From: rgroff-AT-yorku.ca
Date: Thu,  5 Jun 2003 14:36:46 -0400
Subject: BHA: Positivism


Hi all,

I've been thinking about Brad's question regarding critiques of positivism, and
then about all of the different responses that people have given.  If there is
anything that is clear, it's that positivism has been roundly criticized! 
Anyway I can't help but chime in.  

In my thinking about the issue, I realize that I distinguish between critiques
of positivism actually that come after the emergence of logical positivism in
philosophy and the work of major, mostly earlier, thinkers whose ideas are at
odds with certain basic premises of positivism -- in particular the radical
disjunction between subject and object.  I think of the first group as lines of
response *to* positivism, the second as more like alternative traditions.   The
two do overlap though, especially as many in the first group draw on insights
from the second.  Also, some figures are ambiguous -- Dewey, for example, kind
of fits into both categories.  

In terms of critiques proper, I think of there being a bunch of different
trajectories away from logical positivism.  One I connect to Horkheimer and
Adorno.  Two good articles are "Traditional and Critical Theory" and "The Latest
Attack on Metaphysics," both in a collection of articles by Horkheimer called
*Critical Theory*.  I think of this as the Hegelian Marxist line.  Jumping
ahead, there is the early feminist standpoint epistemology line, which I see as
falling within the same basic tradition of Marxist analyses of ideology. 
Chronologically that stuff comes out after Kuhn, but conceptually I think that
it is closer to the Frankfurt School approach.

Then there is the philosophy of language (and implicit metaphysics thereof)
line.  Wittgenstein and Quine especially (and Saussure -- see below).  These
guys' works lead off in different directions, ultimately, but they absolutely
come together in Kuhn.  I don't have a good sense of exactly where to situate
Heidegger.  Anyone interested in empiricism should read a little Quine.  "Two
Dogmas of Empiricism" and "Posits and Reality" are good.

I also see a line from Popper, an important early critic of positivism (even if
he is dumb about social science), to Feyerabend -- Kuhn and Feyerabend being the
core of the philosophy of science line, which quickly then came to include
feminists.  This gets us to the mid-1970s in Anglo-analytic circles. 

I don't have as good of a grasp of the continental trajectories, but at a
minimum there is the Marx-Nietzsche line through Foucault and the structuralist
to post-structuralist line through to Derrida.  Plus Heidegger.  There's also
the continental philosophy of science guys, e.g., Bachelard and Canguilhem, who
had a big influence.  In North America, anyway, a second line of feminist
anti-positivism enters in here by the 1980's, through Foucault and Derrida
especially.  I know that there is a whole backdrop of psychoanalytic and
semiotic theory that comes in here too, but I don't know any of that stuff.

I see three other major lines of critique, which I would call broadly
pragmatist, hermeneutic and critical realist/scientific essentialist.  I'd stick
Rorty and Putnam both in the pragmatist camp.  On the hermeneutic *philosophy*
of science, I'd say Taylor is the best.  Brian Ellis and Rom Harre belong with
early Bhaskar in the essentialist category.  People who know more about
Bhaskar's most recent work could say more about where it falls.

I recognize that this little map of mine is all at the level of philosophy, but
I thought it might complement some of the more applied recommendations that
people have had.  What I think is unique to the cr/essentialist crew is that
they are the only ones who hold to a realist conception of causality,
linked to a commitment to real essences.  In this sense I think that they are
the most metaphysically radical.                

I don't know of any one piece that puts all of this together, though I'd like to
try it sometime.  I'm going to teach an MA level course on much of this material
in the spring -- I'm looking forward to seeing whether students will come out of
it with a good over-view or not.  

r.     

 




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