Positivism & its Discourse
Abstract
As mentioned, this paper will try to understand what the term ‘Positivism’ means and its discourse as a research method and as an ideology. The paper will also try to comprehend what Positivism means as a research philosophy and take a closer look at its creator — Augustus Comte and other paradigms related to its understandings. Further, the paper will also try to cover other philosophers, sociologists and researches that have used or applied this method in their work. I would like the reader to understand the limitations of this paper as most of its content is taken from various sources and ask the reader to keep in mind that this paper is just a presentation or compilation of ideas according to the author’s understanding.
Introduction
Coined and formulated by the French Philosopher Isidore Marie Auguste François Xavier Comte, Positivism tries to configure how genuine knowledge can be derived. According to its discourse, pure or true knowledge can only be derived through the experience of a human being via their sensory organs. This knowledge can be of the world, its factors and how each component influences each other. Macionis, in his book Sociology, mentions that Positivism states -
‘Information derived from sensory experience, as interpreted through reason and logic, forms the exclusive source of all certain knowledge’ (taken)
According to its Etymology, the word has been derived from the French word ‘positivisme’; which could loosely translate to knowledge experienced by the mind. The french philosopher further made the idea popular and wrote a few books describing how society looks for knowledge and his theory on Positivism. Let’s take a closer look at who Comte was:
Auguste Comte was born in 1798 in the South of France. He is credited to be one the Founder of Sociology. Comte was born right after the French Revolution and rejected religion and royalism. Comte, historians note, was a very intelligent child and did very well in his school work. After his studies were over he moved to Paris and started teaching Maths as a subject. In Paris, he started reading Philosophy and History. His friend in the city was Henri de Saint-Simon, who was a social reformer. The two often wrote together but a bit later Comte decided to start his own lecture series.
A bit later in his life Comte suffered through a nervous breakdown but recovered soon after that. Then from 1830–1842 he dedicated his life to writing a series of books on the Course of Positive Philosophy. He then wrote many books on Positivism and created Sociology. He finally died in 1857 from Cancer.
Comte’s Thoughts
It’s important to understand how Comte’s thought process moved to be able to comprehend how he came about his discourse of Positivism. As mentioned earlier, Comte was born a little after the French Revolution and when the Industrial revolution was raging full-on. The French philosopher could see how people in his own country were suffering and were in despair. Society seemed to be moving far away from religion and people were becoming further disoriented with society. Comte noticed this change and formulated that human society was going through a major change.
As mentioned earlier, Comte was highly influenced by Philosophy and read the work of Hume and Kant thoroughly. Kant often talked about how pure knowledge could be derived in his book — Critique of Pure Reasoning. From his study, he derived that the old method of gaining knowledge through — theology (religious epistemology) and metaphysics (Cosmology and Ontology) was an incomplete method and that it was going to evolve.
This brings us to his first Positivists theory — the law of three stages. Comte stated in this law that when looking for knowledge society would go through three stages — Theology, Metaphysics and The Positive. He mentioned that society at first was interested in gaining knowledge about God and then shifted to trying to understand the nature of the world they live in. He concluded that the time he lived in would be related to gaining pure or true knowledge. He mentioned that Knowledge would always be subjected to the limitations of human knowledge and experience. He then added that man should stop trying to find absolute truth (as philosophy had done for a long time) and should focus more on observable facts (which could be gained by science).
After developing this theory, he added a separate and new system of science had to be devised and it would be called Sociology that would study society in itself and its phenomenon. He also mentioned that science developed in the following order — mathematics, astronomy, physics, and chemistry to biology and finally to sociology.
Positivism as a Research Methodology
To start this off, in very simple words, Positivism points out that science is the only way through which true or pure knowledge can be gained.
As a philosophy, positivism adheres to the view that only “factual” knowledge gained through observation (the senses), including measurement, is trustworthy. In positivism studies, the role of the researcher is limited to data collection and interpretation in an objective way. In these types of studies, research findings are usually observable and quantifiable.
In Postivitism, the researcher tries to take a research topic whose conclusion can be made after observing scientific data. The research also has to be free from personal bias and it ‘has an atomistic, ontological view of the world as comprising discrete, observable elements and events that interact in an observable, determined and regular manner’
Positivism also tries to adopt a deductive method of coming to a conclusion and not inductive. Business Research Methodology states these 5 focal points that need to be kept in mind regarding Positivism:
- There are no differences in the logic of inquiry across sciences.
