POSITIVIST SCHOOL OR POSITIVISM: CHARACTERISTICS AND PRINCIPLES - PHILOSOPHY - 2025

The positivist school or positivism is a philosophical movement that developed during the 19th and 20th centuries. According to the positivists, the only valid knowledge is that which comes from observation and experience. For this reason, they criticized and excluded any kind of speculation and superstition.

Positivism was born in the middle of the 19th century and it is considered that the father of the movement was the French philosopher Auguste Comte.

Auguste Comte, representative of the positivist school.

However, his ideas were accepted and supplemented by other philosophers until the first half of the 20th century.

The principles of positivism

According to positivist thinking, knowledge can only be obtained through positive data. That is, those that come from the observation of natural and social phenomena.

To guide these observations, the positivists raised these five principles:

• The logic of the investigation must be the same for all sciences. It does not matter if they are concerned with studying nature or human behavior.
• The goal of science is to observe in order to explain and predict natural and social phenomena.
• The investigation must be observable through the human senses and must only use logic to interpret the observed facts.
• Science is not the same as "common sense" and scientists should avoid any interpretation of the data they have collected.
• Science must produce knowledge and must be as objective and value-free as possible. Therefore, politics, morals or cultural values ​​should not interfere with it.

Historical evolution of positivism

Positivist ideas can be found even among ancient philosophers. Thinkers like Protagoras or Sextus Empíricus, already showed an inclination towards thoughts that in modernity would be classified as positivists.

However, the true inspirers of positivism are located in the 18th century. This is due to the influences that the ideas of the French Enlightenment and British Empiricism had on the thinkers of the time.

Social positivism

Auguste Comte, father of positivism, affirmed that there were three phases within the intellectual development of any person.

According to him, each person develops their thinking through three stages, in the same way that it has evolved through the history of humanity.

These three stages were: theological, metaphysical and positive.

The theological stage consisted of the explanation of all natural phenomena as results of the power of a god.

One of Comte's main criticisms of this stage was that all the gods had been created by man and this was evident in the human features of the gods.

The metaphysical stage consisted of a depersonalized theology. This means that it is assumed that natural phenomena come from hidden powers or vital forces. Comte criticized this stage because he claimed he was not looking for true explanations.

Finally, the positive stage consisted of explaining natural phenomena and the course of life only through the observation of real and verifiable facts. According to Comte, the task of science was to observe nature and describe how it works.

For Comte, humanity would reach maturity when scientific observations were accepted as absolute truths.

The name of Comte's most important work "Course in Positive Philosophy" comes from that third stage raised as an ideal. And it is from this work that the name of the philosophical movement comes from.

Critical positivism

Comte's ideas of positivism were echoed in the German positivism that developed before the First World War. The representatives of this school were Ernst Mach and Richard Avenarius, considered as the creators of Critical Positivism.

According to Mach, theories and theoretical concepts were not "reality" but only an instrument that made it possible to understand it. For critical positivists, the theory was just a way of understanding a reality in order to interpret another set of observable data.

According to them, theories could be modified while reality was stable ground. Therefore, positivism refused to determine whether a theory was true or false. However, they considered them useful resources for their observation processes.

Logical positivism

Logical positivism developed in Vienna and Berlin at the beginning of the 20th century, strongly influenced by the ideas of Comte and Mach. Among them stand out Philipp Frank, Hans Hahn and Richard Von Mises.

This current of thought was developed in parallel in the two cities by groups of philosophers and scientists from different areas who had a common interest in philosophy.

According to these groups, the function of philosophy is to clarify scientific concepts and not to try to answer unanswered questions. For example: life after death.

For them, metaphysics was a bad attempt to express feelings and emotions. They claimed that this task was important but only belonged to art and therefore their claims should not be passed off as scientific truths.

The legacy of positivism

Positivism, as conceived by Comte and Mach, has undergone changes and has been criticized since its appearance. Even so, it is necessary to recognize that this movement made great contributions to the history of mankind.

His main contribution consists of the development of science, thanks to the fact that he marked the limit between real events and simple assumptions.

Today this limit seems quite obvious, however, in Comte's time religion had a great authority to determine what could be considered as "true".

Positivism was also very important for the development of the social sciences. In fact, Comte is also considered the father of Sociology as he was the first to define a scientific method to analyze social phenomena.

Positivist philosophers also made great contributions to ethics and moral philosophy. For them, the ethical ideal should be understood as the well-being for the majority. Therefore, they measured the morality of the actions in relation to the observation of this criterion.

Finally, it is necessary to recognize the great contributions that the members of the Berlin and Vienna groups made to science. Among them, some of the most outstanding scientists of the 20th century even stand out.

Some of them are Bernhard Riemann, author of a non-Euclidean geometry; Heinrich Hertz, the first scientist to produce electromagnetic waves in his laboratory and even Albert Einstein, creator of the theory of relativity.

References

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5. The editors of The Encyclopaedia Britannica. (2017). Positivism. Recovered from: britannica.com.