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Positivism, Sociological
Positivism, Sociological RW Outhwaite, Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK Ó 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. This article is a revision of the previous edition article by J.H. Turner, volume 17, pp. 11827–11831, Ó 2001, Elsevier Ltd.
Abstract Positivism and sociology have a common origin, and positivism remains a significant approach in sociology and the other social sciences. In positivist sociology, the scientific study of the social world is identified with empirical research, statistical methods, and often the pursuit of general laws of social life which can be tested against experience.
The Rise of Positivism Auguste Comte (1798–1857) argued in his Course of Positive Philosophy (1830–1842) that the various sciences developed through three stages – theological, metaphysical, and, eventually, positive. A positive science does not rely on spirits or abstract forces but on precise relationships of the kind expressed in Newton’s law of gravity. The sciences move gradually into the positive stage, with sociology representing the culmination of this process, in the work of Comte himself. Comte, a strong influence on John Stuart Mill (1806–73) popularized the name ‘sociology’ to refer to what had earlier been called social physics, and a positivist approach was taken forward in sociology by Herbert Spencer (1820–1903) and later Emile Durkheim (1858–1917). Spencer made much of the parallels, as he saw them, between biological and social evolution and between societies and (other) organisms and the functional relations between their component parts. Durkheim’s evolutionism was more muted, though his study of religion looked to Australian totemism for the Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912) and his earlier Rules of Sociological Method (1895) argued for the study of ‘social facts’ as ‘things.’ Insisting on the distinctiveness of sociology and in particular its difference from psychology, Durkheim argued, notably in his classic study of Suicide (1897), that one should look for the social causes of regular differences in suicide rates in religious attachments or marital status, rather than invoking psychological explanations or speculating about the motives of suicidal individuals. Durkheim’s distinction between ‘normal’ and ‘pathological’ states of society echoes Comte’s principle that science can lead to prediction and thereby to the control of natural or social processes. Positivism also had a presence in the study of history, for example in the work of Henry Thomas Buckle (1821–62) and others across Europe, and it was in Germany that this provoked the strongest antipositivist reaction, with the philosopher of history J.G. Droysen (1808–84) and his contemporary Wilhelm Dilthey (1833–1911), insisting on the distinctiveness of what came to be called the ‘human sciences’ or Geisteswissenschaften. In these sciences, as Dilthey put it, the mental activity of humans and of some other animals, and its products, can be understood. Dilthey developed what we would now call a research program for history and the other human sciences based on the distinctiveness of human psychic expressions and the understanding of those expressions. In a move which was to
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become a definitional feature of later interpretive social science, Dilthey emphasized the continuity between everyday understanding and more formal processes of interpretation. In sociology, Georg Simmel (1858–1918) and Max Weber (1864–1920) also argued strongly for the importance of understanding (Verstehen) in history and the other social sciences, and Weber presented in his posthumously published Economy and Society (1920) the principle that sociology, as he conceived it, should attempt the interpretive understanding of social processes in order to explain them. His earlier classic study of The Protestant Ethic and the ‘Spirit’ of Capitalism (1904–1905) had applied this two-track approach by first showing (at least to his own satisfaction) that ascetic protestants such as Calvinists were in fact more economically innovative than Catholics in early modern Europe and then offering an explanation which ‘made sense’ of their conduct. By 1920, then, Weber had developed a strong alternative to positivistic sociology and offered a way of combining understanding and causal explanation which continues to attract many sociologists. In the years following his death, however, sociology became more polarized between more radical versions of both positivist and interpretivist approaches.
The Vienna Circle and the Transformation of Positivism Positivist philosophy of science had taken a strongly empiricist direction in the work of Ernst Mach (1838–1916) who inspired the Vienna Circle, which met regularly in 1910–12 and again from 1926 into the 1930s. These physicists, mathematicians, and philosophers founded the Ernst Mach Society in 1928 and published, in 1929, a manifesto under the editorship of the sociologist Otto Neurath (1882–1945) (Neurath et al., 1929). Comte’s positivistic conception of science had stressed theory and opposed empiricism, arguing that “the next great hindrance to the use of observation is the empiricism which is introduced by those who, in the name of impartiality, would interdict the use of any theory whatsoever” and that “No real observation of any kind of phenomena is possible, except in as far as it is first directed, and finally, interpreted, by some theory.” Viennese positivism or logical empiricism drew more on the formalization of logic and mathematics in the early years of the twentieth century and its extension to the philosophical analysis of language by Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951),
