Positivism
Positivism is a
Although the positivist approach has been a recurrent theme in the history of western thought, modern positivism was first articulated in the early 19th century by Auguste Comte.[3][4] His school of sociological positivism holds that society, like the physical world, operates according to general laws.[5] After Comte, positivist schools arose in logic, psychology, economics, historiography, and other fields of thought. Generally, positivists attempted to introduce scientific methods to their respective fields. Since the turn of the 20th century, positivism although still popular, has declined under criticism in parts of social sciences from antipositivists and critical theorists, among others, for its alleged scientism, reductionism, overgeneralizations, and methodological limitations.
Etymology
The English noun positivism in this meaning was imported in the 19th century from the French word positivisme, derived from positif in its philosophical sense of 'imposed on the mind by experience'. The corresponding adjective (
Background
In the early nineteenth century, massive advances in the natural sciences encouraged philosophers to apply scientific methods to other fields. Thinkers such as Henri de Saint-Simon, Pierre-Simon Laplace and Auguste Comte believed that the scientific method, the circular dependence of theory and observation, must replace metaphysics in the history of thought.[10]
Positivism in the social sciences
Comte's positivism
For him, the physical sciences had necessarily to arrive first, before humanity could adequately channel its efforts into the most challenging and complex "Queen science" of human society itself. His View of Positivism therefore set out to define the empirical goals of sociological method:The most important thing to determine was the natural order in which the sciences stand—not how they can be made to stand, but how they must stand, irrespective of the wishes of any one. ... This Comte accomplished by taking as the criterion of the position of each the degree of what he called "positivity," which is simply the degree to which the phenomena can be exactly determined. This, as may be readily seen, is also a measure of their relative complexity, since the exactness of a science is in inverse proportion to its complexity. The degree of exactness or positivity is, moreover, that to which it can be subjected to mathematical demonstration, and therefore mathematics, which is not itself a concrete science, is the general gauge by which the position of every science is to be determined. Generalizing thus, Comte found that there were five great groups of phenomena of equal classificatory value but of successively decreasing positivity. To these he gave the names astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology, and sociology.
—Lester F. Ward, The Outlines of Sociology (1898), [13]
Comte offered an
Comte's stages were (1) the
Comte describes the metaphysical phase of humanity as the time since the Enlightenment, a time steeped in logical rationalism, to the time right after the French Revolution. This second phase states that the universal rights of humanity are most important. The central idea is that humanity is invested with certain rights that must be respected. In this phase, democracies and dictators rose and fell in attempts to maintain the innate rights of humanity.[16]
The final stage of the trilogy of Comte's universal law is the scientific, or positive, stage. The central idea of this phase is that individual rights are more important than the rule of any one person. Comte stated that the idea of humanity's ability to govern itself makes this stage inherently different from the rest. There is no higher power governing the masses and the intrigue of any one person can achieve anything based on that individual's free will. The third principle is most important in the positive stage.[17] Comte calls these three phases the universal rule in relation to society and its development. Neither the second nor the third phase can be reached without the completion and understanding of the preceding stage. All stages must be completed in progress.[18]
Comte believed that the appreciation of the past and the ability to build on it towards the future was key in transitioning from the theological and metaphysical phases. The idea of progress was central to Comte's new science, sociology. Sociology would "lead to the historical consideration of every science" because "the history of one science, including pure political history, would make no sense unless it was attached to the study of the general progress of all of humanity".[19] As Comte would say: "from science comes prediction; from prediction comes action".[20] It is a philosophy of human intellectual development that culminated in science. The irony of this series of phases is that though Comte attempted to prove that human development has to go through these three stages, it seems that the positivist stage is far from becoming a realization. This is due to two truths: The positivist phase requires having a complete understanding of the universe and world around us and requires that society should never know if it is in this positivist phase. Anthony Giddens argues that since humanity constantly uses science to discover and research new things, humanity never progresses beyond the second metaphysical phase.[18]
Comte's fame today owes in part to
In later life, Comte developed a '
The early sociology of Herbert Spencer came about broadly as a reaction to Comte; writing after various developments in evolutionary biology, Spencer attempted (in vain) to reformulate the discipline in what we might now describe as socially Darwinistic terms.[citation needed]
Early followers of Comte
Within a few years, other scientific and philosophical thinkers began creating their own definitions for positivism. These included
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Durkheim's positivism
The modern academic discipline of sociology began with the work of Émile Durkheim (1858–1917). While Durkheim rejected much of the details of Comte's philosophy, he retained and refined its method, maintaining that the social sciences are a logical continuation of the natural ones into the realm of human activity, and insisting that they may retain the same objectivity, rationalism, and approach to causality.
