Positivism Essay, Research Paper
Positivism is the belief that “scientific naturalism” is the foundation of knowledge and truth. Leszek Kolakowski wrote “Positivism is a normative attitude, regulating how we are to use such terms as ‘knowledge’,’science’,'cognition’, and ‘information’. Positivism rejects the theories of theology and metaphysics because they don’t have proof that they are true. Positivism is a philosophy that has many theories for the whole spectrum of life. They include the theory of knowledge as discussed above, the theory of society, the theory of morality, the theory of language, the theory of mind. Positivism’s theory of society says that there are two laws that govern society:static and dynamic. Statics, according to Positivism is the basis of sociology and “consists in the investigation of the laws of action and reaction of the different parts of the social system.”(Dale, 1989) Dynamics “studies the laws of [social] succesion, while social statics inquires into those of coexistence; so that the first is to furnish the true theory of progress to political practice, while the second performs the same service in regard to order…”(Dale, 1989) The theory of morality that Positivism supports states that the “true final science” is sociology but it should be replaced by moral science, which Auguste Comte, the founder of positivist philosophy, believed was the only science of an individual nature. The Positivist theory of language confers with the correspondence theory. This theory explains that observational statements whose synthetic or theoretical constructions can be verified by comparison with the facts.(Dale,1989) The theory of the mind states that the mind is biological, not psychological.