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whose Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922) was a strong influence on members of the Circle. As they saw it, language maps onto the world through precise observation statements, to which the language of science has to be ultimately reducible. Whereas Comte had stressed the distinct domains of the various sciences, on this model the social sciences were reducible to psychology and ultimately to physics, which was no longer just the lead science in the march toward a positive state, as it had been for Comte, but the fundamental basis of ‘unified science.’ This approach was disseminated in the 1930s as the members of the Vienna Circle fled from Nazism, with several figures settling in the United States, where a similar approach to science had developed independently (Platt, 1996). (The American physicist Percy Williams Bridgman’s operationalism, had, for example, been a major influence on the Vienna Circle itself.) Two philosophers who popularized logical empiricism were Alfred Ayer (1910–89) in the United Kingdom and Karl Popper (1902–94), who emigrated from Austria to New Zealand and then also settled in London. Popper introduced the most important modifications to the Vienna Circle model and also addressed issues of social and political philosophy. One of the central principles of logical empiricism had been the ‘verification principle,’ the Bridgmanian idea that the meaning of an empirical statement depends on, or in some versions is identical with, its means of verification. (One consequence, enthusiastically promulgated by Ayer (1936), was that value judgments were meaningless, being neither empirical nor logical or mathematical.) Popper (1934) demonstrated the impossibility of conclusive verification in science and stood the problem on its head, arguing that testability was better understood in terms of falsification. The statement that all swans are white can never be conclusively verified, unless we are sure that we have observed all swans that ever existed and that they are now extinct, whereas the statement can be falsified by the observation of just one black swan. Scientific theories expose themselves to testing, as Einstein had done by making a prediction about the position of Mercury which was proved accurate in 1910. In Popper’s analysis, this did not prove the theory but merely gave it greater ‘verisimilitude’ since it had passed a crucial test. Like a car which has passed an annual safety inspection, it could be conditionally relied on until the next time. Pseudotheories by contrast, such as Marxism and psychoanalysis, could amass lots of supporting evidence but did not expose themselves to falsification. Social science, Popper argued, could make conditional predictions, but should avoid the temptation of ‘prophecy.’
Positivism and Sociology This modified version of Viennese positivism has been massively influential in the philosophy of science, including social science. Popper had undercut the search for certainty which had been the Achilles heel of logical empiricism and offered an alternative model of scientificity. In the social sciences, new quantitative techniques were developed for theory testing, and punched cards gave way to computers. In the ‘covering-law’ model of causal explanation, empirical findings were attached to general laws in the manner alleged to operate in the natural sciences. (In the classic example, the
general law that water freezes at 0 explains the state of my car radiator after a cold night.) This covering-law approach to explanation coexisted with the rise of functionalism; Talcott Parsons suggested, quite implausibly, that his system theory might one day be open to empirical testing. Max Weber’s plea for the avoidance of value judgments in social science (which in Weber’s practice coincided with an almost existentialist position on our choice of ultimate values and a variety of intensely political engagements) became the dominant position justifying an apolitical stance for social science – which in practice tended to mean an endorsement of the ideological status quo. However, the history of positivism, like that of Stalinist economic planning, is largely the history of attempts to modify or reform it, and it unraveled from a number of directions. In philosophy, thinkers influenced by North American pragmatism such as W.V.O. Quine (1908–2000) emphasized the importance of theoretical frameworks, questioning the idea of piecemeal testing or instance confirmation. More seriously for Popper, the historian of science Thomas Kuhn (1962) showed that scientists tend to work most of the time within unquestioned frameworks or ‘paradigms,’ switching from one to another only in periods of scientific revolution, in a process close to religious conversion. Paul Feyerabend (1924–94) drew the extreme conclusion that a good empiricist should be an epistemological anarchist and accept that ‘anything goes’: all theories should be taken seriously. Wittgenstein (1953) had dropped his earlier theory of language in favor of a much more holistic and sociological approach to ‘language games’ located in ‘forms of life.’ This linked up with antipositivist interpretive approaches in sociology and social anthropology, as demonstrated by the British philosopher Peter Winch (1958). Meanwhile the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor (1964), influenced both by analytic philosophy and by continental European hermeneutics, argued that the behavior of humans and other higher animals should be understood in terms of intentions and purposes rather than just causal impulses. In a further twist, Karl-Otto Apel (1967) demonstrated in more detail the affinities between analytic philosophy of language and the Geisteswissenschaften tradition, and Jürgen Habermas, who had joined in the critique of positivism in West German sociology in the early 1960s (Adorno et al., 1976), showed how phenomenology, analytic philosophy and Hans-Georg Gadamer’s version of philosophical hermeneutics could combine against social scientific positivism and yield a ‘critical social science’ (Habermas, 1968a,b). This type of science combined causal explanation and understanding in an approach, exemplified by psychoanalysis and the marxist critique of ideology, which identified and removed causal obstacles to understanding. Positivism, for Habermas (1968b: p. vii) and his associate Albrecht Wellmer (1967), meant an absence of reflection and the reduction of epistemology to methodology, whether in natural or social science. In the latter case, however, the imitation of a natural scientific model was particularly dangerous because it reinforced tendencies to technocracy which undermined the possibilities of political deliberation. Habermas later reformulated his model of emancipatory science, but it remains in a modified form in his idea of reconstructive sciences, which explicate capacities which we exercise in daily life. His initial example was linguistics, which identifies the rules which we
