Humanity in the process of evolution has passed many stages, and if at the starting point of its path all the laws of the world were explained from a pagan, heavenly point of view, then with the development of technical progress, practical - material interests came to the fore. Positivism is inextricably linked with this phenomenon.
What is positivism?
This is a general cultural setting of Western consciousness, which replaced the feudal one and was the result of the process of formation of capitalist society. Positivism is a direction that denies philosophy and is based on the fact that everything that humanity has to-day is the merit of science. The spirit of positivism brought with it a change in the hierarchy of values : everything spiritual, divine in man replaced the earthly. The religion, philosophy and other abstract dogmas were thwarted and criticized, and the achievements of medicine, knowledge of nature, etc., were given for genuine science.
Positivism in philosophy
In philosophy, this trend took shape in the 1830s and still retains its influence, having overcome three stages of its development:
- classical positivism;
- empirio-criticism;
- neopositivism.
Positivism in philosophy is a science based on two principles. The first is the recognition of any positive genuine knowledge as relative, and the second involves the systematization and ordering of scientific facts that are accumulated and subsequently summarized. The essence of positivism is to observe, experiment and measure, based on the stable laws of nature, the knowledge of man about himself, that is, for certain facts.
Positivism in Sociology
The founder of this direction, O. Comte, considered basic science sociology and believed that, along with other positive sciences, she appeals only specific facts. Sociological positivism studied the law in correlation with other social phenomena and relied on positivist sociology with its psychological and biologo-naturalistic varieties. Comte believed that the state should rely on science. He gave the authority in society to philosophers, power and material resources endowed capitalists, and the proletariat had to work.
Positivism in Psychology
The positivistic research direction played a significant role in the history of psychology. Wishing to know what the essence of positivism is, it is worthwhile to answer that as a result, "self-consciousness" has sharply increased. On the basis of natural science, psychology stands on its own path, relying on empirical thinking. From the appendage of philosophy, it turns into an independent science with its own natural science disciplines, methods and attitudes. On the face was the apparent progress of real knowledge about the phenomena of life of the soul and their dependence on natural physical processes.
Positivism - the pros and cons
The need for the emergence of such a philosophical teaching, which combined the logical and empirical methods into a single scientific scheme, was already, and its undoubted merits include:
- Relative independence and independence of mature science from philosophy.
- Modern positivism provides for the orientation of any philosophy to real science.
- Differences between classical philosophy and concrete scientific facts.
From the minuses can be identified:
- The lack of evidence of the fact that classical philosophy as the most important factor in the development and development of culture is useless, and its cognitive resources exhausted.
- The essence of positivism is not completely understood. Its founders seek to reduce everything to empirical knowledge, while the qualitative feature of theoretical knowledge in science is underestimated in comparison with empirical experience and the difficult role of scientific research in its dynamics and structure. At the same time, the nature of mathematical knowledge is misinterpreted, the value neutralization of science takes place, and so on.
Types of positivism
The relationship between such concepts as positivism and postpositivism is traced. The latter emerged as a critical reaction to logical positivism. His followers are engaged in the study of the development of scientific knowledge and the rationale for its relativity. Positivist followers of Comte are K. Popper and T. Kuhn. They believed that the truth of the theory and its verifiability are not necessarily interrelated, and the meaning of science does not contradict its language. The positivist follower of this trend does not exclude the metaphysical and unscientific components of philosophy.