Learning Connection
Rationalism – the view that reason has precedent over other ways of acquiring knowledge (Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy, 1999).
Empiricism – the view that experience has primacy in human knowledge and justified belief (Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy, 1999).
Empirical – derived from or guided by experience or experiment (The Macquarie Dictionary 1991).
Logical positivism – a twentieth century empiricist position embracing some form of the verification principle (Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy, 1999).
Objectivism – the view that things are infused with meaning that exist independently of consciousness and experience (Crotty, 1998:5).
Scientific realism – the view that the subject matter of scientific research and scientific theory exists independently of our knowledge of it, and that the goal of scientific research is to describe and explain both observable and unobservable aspects of the world. Scientific realism holds that there are knowable, mind-independent facts, objects, or properties (Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy, 1999).
Critical realism – like scientific realism, except it raises its claims within the social sciences (Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy, 1999).
Anti-realism – rejects the view that there are knowable mind-independent facts, objects, or properties (Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy, 1999).
Verification principle – the view that a proposition can be true either by definition, or by empirical verification (Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy, 1999).
Metaphysics – the study of a transcendent reality that lies beyond the physical world and senses (Miller, 1993).
This topic will discuss positivist and empiricist philosophical assumptions and some of the critiques that have been directed at positivism within the human and social sciences. Positivism or logical positivism provide investigations that are informed by the assumptions of validity and verification. They attempt to provide a dispassionate and impartial explanation or prediction of some aspect of objective reality. Empiricism gives primacy to knowledge gained from experience. While there is overlap between the two concepts, there are also important differences.
Although they are perhaps less likely to be associated with social philosophy than say interpretivism, hermeneutics or poststructuralism, positivism and empiricism are nevertheless based on specific epistemological and ontological propositions. Empiricism has its origins in British empiricism, particularly the thought of David Hume (1711-76) and the philosophy of the enlightenment. Positivism, a twentieth century version of empiricism, was shaped by the Vienna Circle in the period 1922-1938.
Before turning to a definition of positivism and empiricism and the differences between them, it is important to consider some common misconceptions about them. One is that they can be thought about simply in terms of quantitative research. As Michael Crotty (1998:41) explains, non positivists also do quantitative work, and qualitative research can be understood within an empiricist paradigm. Theoretical paradigm and method do not align along predictable lines. Positivist and empiricist studies can be distinguished, not by their use of quantitative methods, but by the claims that empirically generated findings (whether qualitative or quantitative) are the only way to gain knowledge, and that they reflect something objectively real and generalisable about the world.
People sometimes assume that positivism and empiricism are aligned with conservative political values. As philosophical positions, positivism and empiricism bear no relationship to political doctrine. However, many have argued that the separation of fact and value within positivism prevents a deeper questioning of 'scientific truth'. Whether or not we agree with this statement, it is worth noting that the same criticism might be applied to critical realism and Critical Theory, paradigms which also claim to offer 'scientific' knowledge, but which are more often associated with 'radical' political agendas.
Some people think that the interpretive paradigms that challenge positivism and empiricism are totally opposed to them. This is not altogether true. Many social theorists are sympathetic to the empiricist view that knowledge is grounded in experience, and many agree that there is something essential within the world and within the nature of things. For the most part, what the other paradigms find fault with is the positivist view that it is possible to separate knowledge from its cultural and historical context. The similarities and differences between positivism and empiricism and the other paradigms will be discussed in the topics that follow.
Summary taken from Miller, E 1993, Questions that matter: An invitation to philosophy, McGraw-Hill, New York.
The beginnings of contemporary empiricism can be found in Aristotle’s rejection of Plato’s philosophy that knowledge arises from intuition, rationality and philosophy. Aristotle agreed with Plato’s concept of the forms, or a pre conscious realm of absolute values and essential meanings. However for Aristotle the ‘forms’ were to be found in ‘things themselves’ and could only be observed via perceptual experience. There is absolute knowledge, but it is grounded in sensory or empirical evidence. Knowledge is ‘immanent’ rather than a ‘transcendent’.
The debate between Plato and Aristotle gave rise to what has become known as mind-matter dualism, the idea that the world is comprised of two substances, mind and matter. The mind is understood as the conscious material that does thinking as expressed famously in Decartes’ dictum ‘I think therefore I am’.
