At the beginning of the nineteenth century, industrialization and rationalization of worldviews would shape both the economic and intellectual status quo of the era. The opposition to the Medieval irrationality had already inaugurated in the seventeenth century with Renaissance and continued in the eighteenth century with the Age of Enlightenment. The faith in science’s power to alleviate basic human problems was stronger than ever. The will to liberate people from the spiritual “darkness” and the tyranny of church during the Middle Ages was insurmountable.
Interestingly, the will for massive industries, big profits and rationalization of markets was even more insurmountable. The rising and very promising capitalist socioeconomic system demanded objectivity, productivity and specialization, and the philosophical movement of Positivism was promising to meet this demand.
Auguste Comte (1798-1857) is considered as the founder of Positivistic Sociology (to many, however, it was the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle that first gave birth to Positivism). Comte claimed that the social world resembled the physical world in that both worlds consisted of objective phenomena that were not contingent on impressions and perceptions of people and were awaiting discovery (Giddens, 1974). The well-known sociologist Emile Durkheim (1858-1917) would argue that only the scientific method was valid and trustworthy and that the rules of natural sciences should be employed by sociologists in order to study human beings (Giddens, 1974). The core of the system of Positive Philosophy was that natural laws governed social sciences in the same way they governed natural sciences.
According to Bryman (1988), Positivism possesses five central features:
- Methodological naturalism: social research should rely on the methods of the natural sciences.
- Empiricism: knowledge is plausible only if it is gained by observable phenomena.
- Inductivism: theory is the expression of a series of verified facts presented as laws.
- Deductivism: hypotheses are generated from theory but are also subjected to empirical testing so as to confirm or refute the theory.
- Objectivity: valid knowledge stems when subjective evaluations are excluded from its production.
From this perspective, concepts like motives, emotions and deeper meanings became indifferent, if not inferior. Everything that could not be directly observed or measured in a quantitative and not interpretive manner was automatically denounced as unscientific and devoid of purpose.
2012 positivists, however, are more reserved and not that absolutists. Instead of accuracy and objectivity, they seem to prefer employing terms like probability and partial objectivity. They have not abandoned the emphasis on the role of empiricism, the unity of sciences, and the possibility to find meaning in material objects, but they are certainly more modest compared to their predecessors.
All things considered, it appears that Positivism offers the “misunderstood” soft sciences the chance to prove themselves and share some of the "almighty" methodological tools of "hard sciences". Nevertheless, every science that revolves around abstract entities and concepts such as human perceptions and social representations is condemned as questionable until that day comes when people carry embedded chips that decipher and measure the bio-electric impulses created by their thoughts. This final step would most likely be left to neurobiologists and computer scientists who would capture the data and translate that information to meaningful and intelligent data. However, even those data might be subject to debate – for how can we truly measure the quality and quantity of any deep thought or philosophy?
Further Sources
Giddens, A. (1974) Positivism and Sociology, London: Heinemann
Bryman, A. (1988) Quantity and Quality in Social Research, London: Routledge
Stavroula Dimitropoulos - MSc, BSc