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unconsciously follow as native speakers of a language, but his own theory of communicative action (Habermas, 1981) also embodies this approach. Whereas critical theory tends toward a dualism of natural and social science, but in an increasingly muted form, the assumption that opposition to positivism also entailed dualism or antinaturalism was, however, also put in question in the late 1960s and early 1970s by the realist metatheory of science developed by Rom Harré and Roy Bhaskar. Both Harré and Bhaskar, like Habermas, were substantially motivated by the desire to undermine positivistic theories and approaches in the social sciences. They were interested in giving a more adequate account of science as a whole, in world composed of relatively enduring structures and mechanisms. Some of these could be isolated in scientific experimentation, given the contingent existence of Homo sapiens and Homo scientificus. An important aspect of the realist program developed by Harré, Bhaskar, and others was a conception of explanation as involving not an essentially semantic reduction of causal statements to general laws (which in sociology tended to be either vacuous or riddled with exceptions) but a reference to the causal powers of entities, structures, and mechanisms. The real explanation of the state of my radiator is not the mere generalization that water freezes at 0 but the causal properties of water molecules: their capacity to freeze or evaporate. Causal tendencies may be outweighed by countervailing tendencies, and two causal tendencies may neutralize one another, as do the centrifugal force of the Earth’s rotation and its gravitational attraction, with the convenient consequence that human beings and other animals are safely anchored close to the Earth’s surface but can jump over small obstacles. This and other features of realism meant that the whole issue of naturalism could be rethought. Human beings could be seen as having causal powers and liabilities, just like other entities; it no longer mattered if their relations rarely sustained any universal generalizations of an interesting kind, but only sets of tendencies regular enough to be worth exploring. It also seemed natural to include among the causes of human action the agents’ reasons for acting – reasons which must be understood as far as possible. Reasons, such as a smoker’s reasons for giving up the habit, might form part of a causal explanation of the cure. The fact that many of the entities accorded causal force in social scientific explanations were necessarily unobservable was not, as it was for empiricism, a problem of principle. And the understanding of meaning could, as Bhaskar (1979: pp. 58–59) put it, be seen as in some ways equivalent to measurement in the natural sciences. Realists diverge on the issue of naturalism, with Bhaskar arguing for it and Harré defending a more interactionist and social constructionist position, focusing on interpersonal action and questioning the existence of social structures. Realism found a more comfortable home in sociology and the emergent discipline of international relations than in academic philosophy, and in Britain and Scandinavia more than in other parts of Europe or in North America. Together, however, all these antipositivist currents meant that it was even harder than before to find explicit defenders of positivism. Jonathan Turner (1981, 1985, 1992, 2013) in the
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United States is a significant example, and Peter Blau also identified explicitly with positivism. For the most part, however, positivism tended to be equated, by both supporters and critics, with empirical research and in particular with quantitative methodologies. Turner is an exception, since his positivistic defense of scientific theory in sociology was also highly critical of the vogue for quantification in the United States. As he noted in an earlier version of this article, positivist books on ‘theory building’ and ‘theory construction’ in the late 1960s, beginning with Hans Zetterberg’s (1965) On Theory and Verification in Sociology and continuing through the 1960s and 1970s (e.g., Blalock, 1969; Dubin, 1969; Gibbs, 1972; Hage, 1972; Reynolds, 1971), did not retain their initial appeal at a time when functionalism was also going into decline. As the theoretical wave of the later twentieth century passed over sociology and began to dissipate, with more interdisciplinary conceptions of ‘social theory’ tending to break away from mainstream sociology, the theoretical debates between positivism and hermeneutic and other antipositivist approaches tended to be trivialized into a choice between quantitative and qualitative methods or between ‘empiricism,’ identified with any empirical research, and ‘theory,’ meaning any sociological work not involving empirical research. Some prominent figures labeled as theorists did empirical research, for example, Pierre Bourdieu in France; others, like Zygmunt Bauman or Anthony Giddens in the United Kingdom, did not, but this was not generally felt to be a significant difference.
The Prospects for Positivism Positivism in the very general sense of an aspiration to scientificity and to the construction and empirical testing of formal theories remains a significant presence in contemporary sociology, and to a much greater extent in economics, political science, and some parts of international relations. As Peter Halfpenny (2001: p. 382) notes,
.large numbers of investigators continue to produce research that conforms to the positivist image of science, explaining social activities in loosely deductive-nomological terms, and these explanations are used to guide and evaluate a wide variety of social programmes.