The mind-matter debate gave rise to two distinct philosophical positions – materialism and idealism, which in turn shaped positivism and modern empiricism respectively.
On the matter side of the argument you have materialism. Materialists reject the reality of mind as a substance, or, more precisely, they reduce mind to just another material substance, and argue that everything in the world is reducible to matter including the mind. Everything can be reduced to quantifiable physical states and properties, which can be explained in terms of a finite number of physical laws like Newton’s laws of physics. In the social sciences this view is perhaps best typified by the behaviourism of Skinner. In Skinner we see the idea that human beings are the effects of determined social causes which can be manipulated to control behaviour. This is akin to the positivist idea that there are cause and effect relationships in the world upon which we can generate theory about general causal laws. More will be said about positivism below.
On the other side we have the idealism of George Berkeley (1685-1753) who totally denied the existence of material substance and argued that all knowledge comes to us through our minds. According to Berkeley we can never know about objects in the real world, all we can know about are our perceptions of objects, and since humans in general can agree about these perceptions we can believe in the world being similar for everyone. This led Berkeley to insist upon an approach to knowledge or truth production based on the world as we perceive it, and not as it comes to us through abstract theory, ideas or language, and not as it appears to us through individual eyes.
The early empiricists, for example John Locke (1632-1704), framed their ideas within these terms of debate moving away from the materialist argument toward a line of thought that was more influenced by idealist thought. Locke argued that there are two quantities involved in human knowing, the mind and its ideas, so that all we can know are our ideas. The gap between our ideas about things and the actual things themselves was no problem for Locke because he thought that ideas correspond directly to the objects of our perception. So Locke was sure that experience is a valid basis for universal and certain knowledge about ‘reality’.
The idea that our ideas about things correspond perfectly with the real world has been questioned by other empiricist philosophers. For example, David Hume (1711-76), the so called ‘radical’ empiricist, took the empiricist logic to an even more logical end than Locke. Hume agreed with Locke that all we have are our impressions, but this led him to question the very substances of both mind and matter. For Hume neither substance is directly apparent to our senses so we cannot be sure that they exist objectively. Hume also questioned the reality of other basic things such as, causality, time and space. For instance, Hume pointed out that the idea that X causes Y is really just an idea, it cannot actually be observed by the senses so we cannot know that it exists objectively.
Later on in the story of Western philosophy we had the so called ‘Kantian revolution’. Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) was not content with Hume’s conclusion that all we have are appearances so that we can never ultimately draw certain conclusions about the world. Kant wanted to come up with a philosophical explanation for the possibility of positive or certain knowledge. Kant’s solution to this was the argument that human beings share the same perceptual categories of the mind, so that we organise perceptual material in the same way. This shared cognitive mapping of the world is then the basis for certain, universal knowledge. So for example for Kant space and time, and the idea that things are causally related within them are no longer just pale appearances, as for Hume, but categories of the human mind which organise or constitute our experience.
In this conflation of mind and matter, Kant forsakes the possibility that human beings can ever come to know an absolute objective reality because he argues that all reality comes to us through the collective categories of the human mind. However, although we don’t know what the real world is like, it doesn’t matter for Kant because we can at least know that we all experience it in the same way. Hence we have a shared positive basis for knowledge.
Empiricism then takes many forms and is associated with a variety of epistemological positions. At the radical end all claims to truth are avoided. At the less radical end there is the assumption that what we perceive represents the world (the Lockean version), or that we all share the same cognitive perceptual frame of mind so that even if we can never know an objective reality, we can at least talk about a universal human reality (the Kantian version).
As a philosophy positivism:
Positivism also holds the following theoretical presuppositions:
The difference between empiricism and positivism
A common empiricist analytic approach to research design:
Style and tone – especially in quantitative versions:
Popper offered a significant modification of the positivist position by identifying what he saw as the distinctive features of the scientific method. Popper agreed with positivism that the methods of the natural sciences are relevant to the social sciences, but he rejected the idea that scientific knowledge of the social world is formed on the basis of general laws. He challenged the ‘scientific’ claims of social science knowledge such as Marxism and Freudianism on inductive grounds. Instead, Popper emphasised the importance of trial and error testing of general laws via new empirical observations of phenomenon. He argued that ‘true’ science does not seek to build unfalsifiable generalisations on the basis of empirically generated instances, nor does it seek to explain away failures in its predictions. ‘True’ science seeks to disqualify its theories by testing them against empirical data. One of the crucial conclusions of Popper’s view for social science theories is that attempts to reconstruct society in the name of general principles are not emancipatory, but suppress alternatives and invite tyranny (from Audi and Hughes and Sharrock).