- The research should aim to explain and predict.
- Research should be empirically observable via human senses. Inductive reasoning should be used to develop statements (hypotheses) to be tested during the research process.
- Science is not the same as the common sense. The common sense should not be allowed to bias the research findings.
- Science must be value-free and it should be judged only by logic.
Another way that the research methodology can be looked into is via its ontological and epistemological analysis. Ontologically, positivism is external to a human being and can be felt and understood by human beings, epistemology of this statement mentions this is because Positivism is a scientific method of research. The next ontological assumption is that reality is ‘out there’, epistemology of this mentions that social facts are objective and thus can be determined by an individual.
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Another important aspect of positivism is its relation to science. The aspects that positivism relies on is the concreteness of science. Any knowledge can only be considered science after it’s proven to be true via methods of experiment, trial and error and observation. Thus, this is why positivism is a scientific method because it also involves experiment over subjects and objects that can be evaluated in a scientific manner.
But positivism also has a few shortcomings and there are many other methods that have contested these shortcomings, that we’ll get into later. The first shortcoming is the idea that experience of a human being can be considered as concrete knowledge. Many philosophers would disagree and add that experience can never be really trusted 100% and that an experience of one person can differ that of another and is influenced by many factors that are not quantifiable. Interpretavists would also add that reality not only consists of objectionable facts but also of subjective facts. Another pioneer who changed and enhanced positivism as we know it today was the French sociologist — Émile Durkheim. Let’s take a closer look at him and his work:
Émile Durkheim
Émile Durkheim was born in France on 15th April 1858, into a Jewish family. He came from a long heritage of rabbis and his family also expected him to become a rabbi but Durkheim always lived a very secular life and decided that he would not become a rabbi. Durkheim was very intelligent and did quite well in his studies. He was very much influenced by Comte and Spencer and often read philosophy.
Talking about Durkheim’s inspiration, Augustus Comte was one person that Durkheim was influenced by a lot. He took Comte’s sociological positivism and refined it as much as he could. First, he accepted Comte’s thoughts that the study of society had to be done with the help of examination of facts, after that he agreed that there had to be scientific method via which they could come on to knowledge about society and also agreed that the study of society would only deemed to be scientific when stripped of its philosophical and metaphysical ambiguities. Interestingly enough, Durkheim thought that even Comte was too philosophical.
In his work — The Rules of Sociological Method, Durkheim mentions that all elements of society like religion, division of labour & more can be studied in a scientific way, i.e. through positivism. He adds that the matter for sociological study is ‘social facts’ that are external to human beings, independent and can be experienced and studied by sociologists. He further added that these social facts are — sui generis, ie they are unique and exist independent to a society. This would imply that social facts are a separate entity from people and exercise control over them in a society. Durkheim also adds that these social facts can be material and immaterial. In such a manner it is easy to see how these social facts control the lives of people who exist in a society. Durkheim also added that these phenomena could be studied with science and these facts are influenced in a collective manner by society itself.
Durkheim also gave a set rules by which social facts could be studied. He added that first social facts must be treated as an object and then rules and limits of the research must be set. He also mentions that social facts can be understood in relation to other social facts only. Division of Labour is another aspect of society that was also studied by Durkheim where he used positivism to come to his conclusion. Have a look:
Durkheim talks a lot about the division of labour that came about the Industrial revolution. He credits the social fact of individualism in this aspect and how it came to affect society at large. Durkheim explains that with the growth and specialization of labour, people had time to focus on their life and skills, this also meant that society would interfere less in the daily lives of people, this led to individualism. Even though individualism developed and gained much significance in society, dependence on each other also grew as everyone could see the importance of the role of people in making sure a complex society as such continued growing.
Durkheim also explained other social facts like sucide and religion in contrast with other aspects of society. Sucide, as Durkheim saw, was a social fact that was affected by many other social facts like religion and income. He pointed out that people who were Protestants were more likely to sucide than people who were Catholics. He also explained religion in such a way and posed great importance on the discourse of ‘the sacred’.
Interpretivism — ‘The anti-positivism methodology’
To get a clear idea about the text, its context and relevance, it’s important to give a closer look at the author of the text — Maximilian Karl Emil Weber. Weber was born in Germany on 21 April 1864 and went on to become a child with great intellect and was always looking to learn new things. He also later studied law and married a woman who was an advocate for Women’s Rights. Throughout his life, he developed many important theories that would change how the world viewed Sociology. He is also considered one of the founders of Sociology though he would only consider himself as a Historian.