Durkheim's seminal monograph,
David Ashley and David M. Orenstein have alleged, in a consumer textbook published by
Historical positivism
In
The origin of the historical positivist school is particularly associated with the 19th-century German historian Leopold von Ranke, who argued that the historian should seek to describe historical truth "wie es eigentlich gewesen ist" ("as it actually was")—though subsequent historians of the concept, such as Georg Iggers, have argued that its development owed more to Ranke's followers than Ranke himself.[32]
Historical positivism was critiqued in the 20th century by historians and philosophers of history from various schools of thought, including
Historicist arguments against positivist approaches in historiography include that history differs from sciences like physics and ethology in subject matter and method;[36][37][38] that much of what history studies is nonquantifiable, and therefore to quantify is to lose in precision; and that experimental methods and mathematical models do not generally apply to history, so that it is not possible to formulate general (quasi-absolute) laws in history.[38]
Other subfields
In
In economics, practicing researchers tend to emulate the methodological assumptions of classical positivism, but only in a de facto fashion: the majority of economists do not explicitly concern themselves with matters of epistemology.[40] Economic thinker Friedrich Hayek (see "Law, Legislation and Liberty") rejected positivism in the social sciences as hopelessly limited in comparison to evolved and divided knowledge. For example, much (positivist) legislation falls short in contrast to pre-literate or incompletely defined common or evolved law.
In jurisprudence, "legal positivism" essentially refers to the rejection of natural law; thus its common meaning with philosophical positivism is somewhat attenuated and in recent generations generally emphasizes the authority of human political structures as opposed to a "scientific" view of law.
Logical positivism
Logical positivism (later and more accurately called logical empiricism) is a school of philosophy that combines empiricism, the idea that observational evidence is indispensable for knowledge of the world, with a version of rationalism, the idea that our knowledge includes a component that is not derived from observation.
Logical positivism grew from the discussions of a group called the "First Vienna Circle", which gathered at the
It was
After moving to the United States, Carnap proposed a replacement for the earlier doctrines in his Logical Syntax of Language. This change of direction, and the somewhat differing beliefs of Reichenbach and others, led to a consensus that the English name for the shared doctrinal platform, in its American exile from the late 1930s, should be "logical empiricism."[citation needed] While the logical positivist movement is now considered dead, it has continued to influence philosophical development.[43]
Criticism
Historically, positivism has been criticized for its reductionism, i.e., for contending that all "processes are reducible to physiological, physical or chemical events," "social processes are reducible to relationships between and actions of individuals," and that "biological organisms are reducible to physical systems."[44]
The consideration that laws in physics may not be absolute but relative, and, if so, this might be even more true of social sciences, was stated, in different terms, by
Wilhelm Dilthey fought strenuously against the assumption that only explanations derived from science are valid.[9] He reprised Vico's argument that scientific explanations do not reach the inner nature of phenomena[9] and it is humanistic knowledge that gives us insight into thoughts, feelings and desires.[9] Dilthey was in part influenced by the historism of Leopold von Ranke (1795–1886).[9]
The contestation over positivism is reflected both in older debates (see the Positivism dispute) and current ones over the proper role of science in the public sphere. Public sociology—especially as described by Michael Burawoy—argues that sociologists should use empirical evidence to display the problems of society so they might be changed.[47]
Antipositivism
At the turn of the 20th century, the first wave of German sociologists formally introduced methodological antipositivism, proposing that research should concentrate on human cultural
Critical rationalism and postpositivism
In the mid-twentieth century, several important philosophers and philosophers of science began to critique the foundations of logical positivism. In his 1934 work
Together, these ideas led to the development of
In the early 1960s, the positivism dispute arose between the critical theorists (see below) and the critical rationalists over the correct solution to the value judgment dispute (Werturteilsstreit). While both sides accepted that sociology cannot avoid a value judgement that inevitably influences subsequent conclusions, the critical theorists accused the critical rationalists of being positivists; specifically, of asserting that empirical questions can be severed from their metaphysical heritage and refusing to ask questions that cannot be answered with scientific methods. This contributed to what Karl Popper termed the "Popper Legend", a misconception among critics and admirers of Popper that he was, or identified himself as, a positivist.[59]
