnap (1891–1970), Otto Neurath (1882–1945), and, on the periphery, the British philosopher A.J. Ayer (1910–1989). The Circle elaborated Logical Positivism (or Logical Empiricism): the sole criterion of cognitive meaning is the Verification Principle — a statement is cognitively meaningful if and only if it is analytic (true by definition) or empirically verifiable. Metaphysical statements — “God exists”, “The Absolute is Spirit”, “Nothing nothings” (Heidegger) — are declared meaningless, not merely false. Neurath’s ambitious project to unify science in a common physicalist language was widely influential.

Logical Positivism was subjected to devastating criticism. Karl Popper (1902–1994), in The Logic of Scientific Discovery (1934), rejected verificationism as a criterion of demarcation between science and metaphysics, proposing falsifiability in its place: a theory is scientific if it makes predictions that could in principle be refuted by observation. It is the attempt at refutation, not verification, that characterises the scientific method. W.V.O. Quine, in “Two Dogmas of Empiricism” (1951), attacked the fundamental presuppositions of positivism — the analytic/synthetic distinction and sentence-by-sentence reductionism — dismantling the Vienna Circle’s programme from within analytic empiricism itself. Thomas Kuhn (The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 1962) showed that real science does not function as positivism assumed — it does not advance through cumulative verification but through “revolutions” of paradigms.

It is important to distinguish legal positivism — a philosophy-of-law position (held by Hans Kelsen and H.L.A. Hart) that positive law, as actually in force and backed by authority, should be studied and applied independently of moral judgements — from the philosophical positivism described here. These are distinct projects that merely share the term.

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