Positivism

The term positivism can be traced back to Enlightenment thinkers such as Pierre Simon De Laplace and David Hume and was adopted by Auguste Comte in the 19th century to designate a philosophical movement which held that science is the only kind of valid knowledge and that empirical facts are the only possible objects or building blocks of knowledge. It held that humanistic areas such as ethics, politics, and religion would be meaningless unless they could become scientific disciplines. Logical positivism or logical empiricism, the dominant form of positivism usually viewed as coextensive with positivism in general, developed out of discussions held by the Vienna Circle, a group growing out of the analytical tradition and composed of Austrian and German philosophers, which began in the early 1920s. Equating knowledge in general with scientific knowledge, they denied the validity of traditional philosophical concerns with metaphysics, ethics, and epistemology. During the following decades many of the positivists moved to England and the United States, where they exerted an enormous influence. Positivism soon became the major framework for the philosophy of science and a powerful school of philosophy in general. While it no longer exists as a unified movement or school of philosophy, its ongoing influence is evidenced in the present widespread focus on issues relating to scientific thinking and developments in formal logic and in a concern with a particular type of rigor in various philosophies.

Positivism holds that there are only two sources of knowledge, logical reasoning and sense experience. Logical knowledge includes math, with math reducible to formal logic. Logical/mathematical truths are based on the rules of language, which are conventions, and thus are true independently of sense experience. They are not truths of some “higher order” or “higher realm of being” but are independent of sense experience only because they are empty of content. Empirical knowledge, whose truth is dependent on sense experience, is [Page 1639]composed of scientific knowledge such as physics, biology, physiological psychology, and so forth.

The logical positivists' major points of focus were on what became known as the verifiability theory of meaning and its consequences, the structure of scientific theories, investigations into logic and mathematics, and the philosophy of language as a concern with the possibilities of an ideal logical language as a representation of reality.

Perhaps their most famous tenet was the verifiability theory of meaning, which held that the cognitive meaning of a statement is its method of verification. A statement is meaningful if and only if it can be shown to be true or false, at least in principle, through sense experience. Its meaning is reducible to, or is nothing more than, the sum of all conceivable observation experiences that would go to verify its truth.

Traditional metaphysics, which incorporates abstract speculation about the nature of reality, has no significance as it is not reducible to observation statements. Statements about the existence and nature of God or the absolute are meaningless, for example, as there is no set of observations that could conclusively verify or falsify their truth. Such knowledge claims are always more than, or beyond, any possible set of observation circumstances or statements.

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