Critical theory
Although
Max Horkheimer criticized the classic formulation of positivism on two grounds. First, he claimed that it falsely represented human social action.[64] The first criticism argued that positivism systematically failed to appreciate the extent to which the so-called social facts it yielded did not exist 'out there', in the objective world, but were themselves a product of socially and historically mediated human consciousness.[64] Positivism ignored the role of the 'observer' in the constitution of social reality and thereby failed to consider the historical and social conditions affecting the representation of social ideas.[64] Positivism falsely represented the object of study by reifying social reality as existing objectively and independently of the labour that actually produced those conditions.[64] Secondly, he argued, representation of social reality produced by positivism was inherently and artificially conservative, helping to support the status quo, rather than challenging it.[64] This character may also explain the popularity of positivism in certain political circles. Horkheimer argued, in contrast, that critical theory possessed a reflexive element lacking in the positivistic traditional theory.[64]
Some scholars today hold the beliefs critiqued in Horkheimer's work, but since the time of his writing critiques of positivism, especially from philosophy of science, have led to the development of postpositivism. This philosophy greatly relaxes the epistemological commitments of logical positivism and no longer claims a separation between the knower and the known. Rather than dismissing the scientific project outright, postpositivists seek to transform and amend it, though the exact extent of their affinity for science varies vastly. For example, some postpositivists accept the critique that observation is always value-laden, but argue that the best values to adopt for sociological observation are those of science: skepticism, rigor, and modesty. Just as some critical theorists see their position as a moral commitment to egalitarian values, these postpositivists see their methods as driven by a moral commitment to these scientific values. Such scholars may see themselves as either positivists or antipositivists.[65]
Other criticisms
During the later twentieth century, positivism began to fall out of favor with scientists as well. Later in his career, German theoretical physicist Werner Heisenberg, Nobel laureate for his pioneering work in quantum mechanics, distanced himself from positivism:
The positivists have a simple solution: the world must be divided into that which we can say clearly and the rest, which we had better pass over in silence. But can any one conceive of a more pointless philosophy, seeing that what we can say clearly amounts to next to nothing? If we omitted all that is unclear we would probably be left with completely uninteresting and trivial tautologies.[66]
In the early 1970s, urbanists of the quantitative school like
According to the Catholic Encyclopedia, Positivism has also come under fire on religious and philosophical grounds, whose proponents state that truth begins in sense experience, but does not end there. Positivism fails to prove that there are not abstract ideas, laws, and principles, beyond particular observable facts and relationships and necessary principles, or that we cannot know them. Nor does it prove that material and corporeal things constitute the whole order of existing beings, and that our knowledge is limited to them. According to positivism, our abstract concepts or general ideas are mere collective representations of the experimental order—for example; the idea of "man" is a kind of blended image of all the men observed in our experience.[68] This runs contrary to a Platonic or Christian ideal, where an idea can be abstracted from any concrete determination, and may be applied identically to an indefinite number of objects of the same class [citation needed] From the idea's perspective, Platonism is more precise. Defining an idea as a sum of collective images is imprecise and more or less confused, and becomes more so as the collection represented increases. An idea defined explicitly always remains clear.
Other new movements, such as critical realism, have emerged in opposition to positivism. Critical realism seeks to reconcile the overarching aims of social science with postmodern critiques. Experientialism, which arose with second generation cognitive science, asserts that knowledge begins and ends with experience itself.[69][70] In other words, it rejects the positivist assertion that a portion of human knowledge is a priori.
Positivism today
Echoes of the "positivist" and "antipositivist" debate persist today, though this conflict is hard to define. Authors writing in different epistemological perspectives do not phrase their disagreements in the same terms and rarely actually speak directly to each other.