It may be that the important dividing line is now between formal conceptions of theory and more informal ones such as the ‘theory’ of structuration or risk society or theoretical approaches such as actor-network theory. This dividing line (Turner, 2013; Outhwaite, 2014) runs through several theory families, such as rational choice or rational action theory, which encompasses a highly formalized, even formalistic mainstream, following Gary Becker (1976), and more flexible and sophisticated approaches such as those of Martin Hollis (1938–98), for whom “rational action is its own explanation” (Hollis, 1977: p. 135) or Jon Elster (1989, 2007). Hollis and Nell (1975) deconstructed the powerful alliance between positivism and neoclassical economics, while Hollis and Smith (1990) provided what
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remains one of the best statements of what is at stake in the oppositions between ‘explaining’ and ‘understanding’ in the social sciences and between ‘agency’ and ‘structure.’ As Smith wrote in the exchange with which they end the book:
I, too, reject the Positivist notion that there is a world waiting to be mapped. There may be regularities in human affairs but I do not accept the idea that we can construct a neutral theory, valid across time and space, that allows us to predict in the same way as occurs in the natural sciences. (Hollis and Smith, 1990: p. 203)
Evolutionary sociology, mentioned above in relation to Herbert Spencer, has recently experienced a certain revival, though in forms which are mostly dismissive of Spencer’s earlier efforts (O’Malley, 2007). Marxism is another example, with formal and mathematical reformulations of central Marxist propositions (including French structuralist Marxism, analytical Marxism, also known as ‘no-bullshit Marxism,’ and ‘rational choice Marxism’), coexisting with more humanistic variants which shade off into critical theory, in both its Frankfurt School and broader literary and cultural variants. As Peter Halfpenny (1982: p. 120) concluded,
Positivism may be dead in that there is no longer an identifiable community of philosophers who give its simpler characterisations unqualified support, but it lives on philosophically, developed until it transmutes into conventionalism and realism.
Since then, the term ‘postpositivism’ has come into use. Like most ‘post’ formulations, it tends to be used in a wide variety of senses, ranging in this case from modifications of an essentially still positivist program to strong versions of social constructionism (Alvesson and Sköldberg, 2010). ‘Positivism’ has tended to become a term of abuse, while the positivistic impulse toward formalization and (presumed or hoped-for) certainty continues to pervade our increasingly rationalized and performance-oriented social sciences.
See also: Comte, Auguste (1798–1857); Durkheim, Emile (1858–1917); Hermeneutics, History of; Logical Positivism and Logical Empiricism; Popper, Karl Raimund (1902–94); Positivism, History of; Sociological Theory; Sociology, Epistemology of; Spencer, Herbert (1820–1903); Wittgenstein, Ludwig (1889–1951).
Bibliography Adorno, T.W., Albert, H., Dahrendorf, R., Habermas, J., Pilot, H., Popper, K.R., [1972]1976. The Positivist Dispute in German Sociology. Harper & Row, New York. Alvesson, M., Sköldberg, K., 2010. Reflexive Methodology. New Vistas for Quantitative Research. Sage, London. Apel, K.-O., 1967. Analytic Philosophy of Language and the Geisteswissenschaften (H. Holstelilie, Trans.). D. Reidel, Dordrecht and New York. Ayer, A.J., [1936]2001. Language, Truth and Logic. Penguin, 2001, London.
Becker, G., 1976. The Economic Approach to Human Behavior. Chicago University Press, Chicago. Bhaskar, R., 1979. The Possibility of Naturalism. Harvester Press, Brighton. Blalock Jr., H.M., 1969. Theory Construction: From Verbal to Mathematical Formulations. Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs, NJ. Comte, A., 1830–1842. Cours de philosophie positive. Bachelier, Paris, Various partial translations into English. Dubin, R., 1969. Theory Building. Free Press, New York. Durkheim, E., [1895]1982. The Rules of Sociological Method: And Selected Texts on Sociology and its Method. In: Steven Lukes (Ed. and Introduction), (W.D. Halls, Trans.). Macmillan, London. Durkheim, E., [1897]2002. Suicide: A Study in Sociology (John A. Spaulding, George Simpson, Trans.). Routledge, London. Durkheim, E., [1912]1995. The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (Karen E. Fields, Trans.). Free Press, New York; London. Elster, J., 1989. Nuts and Bolts for the Social Sciences. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Elster, J., 2007. Explaining Social Behaviour: More Nuts and Bolts for the Social Sciences. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Gibbs, J., 1972. Sociological Theory Construction. Dryden Press, Hinsdale, IL. Giddings, F., 1901. Inductive Sociology. Macmillan, New York. Habermas, J., [1968a]1988. On the Logic of the Social Sciences (Shierry W. Nicholsen, Jerry A. Stark, Trans.). MIT Press, Cambridge. Habermas, J., [1968b]1987. Knowledge and Human Interests (Jeremy J. Shapiro, Trans.). Polity, Cambridge. Habermas, J., [1981]1987. The Theory of Communicative Action, 2 vols. (Thomas McCarthy, Trans.). Polity, Cambridge. Hage, J., 1972. Techniques and problems of theory construction in sociology. Wiley,, New York. Halfpenny, P., 1982. Positivism and Sociology: Explaining Social Life. Allen & Unwin, London. Halfpenny, P., 2001. Positivism in the twentieth Century. In: Ritzer, G., Smart, B. (Eds.), Handbook of Social Theory. Sage, London, pp. 371–385. Halfpenny, P., McMylor, P. (Eds.), 1994. Positivist Sociology and its Critics, 3 vols. Edward Elgar, Aldershot. Hollis, M., 1977. Models of Man. Oxford University Press, Oxford. Hollis, M., Nell, E.J., 1975. Rational Economic Man. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Hollis, M., Smith, S., 1990. Explaining and Understanding International Relations. Clarendon Press, Oxford. Johnson, W.M., 1983. The Austrian Mind: An Intellectual and Social History, 1848–1938. University of California Press, Berkeley, CA. Keat, R., 1981. The Politics of Social Theory: Habermas, Freud and the Critique of Positivism. Blackwell/University of Chicago Press, Oxford. Kuhn, T., [1962]1970. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, second ed. University of Chicago Press, Chicago. Mach, E., 1893. The Science of Mechanics (T.J. McCormack, Trans.). Open Court, La Salle, IL. Montesquieu, C., 1900. The Spirit of Laws, 2 vols. London. Colonial [1748]. Neurath, O., et al., 1929. Wissenschaftliche Weltauffassung - der Wiener Kreis. In: Neurath, Marie, Cohen, Robert (Eds.), (Marie Neurath, Trans.), Empiricism and Sociology. Veröffentlichungen des Vereins Ernst Mach, Vienna (D. Reidel Publishing Company, Dordrecht-Holland; Boston-USA). O’Malley, M., 2007. Evolutionary approaches in the social sciences. In: Outhwaite, W., Turner, S.P. (Eds.), The Sage Handbook of Social Science Methodology. Sage, London, pp. 333–357. Outhwaite, W., 2014. Sociological theory. In: Holborn, M. (Ed.), Contemporary Sociology. Polity, Cambridge. Platt, J., 1996. A History of Sociological Research Methods in America 1920–1960. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Popper, K., 1959. The Logic of Scientific Discovery. Hutchinson, London. Popper, K., 1969. Conjectures and Refutations. Routledge & Kegan Paul, London. Reynolds, P.D., 1971. A Primer in Theory Construction. Bobbs-Merrill, Indianapolis, IN. Spencer, H., 1873. The Study of Sociology. Routledge & Kegan Paul, Boston, MA. Taylor, C., 1964. The Explanation of Behaviour. Routledge & Kegan Paul, London (Humanities Press, New York). Turner, J.H., 1985. In defense of positivism. Sociological Theory 3, 24–30. Turner, J.H., 1992. The promise of positivism. In: Seidman, S., Wagner, D.G. (Eds.), Postmodernism and Social Theory. Blackwell, Oxford, UK, pp. 75–94. Turner, J.H., 2013. Contemporary Sociological Theory. Sage, Thousand Oaks, CA.
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Turner, S.P., Turner, J.H., 1990. The Impossible Science: An Institutional Analysis of American Sociology. Sage, Newbury Park, CA. Weber, M., [1904–1905]2009. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (Stephen Kalberg, Trans. and Introduced). Oxford University Press, New York; Oxford. Weber, M., [1920]1968. Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology. In: Guenther Roth, Claus Wittich (Eds.), (Ephraim Fischoff et al., Trans.). Bedminster Press, New York. Wellmer, A., 1967. Methodologie als Erkenntnistheorie: Zur Wissenschaftslehre Karl R. Poppers. Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main.
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Winch, Peter, 1958. The Idea of a Social Science and its Relation to Philosophy. Routledge and Kegan Paul, London. Wittgenstein, L., [1922]1971. Tractatus Logico-philosophicus (D.F. Pears, B.F. McGuinness, Trans.). Routledge & Kegan Paul, London. Wittgenstein, L., 1953. Philosophical Investigations (G.E.M. Anscombe, Trans.). Basil Blackwell, Oxford. Zetterberg, H.L., 1965. On Theory and Verification in Sociology, third ed. Bedminster Press, New York.
Abstract Positivism and sociology have a common origin, and positivism remains a significant approach in sociology and the other social sciences. In positivist sociology, the scientific study of the social world is identified with empirical research, statistical methods, and often the pursuit of general laws of social life which can be tested against experience.