Other critics have challenged the idea that the 'scientific' method is relevant to the social sciences. Interpretive critics of positivism point out that not all research aims to explain or produce generalisations about reproducible and predictable phenomenon. Some research aims for an empathic understanding of the individual and unique meaning of the subject of the research (compare say history to the natural sciences) (von Wright, 1993).
Others argue that the scientific approach used in the natural sciences is not reproducible in the social sciences for a variety of reasons (from Hughes and Sharrock 1997:42-75).
First, social phenomenon are not described in the ‘brute’ terms used in physics (in the same way as say size, shape, velocity), but rely on concepts that are not directly observable (eg capitalism, social class, society, economy). In this sense they cannot qualify as ‘fact’ within a positivist methodology.
Second, the natural sciences rely on a mixture of empiricism and logic that is not possible within the social sciences in the same way.
Hughes and Sharrock conclude that social science research can offer empirical associations and post hoc intuitive explanations of probabilities, not causal or explanatory laws that can explain or predict social phenomena with certainty.
Although Popper could not be sure which scientific claims were true, because they are always open to further testing and refutation, he nevertheless held to the positivist distinction between valid theory or 'facts', and dogma or 'pseudoscience'. This distinction is challenged by Thomas Kuhn (1922-96).
Kuhn argued that Popper’s idealisation of true science rarely exists in reality. He also challenged the possibility of a theory independent view of the world. Rather than unrelenting criticism and testing, science has tended toward paradigmatic conformity and conservatism. For Kuhn, science is a social institution and scientists are socialised to accept the reigning values, beliefs, concepts, and rules of order and technique. Kuhn undermines the status of science as a rational and progressive development towards ‘truth’. According to Kuhn, shifts in scientific 'paradigms' (or disciplinary matrixes or exemplars) reflect the distribution of power, professional ambition, wider political and cultural factors, and the limits of existing theoretical paradigms (from Audi and Hughes and Sharrock).
Paul Feyerabend (1924-94):
Despite their critique of scientific generalisation and the logical empiricist view of scientific progress, neither Popper nor Kuhn questioned the progressive nature of science per se. For Popper progress is secured by the history of trial and error. Kuhn did not dispute that science has progressed human knowledge, but the idea that it does so in a linear fashion, or in a way that is unrelated to social and historical conditions. Feyerabend adopts a relativist stance, arguing that there is no scientific knowledge that can be said to be the product of objective reason or empirical fact. All knowledge is conditioned by factors such as self-interest, ideology and culture (from Hughes and Sharrock).
Taken together these post positivist critiques form a rejection not so much of science per se, but of ‘scientism’ – an inflated belief in the scope and techniques of science. They suggest the need for caution about claims to have found ‘truth’, as well as the need for more attention to studies that investigate the history and sociology of knowledge.
A scientistic approach assumes that research involves ‘detached’ scientists, ‘truth’, ‘facts’, ‘proving’ theories, ‘inevitability’, and ‘progress’.
For post positivists, knowledge produced by empiricist research, and the uses made of it, is shaped by:
The lessons of post positivism suggest that thinking about social science research in terms of ‘finding the truth’ is less useful than a focus on:
Blaxter, L, Hughes, C and Tight, M 2001, How to Research, Second edition, Open University Press, Buckingham.
Crotty, M 1998, The Foundations of Social Research, Allen and Unwin, Sydney.
Hughes, J and Sharrock, W 1997, The Philosophy of Social Research, Third Edition, Pearson Longman, London.
Kolakowski, L 1993, ‘An overall view of positivism’, in Social research: Philosophy, politics and practice, edited by M Hammersley, Sage, London.
May, T 2003, Social research: Issues, methods and process, Open University Press, Buckingham.
Miller, E 1993, Questions that matter: An invitation to philosophy, McGraw-Hill, New York.
von Wright, G 1993, ‘Two traditions’, in Social research: Philosophy, politics and practice, edited by M Hammersley, Sage, London.
Discussion 2 - Positivism and empiricism
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