Social sciences
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While most social scientists today are not explicit about their epistemological commitments, articles in top American sociology and political science journals generally follow a positivist logic of argument.[73][74] It can be thus argued that "natural science and social science [research articles] can therefore be regarded with a good deal of confidence as members of the same genre".[73]
In contemporary social science, strong accounts of positivism have long since fallen out of favour. Practitioners of positivism today acknowledge in far greater detail
In the original Comtean usage, the term "positivism" roughly meant the use of scientific methods to uncover the laws according to which both physical and human events occur, while "sociology" was the overarching science that would synthesize all such knowledge for the betterment of society. "Positivism is a way of understanding based on science"; people don't rely on the faith in God but instead on the science behind humanity. "Antipositivism" formally dates back to the start of the twentieth century, and is based on the belief that natural and human sciences are ontologically and epistemologically distinct. Neither of these terms is used any longer in this sense.[25] There are no fewer than twelve distinct epistemologies that are referred to as positivism.[77] Many of these approaches do not self-identify as "positivist", some because they themselves arose in opposition to older forms of positivism, and some because the label has over time become a term of abuse[25] by being mistakenly linked with a theoretical empiricism. The extent of antipositivist criticism has also become broad, with many philosophies broadly rejecting the scientifically based social epistemology and other ones only seeking to amend it to reflect 20th century developments in the philosophy of science. However, positivism (understood as the use of scientific methods for studying society) remains the dominant approach to both the research and the theory construction in contemporary sociology, especially in the United States.[25]
The majority of articles published in leading American sociology and political science journals today are positivist (at least to the extent of being quantitative rather than qualitative).[73][74] This popularity may be because research utilizing positivist quantitative methodologies holds a greater prestige[clarification needed] in the social sciences than qualitative work; quantitative work is easier to justify, as data can be manipulated to answer any question.[78][need quotation to verify] Such research is generally perceived as being more scientific and more trustworthy, and thus has a greater impact on policy and public opinion (though such judgments are frequently contested by scholars doing non-positivist work).[78][need quotation to verify]
Natural sciences
The key features of positivism as of the 1950s, as defined in the "received view",[79] are:
- A focus on science as a product, a linguistic or numerical set of statements;
- A concern with axiomatization, that is, with demonstrating the logical structure and coherence of these statements;
- An insistence on at least some of these statements being testable; that is, amenable to being verified, confirmed, or shown to be false by the empirical observation of reality. Statements that would, by their nature, be regarded as untestable included the teleological; thus positivism rejects much of classical metaphysics.
- The belief that science is markedly cumulative;
- The belief that science is predominantly transcultural;
- The belief that science rests on specific results that are dissociated from the personality and social position of the investigator;
- The belief that science contains theories or research traditions that are largely commensurable;
- The belief that science sometimes incorporates new ideas that are discontinuous from old ones;
- The belief that science involves the idea of the unity of science, that there is, underlying the various scientific disciplines, basically one science about one real world.
- The belief that science is nature and nature is science; and out of this duality, all theories and postulates are created, interpreted, evolve, and are applied.
Stephen Hawking was a recent high-profile advocate of positivism in the physical sciences. In The Universe in a Nutshell (p. 31) he wrote:
Any sound scientific theory, whether of time or of any other concept, should in my opinion be based on the most workable philosophy of science: the positivist approach put forward by Karl Popper and others. According to this way of thinking, a scientific theory is a mathematical model that describes and codifies the observations we make. A good theory will describe a large range of phenomena on the basis of a few simple postulates and will make definite predictions that can be tested. ... If one takes the positivist position, as I do, one cannot say what time actually is. All one can do is describe what has been found to be a very good mathematical model for time and say what predictions it makes.
See also
- Cliodynamics
- Científico
- Charvaka
- Determinism
- Gödel's incompleteness theorems
- London Positivist Society
- Nature versus nurture
- Scientific politics
- Sociological naturalism
- The New Paul and Virginia
- Vladimir Solovyov
Notes
- Pearson Canada
- ^ Larrain, Jorge (1979). The Concept of Ideology. London: Hutchinson. p. 197.
one of the features of positivism is precisely its postulate that scientific knowledge is the paradigm of valid knowledge, a postulate that indeed is never proved nor intended to be proved.
- S2CID 143761151..
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- ISBN 978-0-205-11671-3.
- ^ Le petit Robert s. v. 'positivisme'; OED s. v. positive
- ISBN 978-0-226-19036-5.
Positivism is marked by the final recognition that science provides the only valid form of knowledge and that facts are the only possible objects of knowledge; philosophy is thus recognized as essentially no different from science [...] Ethics, politics, social interactions, and all other forms of human life about which knowledge was possible would eventually be drawn into the orbit of science [...] The positivists' program for mapping the inexorable and immutable laws of matter and society seemed to allow no greater role for the contribution of poets than had Plato. [...] What Plato represented as the quarrel between philosophy and poetry is resuscitated in the "two cultures" quarrel of more recent times between the humanities and the sciences.
- ^ Saunders, T. J. Introduction to Ion. London: Penguin Books, 1987, p. 46
- ^ a b c d e Wallace and Gach (2008) p. 27 Archived 17 June 2016 at the Wayback Machine
- ^ Hobsbawm, Eric (1975). The Age of Capital: 1848–1875. New York City: Charles Scribner's Sons.
