Positivism is an approach to knowledge which states that the only way to true knowledge is through direct observation and measurement. Positivism is suspicious of both metaphysics and theology, the idea that we can say something about reality apart from observation. Positivism developed with Auguste Comte in the 19th century. Comte tried to construct a theory of the progress of human knowledge through 3 stages (see example), the theological, the metaphysical, and the positive or scientific. The progress implies that more will be explained with fewer principles.Each science also progresses through the three stages at its own rate. Comte's goal was to discover the laws which explained social events, in the way that other sciences had progressed to find the laws which explained their own phenomena.
The goal here was laudable: Just as doctors were discovering the laws which the body obeyed, and because of that discovering cures for things, Comte thought that discovering the laws that ran society would cure social ills.
Go to the Auguste Comte site
One 20th century version of positivism is logical positivism, which started by rejecting anything metaphysical. Logical positivists believed that our language allowed us to talk about all sorts of things that didn't and couldn't really be. Language was messy, and needed to be purified by finding its logical roots.
The Blackwell Dictionary of 20th Century Social Thought says that positivism has three related principles (p. 495):
1. Phenomenalism: The principle that knowledge can be founded on experience alone. This is an ontological claim.
2. Unity of the Scientific Method: The principle that the procedures of natural science are directly applicable to the social world with the goal of establishing invariant laws or lawlike generalizations about social phenomena. This is a methodological claim.
3. Neutrality: The principle that normative statements do not have the status of knowledge, that is, there is a rigid distinction between facts and values. This is an axiological claim.
So, what's wrong with positivism? Doesn't it make sense to say that our knowledge only comes from observation? Perhaps, if we are dealing with external, non-human phenomena (maybe not even there, but we'll let that pass). But what about humans, and human society? Think about the way that behaviourists would try to describe human behaviour. They would run rats through mazes, and demonstrate how positive and negative reinforcement produced certain kinds of behaviours. And it worked. They could produce the desired behaviours. So why didn't Skinner's theory ever really catch on in the social world (as evidently he wanted, given that he wrote Walden Two). Because most people don't think that we are reducible to such simple cause and effect connections. Positivism assumes a mechanistic world, and therefore a deterministic world.
