JBR Journal of Interdisciplinary Medicine and Dental Sciences

Positivism-Open Access Journals

 Positivism is the name for the scientific study of the social world. Its goal is to formulate abstract and universal laws on the operative dynamics of the social universe. A law is a statement about relationships among forces in the universe. In positivism, laws are to be tested against collected data systematically. Auguste Comte—who saw Newton's law of gravity as the exemplar—advocated positivism as a means to legitimate the new discipline of sociology. Herbert Spencer and Emile Durkheim executed this advocacy in formulating laws that were assessed by data. Positivism however, has, never gone unchallenged, particularly in sociology and anthropology; and as a consequence it has been subject to intense epistemological debate. The debate was, for much of the first half of the twentieth century, framed by the Vienna Circle, a group of intellectuals in Vienna who debated the nature of thought and logic on the one side, and their relations to empirical data on the other. This debate continues in many different guises at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Positivism is the name of a social and intellectual movement that tried to learn from the mistakes of the Enlightenment project that eventuated, first, in the Reign of Terror following the French Revolution of 1789, and second, in the irrationalism of the Weimar Republic following Germany's defeat in World War I. While it has been customary to distinguish between the quasipolitical movement called ‘positivism’ originated by Auguste Comte in the 1830s and the more strictly philosophical movement called ‘logical positivism’ associated with the Vienna Circle of the 1930s, both shared a common sensibility, namely, that the unchecked exercise of reason can have disastrous practical consequences. Thus, both held that reason needs ‘foundations’ to structure its subsequent development so as not to fall prey to a self-destructive skepticism

High Impact List of Articles

Relevant Topics in General Science