- ^ a b Auguste Comte Archived 11 October 2017 at the Wayback Machine in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
- ^ "OpenStax". openstax.org. Retrieved 9 April 2021.
- ^ The Rules of the Sociological Method. Cited in Wacquant (1992).
- ^ Giddens, Positivism and Sociology, 1
- ^ Mill, Auguste Comte and Positivism 3
- ISBN 0-486-21867-8)
- ^ Mill, Auguste Comte and Positivism, 4
- ^ a b Giddens, Positivism and Sociology, 9
- ^ Mary Pickering, Auguste Comte: An Intellectual Biography, Volume I, 622
- ^ Mary Pickering, Auguste Comte: An Intellectual Biography, Volume I, 566
- ^ Pickering, Mary (1993) Auguste Comte: an intellectual biography Cambridge University Press, p. 192
- ^ "Comte's secular religion is no vague effusion of humanistic piety, but a complete system of belief and ritual, with liturgy and sacraments, priesthood and pontiff, all organized around the public veneration of Humanity, the Nouveau Grand-Être Suprême (New Supreme Great Being), later to be supplemented in a positivist trinity by the Grand Fétish (the Earth) and the Grand Milieu (Destiny)" According to Davies (pp. 28–29), Comte's austere and "slightly dispiriting" philosophy of humanity viewed as alone in an indifferent universe (which can only be explained by "positive" science) and with nowhere to turn but to each other, was even more influential in Victorian England than the theories of Charles Darwin or Karl Marx.
- ^ Pickering, Mary (2009). Auguste Comte: Volume 3: An Intellectual Biography. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. p. 561.
- ^ Sémérie, Eugène. "Founding of a Positivist Club". Marxists Internet Archive. Archived from the original on 15 July 2018. Retrieved 6 March 2017.
- ^ a b c d e f Wacquant, Loic. 1992. "Positivism." In Bottomore, Tom and William Outhwaite, ed., The Blackwell Dictionary of Twentieth-Century Social Thought
- ^ Gianfranco Poggi (2000). Durkheim. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
- ISBN 978-0-631-21348-2. Archivedfrom the original on 23 June 2016. Retrieved 7 November 2015.
- ^ Durkheim, Émile [1895] "The Rules of Sociological Method" 8th edition, trans. Sarah A. Solovay and John M. Mueller, ed. George E. G. Catlin (1938, 1964 edition), p. 45
- ^ Ashley D, Orenstein DM (2005). Sociological theory: Classical statements (6th ed.). Boston, MA: Pearson Education. pp. 94–98, 100–104.
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- ^ Collingwood, R. G. (1946). The Idea of History. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 131–33.
- ^ Raymond Boudon and François Bourricaud, A Critical Dictionary of Sociology Archived 3 May 2016 at the Wayback Machine, Routledge, 1989: "Historicism", p. 198.
- ^ a b Wallace, Edwin R. and Gach, John (2008) History of Psychiatry and Medical Psychology: With an Epilogue on Psychiatry and the Mind-Body Relation. p. 14 Archived 16 May 2016 at the Wayback Machine
- ^ a b Wallace and Gach (2008) p. 28 Archived 8 November 2015 at the Wayback Machine
- ^ Koch, Sigmund (1992) Psychology's Bridgman vs. Bridgman's Bridgman: An Essay in Reconstruction., in Theory and Psychology vol. 2 no. 3 (1992) p. 275
- ^ "Lawrence A. Boland, Economic Positivism positivists.org 2012". Archived from the original on 17 February 2015. Retrieved 18 February 2015.
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To conclude, logical positivism was progressive compared with the classical positivism of Ptolemy, Hume, d'Alembert, Comte, Mill, and Mach. It was even more so by comparison with its contemporary rivals—neo-Thomisism, neo-Kantianism, intuitionism, dialectical materialism, phenomenology, and existentialism. However, neo-positivism failed dismally to give a faithful account of science, whether natural or social. It failed because it remained anchored to sense-data and to a phenomenalist metaphysics, overrated the power of induction and underrated that of hypothesis, and denounced realism and materialism as metaphysical nonsense. Although it has never been practiced consistently in the advanced natural sciences and has been criticized by many philosophers, notably Popper (1959 [1935], 1963), logical positivism remains the tacit philosophy of many scientists. Regrettably, the anti-positivism fashionable in the metatheory of social science is often nothing but an excuse for sloppiness and wild speculation.
- ^ "Popper, Falsifiability, and the Failure of Positivism". 7 August 2000. Archived from the original on 7 January 2014. Retrieved 30 June 2012.
