Positivism And Logical Empiricism In The 19th Century
The term positivism it derivates from August Comte Due to his critical work, however, one can consider Hume as the first great positivist. He revealed the impossibility of deductive reasoning producing assertions of fact, since deduction takes place and affects a second level, that of concepts.
The development of the term positivism It has been, however, incessant. The basic statements of positivism are:
1) That all knowledge of facts is based on “positive” data from experience -that reality exists, the opposite belief is called solipsism-.
2) That beyond the realm of facts there is logic and pure mathematics recognized by Scottish empiricism and especially by Hume as belonging to “the relation of ideas.”
In a later stage of positivism, the sciences thus defined acquire a purely formal character.
Mach (1838-1916)
He claims that all factual knowledge consists of the conceptual organization and the elaboration of data from immediate experience Theories and theoretical conceptions are only predictive instruments.
Furthermore, theories can change, while observational facts maintain empirical regularities and constitute a firm (immutable) ground on which scientific reasoning can be founded. Positivist philosophers radicalized empiricist anti-intellectualism, maintaining a radical utilitarian vision of theories.
Avenarius (1843-1896)
He developed a biologically oriented theory of knowledge that influenced much of American pragmatism. Just as adaptation needs develop organs in organisms -Lamarckism-, so knowledge develops theories for the prediction of future conditions.
The concept of cause is explained in terms of the regularity observed in the succession of events, or as functional dependence between observable variables. Causal relations are not logically necessary, they are only contingent and determined by observation and especially by experimentation and inductive generalization -Hume-.
Many scientists of the 20th century, following the path opened by Mach, to which was added the influence of some “philosophers of mathematics” such as Whithead, Russell, Wittgenstein, Frege, etc., came together more or less unanimously around the positivist problem. of the legitimacy of scientific theories.
Russell states: “Either we know something independently of experience, or science is a chimera.”
Some philosophers of science, known as the group of Vienna Circle, They established the principles of logical empiricism:
1. First of all they believed that The logical structure of some sciences could be specified without taking into account their contents
2. Secondly established the principle of verifiability, according to which the meaning of a proposition must be established through experience and observation. In this way ethics, metaphysics, religion and aesthetics were left out of all scientific consideration.
3. Third, proposed a unified doctrine of science, considering that there were no fundamental differences between physics and the biological sciences, or between the natural sciences and the social sciences. The Vienna Circle reached its maximum activity during the period before the Second War.
Conventionalists
Another group of inductivists, of different orientation – among them those of influence Marxist which are known as Frankfurt school – are the Conventionalists who maintain that the main discoveries of science are, fundamentally, inventions of new and simpler classification systems.
The fundamental features of classical conventionalism – Poincaré – are, therefore, decisiveness and simplicity. They are also, of course, anti-realistic. In terms of Karl Popper (1959, p. 79):
“The source of conventionalist philosophy seems to be awe at the austere and beautiful simplicity of the world as revealed in the laws of physics. Conventionalists (…) treat this simplicity as our own creation… (Nature is not simple), only the “laws of Nature” are; and these, the conventionalists maintain, are our creations and inventions, our arbitrary decisions and conventions.”
This form of Logical Empiricism was soon opposed by other forms of thought: Wittgenstein also a positivist, confronts, however, the verificationist positions of the Vienna Circle.
Wittgenstein maintains that verification is useless. What language can communicate it “shows”, it is an image of the world. For logical positivism, heir to Wittgenstein, the logical formulas do not say anything about the meanings of the propositions, but are limited to showing the connection between the meanings of the propositions.
The fundamental answer will come from the falsificationist theory of popper which maintains the impossibility of an inductive probability with the following argument:
“In a universe containing an infinite number of distinguishable things or spatio-temporal regions, the probability of any universal (non-tautological) law will be equal to zero.” This means that as the content of a statement increases, its probability decreases, and vice versa. (+ content = – probability).
To solve this dilemma, he proposes that an attempt should be made to falsify the theory, seeking to demonstrate the refutation or counterexample. Furthermore, he proposes a purely deductivist methodology, actually negative hypothetico-deductive or falsificationist.
In reaction to this approach, a series of theorists emerge who criticize logical positivism -Kuhn, Toulmin, Lakatos and even Feyerabend-, although they differ about the nature of the rationality exhibited by scientific change. They defend notions such as scientific revolution, as opposed to progress -Kuhn-, or the intervention of irrational processes in science -Feyerabend’s anarchist approach-.
Popper’s heirs are now united under the Critical Rationalism in a last effort to save science, theory and the notion of “scientific progress”, which they do not without some difficulty, proposing as alternatives, among others, the establishment of rival Research Programs, defined by their heuristics, and that compete with each other.
The difficulties of logical models applied to the methodology of Science, therefore, could be summarized as follows:
The induction of the theory, from particular data, was clearly no longer justified. A deductivist theory will accomplish nothing because there are no secure general principles from which deduction can be derived. A falsificationist vision is inadequate because it does not reflect scientific practice – scientists do not operate like this, abandoning theories when they present anomalies.
The result appears to be a skepticism generalized regarding the possibility of distinguishing between valid theories and ad hoc theories, which is why we usually end up appealing to history, that is, to the passage of time as the only safe method, or at least with certain guarantees, to judge the adequacy of the models -another form of conventionalism-.
