Realism

Positivism

Positivism is a hugely influential philosophy of science associated with a 19th-century model of the physical sciences. It is empiricist in asserting that the world exists of observables that are knowable through sensory experience, aspires to the discovery of universal causal laws through the identification of statistical regularities, and commits to value neutrality. The ontology proscribed to positivism ranges from the naive realism that the world exists of objective material things to the more complex position that although there is a real world to be discovered, it can be apprehended only imperfectly and probabilistically. The epistemology of positivism is tied to the scientific principle of verification that specifies rules for what counts as knowledge, in particular confirming sensory experiences through replication. However, although an objective stance is sought, positivist empiricism admits a certain subjectivity through restricting the knowable to the experienceable. In fact, during the 1920s and 1930s, logical positivists introduced elements of epistemological relativism, arguing that the truth of a statement was always internal to a culturally produced linguistic framework of meaning. Moreover, although strongly associated with quantification, the role of interpretation in statistical analysis is acknowledged in logical positivism, inductive theory generation accepted as a stage for scientific inquiry, and qualitative methods not disqualified prima facie, particularly in the social sciences.

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