How the Exciting and Cool Attack on Positivism in Academia Led to Absurdities

Decades of positivist-bashing in academia, as exciting as it was, led to the absurdities we see today in both academia and society. Today, "positivist" has become a slur in social science.

Positivism, also called logical empiricism, was the attempted scientific approach to knowledge acquisition and philosophy which was under development in the early 1900s. The famous Vienna Circle of philosophers and scientists was a pro-science, pro-measurement, pro-verification movement that criticized the metaphysical side of philosophy, and promoted a testable scientific approach. Some great philosophers of science were affiliated with positivism, including Carnap, Hempel, Richard von Mises, and others. The Vienna Circle was open-minded and guided by the ideals of the Enlightenment. It was unified by the aim of making philosophy scientific via the use of logic. Loosely influencing the Vienna Circle included people like Bertrand Russell, and those influenced by the group included Karl Popper, Imre Lakatos, and Mario Bunge. Interestingly, even as philosophers of science such as Popper and Bunge came to criticize positivism in some ways, they did continue to emphasize science over nonscience in quite a similar tradition to the Vienna Circle. In short, all of this branch can be thought of as the scientifically-focused branch of philosophy and the study of knowledge acquisition (epistemology).

But today, it is not uncommon for the scientifically minded of my students, and some of us academics, to be hit with the semi-slur “positivist” whenever we cross pollinate with other subjects and areas in psychology and sociology. Interestingly, though, the students of mine who have reported this are not strictly positivist—they are more influenced by the scientific method primarily, and perhaps Popper’s critical rationalism secondarily. I also heard the positivist slur put out there when I helped on a sociology dissertation, merely towards the idea of trying to ascertain cause and effect. Then, recently an excellent friend of mine defended positivism in a political science article he was drafting. So what is going on? What I think is happening is that there is a trend in social sciences (and the humanities) to label anything using a traditional scientific approach as “positivist.” It is a rhetorical device to disparage the scientific branch of social sciences.

It works as a slur because positivism has been criticised not only by the anti-science movement in academia (postmodernism, critical theory, etc), but also by ambitious folks in the scientific branch of philosophy that followed (Popper, Kuhn, Lakatos, Bunge). On the one hand, this is a shame because some of the Vienna circle’s work was great. Read this by Carnap, and see if you feel as superior to a positivist after reading it as much as you did before you read it. If you read this by Popper which is basically a competitive criticism of verificationism of the positivists, you will see it is not all that different in its focus on testable science. My point here, is that the later scientific philosophers did not debunk the work of the Vienna Circle, they built on it.

Rudolf Carnap (pictured 1935)

But it is, of course, the postmodernists, metaphysical philosophers, mystics, religious theorists, post-structuralists, critical theorists, and the literary criticism folks that attacked “positivism” the most. In short these vague and untestable theorists attack “positivism” as being reductionist and scientism. Why? Because the scientific approach to knowledge simply calls into doubt their approaches, and in effect labels them empty. It is hardly surprising that these non-scientists disparage positivism. Nevertheless, they also disparage modern philosophy of science, and indeed the whole scientific approach as “positivist.” Given the postmodernist’s critique that language can manipulate, postmodernists commit this sin ironically more than most. It is manipulative, because a term from the early 20th century is applied to modern scientists and more recent scientific approaches.

So what can we do about this? Instead of taking on this framing, consider not using the word “positivist” to cover all scientific approaches and philosophies of science. Rather than concede to this framing, instead perhaps terms such as “scientific approach” or a “testable approach” to social science. What should be argued is that some of the grievance studies side of the social sciences desperately need a return to the scientific approach to knowledge (and away from qualitative research drenched in postmodernism, postcolonialism, and neo-critical theories).

In my field it is clear: all the major discoveries in memory science, cognitive psychology, and social psychology were all uncovered using quantitative hypothesis testing, often with experiments and operationally defined variables. Positivism had a positive effect on psychology because it seems to have influenced the formation of behaviorism just after the Vienna Circle influenced the world of academia. Behaviorism was a massive improvement, at least scientifically speaking, compared to psychoanalytic theory and introspection research. But it was follow-up work to this scientific approach that affected the great success of cognitive psychology, and more recently biopsychology. From my point of view, the positivist-bashers in academia are completely wasting taxpayer money, because they discover so little that is actually real in my field (nor in other fields as well as far as I can tell). In fact, when positivism-bashers’ untestable nonsense gets out into practice, medicine, journalism, politics, and society, it seems to do nothing but cause chaos, suffering, and mental health problems. When testable science gets out into society, it tends to help.

It behooves me to finish with a few words as to where the decades long attack on “positivism” has led us. Out of academic subjects, such as sociology and some humanities, we have had absurdities emerge. Applied postmodernism, critical theories, identity politics, trigger warnings, neo-discrimination, the oppression Olympics, child medical malpractice, violent men being placed in womens prisons, the attempted cancelling of the brightest and best academics, are all the result of the long march through academia to attack “positivism.” And by “positivism” the critics—by a clever rhetorical framing—really mean science, hypothesis testing, logic, and empiricism.