The Rise of Positivism Auguste Comte (1798–1857) argued in his Course of Positive Philosophy (1830–1842) that the various sciences developed through three stages – theological, metaphysical, and, eventually, positive. A positive science does not rely on spirits or abstract forces but on precise relationships of the kind expressed in Newton’s law of gravity. The sciences move gradually into the positive stage, with sociology representing the culmination of this process, in the work of Comte himself. Comte, a strong influence on John Stuart Mill (1806–73) popularized the name ‘sociology’ to refer to what had earlier been called social physics, and a positivist approach was taken forward in sociology by Herbert Spencer (1820–1903) and later Emile Durkheim (1858–1917). Spencer made much of the parallels, as he saw them, between biological and social evolution and between societies and (other) organisms and the functional relations between their component parts. Durkheim’s evolutionism was more muted, though his study of religion looked to Australian totemism for the Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912) and his earlier Rules of Sociological Method (1895) argued for the study of ‘social facts’ as ‘things.’ Insisting on the distinctiveness of sociology and in particular its difference from psychology, Durkheim argued, notably in his classic study of Suicide (1897), that one should look for the social causes of regular differences in suicide rates in religious attachments or marital status, rather than invoking psychological explanations or speculating about the motives of suicidal individuals. Durkheim’s distinction between ‘normal’ and ‘pathological’ states of society echoes Comte’s principle that science can lead to prediction and thereby to the control of natural or social processes. Positivism also had a presence in the study of history, for example in the work of Henry Thomas Buckle (1821–62) and others across Europe, and it was in Germany that this provoked the strongest antipositivist reaction, with the philosopher of history J.G. Droysen (1808–84) and his contemporary Wilhelm Dilthey (1833–1911), insisting on the distinctiveness of what came to be called the ‘human sciences’ or Geisteswissenschaften. In these sciences, as Dilthey put it, the mental activity of humans and of some other animals, and its products, can be understood. Dilthey developed what we would now call a research program for history and the other human sciences based on the distinctiveness of human psychic expressions and the understanding of those expressions. In a move which was to
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become a definitional feature of later interpretive social science, Dilthey emphasized the continuity between everyday understanding and more formal processes of interpretation. In sociology, Georg Simmel (1858–1918) and Max Weber (1864–1920) also argued strongly for the importance of understanding (Verstehen) in history and the other social sciences, and Weber presented in his posthumously published Economy and Society (1920) the principle that sociology, as he conceived it, should attempt the interpretive understanding of social processes in order to explain them. His earlier classic study of The Protestant Ethic and the ‘Spirit’ of Capitalism (1904–1905) had applied this two-track approach by first showing (at least to his own satisfaction) that ascetic protestants such as Calvinists were in fact more economically innovative than Catholics in early modern Europe and then offering an explanation which ‘made sense’ of their conduct. By 1920, then, Weber had developed a strong alternative to positivistic sociology and offered a way of combining understanding and causal explanation which continues to attract many sociologists. In the years following his death, however, sociology became more polarized between more radical versions of both positivist and interpretivist approaches.
The Vienna Circle and the Transformation of Positivism Positivist philosophy of science had taken a strongly empiricist direction in the work of Ernst Mach (1838–1916) who inspired the Vienna Circle, which met regularly in 1910–12 and again from 1926 into the 1930s. These physicists, mathematicians, and philosophers founded the Ernst Mach Society in 1928 and published, in 1929, a manifesto under the editorship of the sociologist Otto Neurath (1882–1945) (Neurath et al., 1929). Comte’s positivistic conception of science had stressed theory and opposed empiricism, arguing that “the next great hindrance to the use of observation is the empiricism which is introduced by those who, in the name of impartiality, would interdict the use of any theory whatsoever” and that “No real observation of any kind of phenomena is possible, except in as far as it is first directed, and finally, interpreted, by some theory.” Viennese positivism or logical empiricism drew more on the formalization of logic and mathematics in the early years of the twentieth century and its extension to the philosophical analysis of language by Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951),
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whose Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922) was a strong influence on members of the Circle. As they saw it, language maps onto the world through precise observation statements, to which the language of science has to be ultimately reducible. Whereas Comte had stressed the distinct domains of the various sciences, on this model the social sciences were reducible to psychology and ultimately to physics, which was no longer just the lead science in the march toward a positive state, as it had been for Comte, but the fundamental basis of ‘unified science.’ This approach was disseminated in the 1930s as the members of the Vienna Circle fled from Nazism, with several figures settling in the United States, where a similar approach to science had developed independently (Platt, 1996). (The American physicist Percy Williams Bridgman’s operationalism, had, for example, been a major influence on the Vienna Circle itself.) Two philosophers who popularized logical empiricism were Alfred Ayer (1910–89) in the United Kingdom and Karl Popper (1902–94), who emigrated from Austria to New Zealand and then also settled in London. Popper introduced the most important modifications to the Vienna Circle model and also addressed issues of social and political philosophy. One of the central principles of logical empiricism had been the ‘verification principle,’ the Bridgmanian idea that the meaning of an empirical statement depends on, or in some versions is identical with, its means of verification. (One consequence, enthusiastically promulgated by Ayer (1936), was that value judgments were meaningless, being neither empirical nor logical or mathematical.) Popper (1934) demonstrated the impossibility of conclusive verification in science and stood the problem on its head, arguing that testability was better understood in terms of falsification. The statement that all swans are white can never be conclusively verified, unless we are sure that we have observed all swans that ever existed and that they are now extinct, whereas the statement can be falsified by the observation of just one black swan. Scientific theories expose themselves to testing, as Einstein had done by making a prediction about the position of Mercury which was proved accurate in 1910. In Popper’s analysis, this did not prove the theory but merely gave it greater ‘verisimilitude’ since it had passed a crucial test. Like a car which has passed an annual safety inspection, it could be conditionally relied on until the next time. Pseudotheories by contrast, such as Marxism and psychoanalysis, could amass lots of supporting evidence but did not expose themselves to falsification. Social science, Popper argued, could make conditional predictions, but should avoid the temptation of ‘prophecy.’