Max Weber was the founder of the anti-positivist outlook on Sociology and was an interpretivist. He pointed out that social reality was not only out there but also is ‘within us’ and added that human beings were meaning giving creatures. He thus pointed out that sociology was just not an objective study of society but also the subjective study of it. Weber theories mention modernity to be a huge factor that affects changes in society, and he also talks a bit about human’s enchantment with the world around them. Weber was also a strong critic of bureaucracy and its harm to society, we will come to the discourse of interpretivism later.
His most well read work is — The Protestant Ethic and The Spirit of Capitalism, must have been published around 1904–1905, this by the end of his life as he died in 1920. The book began as a series of essays and was also originally written in German. As the name suggests, the book opens an inquiry and also studies how Potestant lifestyle and religious ideologies actually helped Capitalism thrive in society at that point (to my understanding). He also adds how religion, capitalism all evolved together and directly affected each other in the society. Throughout the book Weber stands to make his readers understand his own limitations and to look at a certain religion as just one means to help capitalism prosper and visa-vi.
He starts his works by comparing Protestants and Catholics and their behaviour in society. He then aims to understand what the spirit of capitalism is and in the end, he reviews different forms of Protestant sects and their impact on and of the society. The Protestant Ethic and The Spirit of Capitalism — is considered to be one of the most important Sociological text ever written and the International Sociological Association listed this work as the fourth most important sociological book of the 20th century. Now, let’s take a closer look at Interpretivism.
Interpretivism is the study of society with consideration of the meanings people assign to social facts. The methodology thrives on the principle that people are meaning giving creatures and thus reality is actually constructed by people. To understand this better, we must first understand the meaning of ‘Verstehen’ — which means ‘to understand. Thus, while in positivism, we stay far removed from taking people’s perspectives into consideration, in Interpretivism, it is essential to take people’s perspective into consideration.
Weber also added that subjectivity was quite important in understanding human’s actions and their behaviour. He mentioned that to understand human actions taking their subjective meanings must be understood. In his work — ‘Objectivity’ in Social Science’ he wrote:
There is no absolutely “objective” scientific analysis of culture. … All knowledge of cultural reality … is always knowledge from particular points of view. … An “objective” analysis of cultural events, which proceeds according to the thesis that the ideal of science is the reduction of empirical reality to “laws”, is meaningless [because] the knowledge of social laws is not knowledge of social reality but is rather one of the various aids used by our minds for attaining this end.
In simple words the idea is that when a man is performing an action in society, he is influenced by many factors like societal rules, his income, his nature and nurture. While a positivist would ask the researcher to look at the action objectively, interpretivists would ask the researcher to not only look at the problem objectively but also subjectively. There are also three different strands of Interpretivist researchers which are — Phenomenologists, Hermeneuticists & Symbolic interactionists.
- Phenomenology is the study of structures in society in which a man functions.In simple words, its an attempt to understand the social structures that are formed in a person’s subjective consciousness. Phenomenologists study the existence of a person and more such events.
- Hermeneutics refers to understanding social events through understanding the meaning of the people who are participating in that event. The study claims that any social event can only be understood when the entire context and discourse of that event is understood. Context is key in this study and this Hermeneutics study cultural artefacts such as texts, symbols, stories, images.
- Symbolic interactionists study how the social world is created by individuals when they interact with each other and their environment. The field also holds important the shared meaning of language and symbol that helps the society grow and sustain.
Types of Positivism
The first type of Positivism is — Logical. Logical Positivism is a school of thought which combines elements of empiricism and rationalism. While empirics states that knowledge only comes from sensory organs, rationalism would argue that knowledge comes not from sensory but intellect and deductive methodology. Though the two are quite the opposite view, from empiricism it takes the fact that to arrive at knowledge experience is very important and from rationalism it takes the factor that knowledge has components that are also not entirely observed by humans. Logical positivism grew after the first world war and German philosopher Moritz Schlick is to be credited for it.
Another type of Positivism is Historical positivism, it is defined to be a historiographical view that so far the knowledge that is developed is enough and that we must build on it. The phrase attached to this kind of positivism is that history speaks for itself and that knowledge can be easily understood through it.
Please Note — This is a paper written by me for Research Methodology for my MA in Sociology. The references could not be added here & many parts might contain citation that are being used for educational purposes only. You can reach out to me on tuliproy@icloud.com for a better cited paper. Thank You
