The following list of "strict" positivist doctrines comes from Giedymin,
Jerzy. 1975. Antipositivism in contemporary philosophy of social science
and humanities. _British Journal of the Philosophy of Science_ 26: 275-301.
1. Identification of knowledge with science and mathematics.
2. Empiricism in the extreme form of either phenomenalism or physicalism,
i.e. the ruduction of science to statements about directly observable
facts and the elimination as meaningless of any sentence that is neither
analytic nor empirical (synthetic in Justin's usage), e.g. of
metaphysics.
3. The reduction of philosophy to the 'logic of science' and of mathematics.
4. Methodological naturalism ... i.e. the view that the social sciences and
even humanities have basically the same aims and methods as the natural
sciences.
5. Sociological relativism with respect to norms, in particular ethical ones.
6. Emphasis on the social value of science and on its practical applications.
Giedymin gets this from Bacon, Comte, and that crowd, the British empiricist,
notably Mill, and the Vienna LP group. From this list, he proposes there are
64 (=2^6) possible definitions of positivism as the term is commonly used in
social sciences.
Marsh Feldman
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"Marginality confers legitimacy on one's contrariness."
