On Wed, 11 Jan 1995, jim devine wrote: > three points on positivism: > > 1. the Marxist Rudolf Hilferding was (to my mind) a positivist, > with his distinction between "Marxism as a science" and "socialism > as a moral committment." > > 2. I think this goes to the heart of positivism: the positivists > think that there's a clear distinction between "fact" and "value," > so it's possible to be "value free" in one's science. The positivists > think that one can separate the observer (the student) from the > observed (society), treating themselves as somehow independent of > society. To my mind, we are all participant-observers. Positivism is much more complex than this. In addition to fact-value distinctions positivists typically insist on distinctions between theory-independent observations and theoretical interpretations thereof, and a posteriori evidence and theory versus a priori knowledge of logic and mathematics. Moreover positivists treat theory nonrealistically, as mere summaries of regularities in the data; theoretical posits for themtare in some sense our contributions and not part of the given world (the empirical data). They also deny any necessity which not a priori, i.e., logical or mathematical. Causal necessity thus turns out to be Humean constant conjunction; explanatory necessity is a matter of loogical derivation of observations from statements of laws and initial conditions. "Dialectical" necessitation is regarded as so much obscurantist claptrap. Logical positivism in particular was associated with the verifiability criterion of empirical meaningfulness (that the cognitive significance of any statement or theory was exhausted by the observations it predicts) and the verifiability criterion of demarcation (that scientific statements alone, unlike ethical, logical, or metaphysical statements) were cognitively meaningful in the stipulated sense. Incidentally positivists are not commited to the idea that scientific inquiry and inquirers can be somehow pulled out of their social circumstances. Max Weber,a positivist in some of these senses, though not a logical positivist, put the point by noting that the questions inquirers ask are conditioned by their values and interests, although the acceptability of the empirical answers they give, he thought, depend solely on the evidential relations between their theoretical hypotheses and the data they hope to explain. Carnap and C.I. Lewis, the former but not the latter of whom was an LP, further argued that the answers to scientific questions themselves, i.e., which theories we propose to explain the data, were subject to social and valuational constraints which were not empirically testable. I should say that, although social scientists seem largely unaware of the fact, that LP is dead in philosophy. > > 3. The positivist story (as I understand it) makes much more > sense on the normative level, i.e., as a prescription for how > scholars should behave, than on the positive level, i.e., as > a description of how scholars actually behave. On the latter, > authors such as Kuhn and Lakatos win hands down. Of course, > it's well-nigh impossible to separate these two levels. But > some sort of committment to non-partisan, critical, thinking > is needed. I wonder what, if it is impossible to seperate partisanship and scientific inquiry, is the point of saying that we are normatively required to do so. Isn't it rather that we don't want to licence quick inferences from our sense of how things ought to be to the way things are? The matter is exceedinbgly complicated and difficult. By the way, Kuhn and Lakatos deny that science is socially interested. The theoretical presuppositions which they say that scientists cannot escape are scientific ones, for Kuhn, those invoked in the dominant "paradigm" which sets the publems normal science solves, for Lakatos, those involved in the "hard core" of the research program, which is itself not susceptible to falsification (a notion Kuhn does not use). --Justin Schwartz