Positivism and Sociology This modified version of Viennese positivism has been massively influential in the philosophy of science, including social science. Popper had undercut the search for certainty which had been the Achilles heel of logical empiricism and offered an alternative model of scientificity. In the social sciences, new quantitative techniques were developed for theory testing, and punched cards gave way to computers. In the ‘covering-law’ model of causal explanation, empirical findings were attached to general laws in the manner alleged to operate in the natural sciences. (In the classic example, the
general law that water freezes at 0 explains the state of my car radiator after a cold night.) This covering-law approach to explanation coexisted with the rise of functionalism; Talcott Parsons suggested, quite implausibly, that his system theory might one day be open to empirical testing. Max Weber’s plea for the avoidance of value judgments in social science (which in Weber’s practice coincided with an almost existentialist position on our choice of ultimate values and a variety of intensely political engagements) became the dominant position justifying an apolitical stance for social science – which in practice tended to mean an endorsement of the ideological status quo. However, the history of positivism, like that of Stalinist economic planning, is largely the history of attempts to modify or reform it, and it unraveled from a number of directions. In philosophy, thinkers influenced by North American pragmatism such as W.V.O. Quine (1908–2000) emphasized the importance of theoretical frameworks, questioning the idea of piecemeal testing or instance confirmation. More seriously for Popper, the historian of science Thomas Kuhn (1962) showed that scientists tend to work most of the time within unquestioned frameworks or ‘paradigms,’ switching from one to another only in periods of scientific revolution, in a process close to religious conversion. Paul Feyerabend (1924–94) drew the extreme conclusion that a good empiricist should be an epistemological anarchist and accept that ‘anything goes’: all theories should be taken seriously. Wittgenstein (1953) had dropped his earlier theory of language in favor of a much more holistic and sociological approach to ‘language games’ located in ‘forms of life.’ This linked up with antipositivist interpretive approaches in sociology and social anthropology, as demonstrated by the British philosopher Peter Winch (1958). Meanwhile the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor (1964), influenced both by analytic philosophy and by continental European hermeneutics, argued that the behavior of humans and other higher animals should be understood in terms of intentions and purposes rather than just causal impulses. In a further twist, Karl-Otto Apel (1967) demonstrated in more detail the affinities between analytic philosophy of language and the Geisteswissenschaften tradition, and Jürgen Habermas, who had joined in the critique of positivism in West German sociology in the early 1960s (Adorno et al., 1976), showed how phenomenology, analytic philosophy and Hans-Georg Gadamer’s version of philosophical hermeneutics could combine against social scientific positivism and yield a ‘critical social science’ (Habermas, 1968a,b). This type of science combined causal explanation and understanding in an approach, exemplified by psychoanalysis and the marxist critique of ideology, which identified and removed causal obstacles to understanding. Positivism, for Habermas (1968b: p. vii) and his associate Albrecht Wellmer (1967), meant an absence of reflection and the reduction of epistemology to methodology, whether in natural or social science. In the latter case, however, the imitation of a natural scientific model was particularly dangerous because it reinforced tendencies to technocracy which undermined the possibilities of political deliberation. Habermas later reformulated his model of emancipatory science, but it remains in a modified form in his idea of reconstructive sciences, which explicate capacities which we exercise in daily life. His initial example was linguistics, which identifies the rules which we
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unconsciously follow as native speakers of a language, but his own theory of communicative action (Habermas, 1981) also embodies this approach. Whereas critical theory tends toward a dualism of natural and social science, but in an increasingly muted form, the assumption that opposition to positivism also entailed dualism or antinaturalism was, however, also put in question in the late 1960s and early 1970s by the realist metatheory of science developed by Rom Harré and Roy Bhaskar. Both Harré and Bhaskar, like Habermas, were substantially motivated by the desire to undermine positivistic theories and approaches in the social sciences. They were interested in giving a more adequate account of science as a whole, in world composed of relatively enduring structures and mechanisms. Some of these could be isolated in scientific experimentation, given the contingent existence of Homo sapiens and Homo scientificus. An important aspect of the realist program developed by Harré, Bhaskar, and others was a conception of explanation as involving not an essentially semantic reduction of causal statements to general laws (which in sociology tended to be either vacuous or riddled with exceptions) but a reference to the causal powers of entities, structures, and mechanisms. The real explanation of the state of my radiator is not the mere generalization that water freezes at 0 but the causal properties of water molecules: their capacity to freeze or evaporate. Causal tendencies may be outweighed by countervailing tendencies, and two causal tendencies may neutralize one another, as do the centrifugal force of the Earth’s rotation and its gravitational attraction, with the convenient consequence that human beings and other animals are safely anchored close to the Earth’s surface but can jump over small obstacles. This and other features of realism meant that the whole issue of naturalism could be rethought. Human beings could be seen as having causal powers and liabilities, just like other entities; it no longer mattered if their relations rarely sustained any universal generalizations of an interesting kind, but only sets of tendencies regular enough to be worth exploring. It also seemed natural to include among the causes of human action the agents’ reasons for acting – reasons which must be understood as far as