The upshot is that the positivists seem caught between insisting on the V.C. [Verifiability Criterion]—but for no defensible reason—or admitting that the V.C. requires a background language, etc., which opens the door to relativism, etc.
- ^ Hanfling, Oswald (2003). "Logical Positivism". Routledge History of Philosophy. Vol. IX. Routledge. pp. 193–194.
- Harper-Collins, 1999, pp. 669–737
- ^ Giambattista Vico, Principi di scienza nuova, Opere, ed. Fausto Nicolini (Milan: R. Ricciardi, 1953), pp. 365–905.
- ^ Morera, Esteve (1990) p. 13 Gramsci's Historicism: A Realist Interpretation Archived 16 May 2016 at the Wayback Machine
- ^ Burawoy, Michael: "For Public Sociology" Archived 21 April 2015 at the Wayback Machine (American Sociological Review, February 2005
- ^ Ashley D, Orenstein DM (2005). Sociological theory: Classical statements (6th ed.). Boston, MA: Pearson Education. pp. 239–240.
- ^ Ashley D, Orenstein DM (2005). Sociological theory: Classical statements (6th ed.). Boston, MA: Pearson Education. p. 241.
- ^ ISBN 9787301124314.
- Conjectures and Refutations, p. 256 Routledge, London, 1963
- ^ Karl Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery, 1934, 1959 (1st English ed.)
- ^ Harding 1976, p. X : "The physicist can never subject an isolated hypothesis to experimental test, but only a whole group of hypotheses" (Duhem)... "Duhem denies that unambiguous falsification procedures do exist in science."
- ^ Thomas, David 1979 Naturalism and social sciences, ch. Paradigms and social science, p.161
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- ^ Trochim, William. "Social Research Methods Knowledge Base". socialresearchmethods.net.
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- ^ ISBN 978-1412974738.
- ^ Friedrich Stadler, The Vienna Circle: Studies in the Origins, Development, and Influence of Logical Empiricism, Springer, 2015, p. 250.
- ^ "Main Currents of Marxism" by Leszek Kolakowski pp. 327, 331
- Suhrkamp, 1968, chap. 1.
- ^ Schunk, Learning Theories: An Educational Perspective, 5th, 315
- ISBN 978-0-7456-4328-1p. 68
- ^ a b c d e f Fagan, Andrew. "Theodor Adorno (1903–1969)". Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Archived from the original on 24 February 2012. Retrieved 24 February 2012.
- ^ Tittle, Charles. 2004. "The Arrogance of Public Sociology". Social Forces, June 2004, 82(4)
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- ^ Portugali, Juval and Han Meyer, Egbert Stolk (2012) Complexity Theories of Cities Have Come of Age p. 51 Archived 10 May 2016 at the Wayback Machine
- ^ "Positivism".
- ^ Varela, F. J., Thompson, E. T., & Rosch, E. (1991). The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience. The MIT Press.
- ^ Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (1999). Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought. Basic books.
- ^ a b Hanson, Barbara. 2008. "Wither Qualitative/Quantitative?: Grounds for Methodological Convergence." Quality and Quantity 42:97–111.
- ^ Bryman, Alan. 1984. "The Debate about Quantitative and Qualitative Research: A Question of Method or Epistemology?." The British Journal of Sociology 35:75–92.
- ^ a b c Holmes, Richard. 1997. "Genre analysis, and the social sciences: An investigation of the structure of research article discussion sections in three disciplines". English For Specific Purposes, vol. 16, num. 4:321–337.
- ^ a b Brett, Paul. 1994. "A genre analysis of the results section of sociology articles". English For Specific Purposes. Vol 13, Num 1:47–59.
- ^ Gartell, David, and Gartell, John. 1996. "Positivism in sociological practice: 1967–1990". Canadian Review of Sociology, Vol. 33 No. 2.
- ^ Boudon, Raymond. 1991. "Review: What Middle-Range Theories are". Contemporary Sociology, Vol. 20 Num. 4 pp. 519–522.
- ^ Halfpenny, Peter. Positivism and Sociology: Explaining Social Life. London:Allen and Unwin, 1982.
- ^ JSTOR 2095839.
- ^ Hacking, I. (ed.) 1981. Scientific revolutions. Oxford Univ. Press, New York.
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External links
- The full text of the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica article "Positivism" at Wikisource
- Parana, Brazil
- Porto Alegre, Brazil
- Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
- Posnan, Poland
- Positivists Worldwide
- Maison d'Auguste Comte, France