possible. Reasons, such as a smoker’s reasons for giving up the habit, might form part of a causal explanation of the cure. The fact that many of the entities accorded causal force in social scientific explanations were necessarily unobservable was not, as it was for empiricism, a problem of principle. And the understanding of meaning could, as Bhaskar (1979: pp. 58–59) put it, be seen as in some ways equivalent to measurement in the natural sciences. Realists diverge on the issue of naturalism, with Bhaskar arguing for it and Harré defending a more interactionist and social constructionist position, focusing on interpersonal action and questioning the existence of social structures. Realism found a more comfortable home in sociology and the emergent discipline of international relations than in academic philosophy, and in Britain and Scandinavia more than in other parts of Europe or in North America. Together, however, all these antipositivist currents meant that it was even harder than before to find explicit defenders of positivism. Jonathan Turner (1981, 1985, 1992, 2013) in the
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United States is a significant example, and Peter Blau also identified explicitly with positivism. For the most part, however, positivism tended to be equated, by both supporters and critics, with empirical research and in particular with quantitative methodologies. Turner is an exception, since his positivistic defense of scientific theory in sociology was also highly critical of the vogue for quantification in the United States. As he noted in an earlier version of this article, positivist books on ‘theory building’ and ‘theory construction’ in the late 1960s, beginning with Hans Zetterberg’s (1965) On Theory and Verification in Sociology and continuing through the 1960s and 1970s (e.g., Blalock, 1969; Dubin, 1969; Gibbs, 1972; Hage, 1972; Reynolds, 1971), did not retain their initial appeal at a time when functionalism was also going into decline. As the theoretical wave of the later twentieth century passed over sociology and began to dissipate, with more interdisciplinary conceptions of ‘social theory’ tending to break away from mainstream sociology, the theoretical debates between positivism and hermeneutic and other antipositivist approaches tended to be trivialized into a choice between quantitative and qualitative methods or between ‘empiricism,’ identified with any empirical research, and ‘theory,’ meaning any sociological work not involving empirical research. Some prominent figures labeled as theorists did empirical research, for example, Pierre Bourdieu in France; others, like Zygmunt Bauman or Anthony Giddens in the United Kingdom, did not, but this was not generally felt to be a significant difference.
The Prospects for Positivism Positivism in the very general sense of an aspiration to scientificity and to the construction and empirical testing of formal theories remains a significant presence in contemporary sociology, and to a much greater extent in economics, political science, and some parts of international relations. As Peter Halfpenny (2001: p. 382) notes,
.large numbers of investigators continue to produce research that conforms to the positivist image of science, explaining social activities in loosely deductive-nomological terms, and these explanations are used to guide and evaluate a wide variety of social programmes.
It may be that the important dividing line is now between formal conceptions of theory and more informal ones such as the ‘theory’ of structuration or risk society or theoretical approaches such as actor-network theory. This dividing line (Turner, 2013; Outhwaite, 2014) runs through several theory families, such as rational choice or rational action theory, which encompasses a highly formalized, even formalistic mainstream, following Gary Becker (1976), and more flexible and sophisticated approaches such as those of Martin Hollis (1938–98), for whom “rational action is its own explanation” (Hollis, 1977: p. 135) or Jon Elster (1989, 2007). Hollis and Nell (1975) deconstructed the powerful alliance between positivism and neoclassical economics, while Hollis and Smith (1990) provided what
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remains one of the best statements of what is at stake in the oppositions between ‘explaining’ and ‘understanding’ in the social sciences and between ‘agency’ and ‘structure.’ As Smith wrote in the exchange with which they end the book:
I, too, reject the Positivist notion that there is a world waiting to be mapped. There may be regularities in human affairs but I do not accept the idea that we can construct a neutral theory, valid across time and space, that allows us to predict in the same way as occurs in the natural sciences. (Hollis and Smith, 1990: p. 203)
Evolutionary sociology, mentioned above in relation to Herbert Spencer, has recently experienced a certain revival, though in forms which are mostly dismissive of Spencer’s earlier efforts (O’Malley, 2007). Marxism is another example, with formal and mathematical reformulations of central Marxist propositions (including French structuralist Marxism, analytical Marxism, also known as ‘no-bullshit Marxism,’ and ‘rational choice Marxism’), coexisting with more humanistic variants which shade off into critical theory, in both its Frankfurt School and broader literary and cultural variants. As Peter Halfpenny (1982: p. 120) concluded,
Positivism may be dead in that there is no longer an identifiable community of philosophers who give its simpler characterisations unqualified support, but it lives on philosophically, developed until it transmutes into conventionalism and realism.
Since then, the term ‘postpositivism’ has come into use. Like most ‘post’ formulations, it tends to be used in a wide variety of senses, ranging in this case from modifications of an essentially still positivist program to strong versions of social constructionism (Alvesson and Sköldberg, 2010). ‘Positivism’ has tended to become a term of abuse, while the positivistic impulse toward formalization and (presumed or hoped-for) certainty continues to pervade our increasingly rationalized and performance-oriented social sciences.
See also: Comte, Auguste (1798–1857); Durkheim, Emile (1858–1917); Hermeneutics, History of; Logical Positivism and Logical Empiricism; Popper, Karl Raimund (1902–94); Positivism, History of; Sociological Theory; Sociology, Epistemology of; Spencer, Herbert (1820–1903); Wittgenstein, Ludwig (1889–1951).
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