This is the next in my series of saved Canvas discussions from our Human Ecology seminar, Fall of 2025. It’s actually three thematic posts from the discussion board (which wasn’t actually much of a discussion, since I was the only one to ever post to it).
Throughout my career, I have been called, sneeringly, a positivist on a fairly regular basis. This has always confused me. I’ve always assumed it was about epistemology of science, and I am certainly no Logical Positivist. My personal epistemology of science is largely pragmatic with realist sympathies. But, as thick as I may be, it actually started to dawn on me that these critics might mean something other than the ideas from the Vienna Circle. When I taught the new EBS grad seminar on human ecology last Fall, I decided it was time to come to grips with this term. What does it mean when a critic refers to someone (usually in a derogatory way) as being “a positivist.” This is common from cultural anthropologists, sociologists of science, critical cultural studies scholars, etc.
In his (1981) edited volume, Scientific Revolutions, Ian Hacking identified the characteristics of positivism in 20th-century science. It can be a bit tricky to get the right list since it turns out he had two lists that were partially overlapping—one for philosophical positivism and one for what Hilary Putnam called “the received view” of science.” This latter seems the more important one for the purposes of this class. Features of positivism in the received view of science in the 20th century included the following (from the Positivism entry on Wikipedia):
- 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.
Feature 3 caused me a bit of distress. I understand (I think) the insistence that statements be testable, etc. The thing that got me was the statement, “thus positivism rejects much of classical metaphysics.” Um…
Here’s my understanding from what I can piece together. This is actually a fundamental statement, not a throw-away at the end of a statement about testability.
Positivism is, at is heart, a rejection of classical metaphysics. That may not be especially helpful to you if, like me, you weren’t a philosophy major.
I think of metaphysics as the branch of philosophy that deals with the big questions that lie beyond the scope of physics and the observable world. Things that make you say, “dude.” Classical metaphysics asks questions like:
- Teleology: Does the universe have an ultimate purpose or goal? (e.g., Is there a reason for existence?)
- Essence: What is the fundamental “what-ness” or essence of a thing? (e.g., What makes a chair a chair, beyond its physical atoms?)
- First Cause: Is there an uncaused cause, like God, that set everything in motion? The root node in the DAG of life.
- Substance: What is reality ultimately made of? Is it matter, mind, or something else?
All of these questions share the commonality that you can’t design an experiment to test them. Well, this is at least what reviewers said to my failed NSF proposal, “Beyond Atoms: An Experimental Assessment of Chairness.”
Positivism is a response to this by proposing a strict criterion for what constitutes a meaningful statement, namely, the verification principle. This principle states that a statement is only meaningful if it is either:
- Analytically true (true by definition, like “All bachelors are unmarried” or 2+2=4).
- Empirically verifiable (testable through observation and experience).
None of those big questions of classical metaphysics fall into either of these categories of allowable questions, so they are meaningless from the standpoint of positivist epistemology. The last line of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (with which I was slightly obsessed my first year of college) summarizes this idea neatly: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” This is how the term “metaphysics” can become a pejorative to a certain sort of critic. Ha, two can play at that game!
In some ways, it’s easiest to see the elements of positivist thinking by investigating critiques of it. When a cultural anthropologist, for example, criticizes positivism or levels the term “positivist” as an epithet at me, it turns out they are almost never referring to the specific doctrines of the Vienna Circle (i.e., the Logical Positivists like Rudolf Carnap). Instead, they are using it as a shorthand to accuse me of a kind of philosophical naïvety about science. The critique implies the belief in one or more of the following:
Naïve Realism: You believe science gives us a direct, unproblematic, and objective mirror of reality (bro, you believe in reality?), ignoring how our theories, language, and culture shape what we see.
Scientism: You believe that science is the only valid form of knowledge and that other ways of knowing (e.g., indigenous knowledge, the humanities, arts, or personal experience) are inferior or invalid.
Ignoring Social Context: You treat scientific facts as if they exist in a vacuum, completely detached from the social, political, and historical contexts in which they are produced.
The Fact-Value Distinction: You hold a rigid belief that scientific facts are, and should be, completely separate from human values, a position that critics argue is both impossible and often undesirable.
Come to think of it, in the various times I’ve been accused of being a positivist, these are, indeed, some of the ideas that would surface. Overall, I don’t think that my work or my philosophy falls prey to any of these, but why ruin a good criticism with facts.
Uh-oh, did I just ignore social context? Or maybe I unreasonably distinguished fact and value.
There are other features of positivism that are either core (e.g., reductionism, falsificationism) or part of a broader modernist zeitgeist (e.g., monism, teleology). Way too many weeds to get into there. However, in my own defense, I will say that (1) I am very interested in systems and emergence, (2) I believe there are situations that don’t lend themselves to falsification and we have to do our (Bayesian) best with verification, (3) I don’t have strong opinions about monism, though I am no fan of facile dichotomies (like Analytic/Empirical?) either, (4) I am a radical adaptationist and therefore inherently anti-teleological (for instance, since adaptation is always to a specific place/time, it is nonsensical to say that some population or species is “more adapted” than some other).
Science and Relativism
As I said above, I see my own personal philosophy of science as pragmatic with realist sympathies. As far as I can tell, every practicing scientist I know is at least part realist. I think it would be hard to do all the hard, tedious work of science if you didn’t believe in some sort of correspondence between your scientific theories and an actual world!
The thing that I suspect would have sent 25-year-old Jamie into spasms is that I also have come to believe that Feyerabend actually had it right. Science is somewhat anarchic. I always, mistakenly, thought that his famous phrase “anything goes” was some extreme relativist, anti-science statement. In fact, what I think he meant is that philosophy shouldn’t be prescriptive to science. Scientists do what they need to do. Philosophers of science can make sense of it and help us be better scientists, but when they lay out specific recipes for how we can and cannot do science, they gone beyond their remit.
If you’re interested in the various major schools of the philosophy of science, I strongly recommend the short book by the great pragmatist philosopher of science, Larry Laudan. It’s called Science and Relativism.
Of the books I read in college, this is one of the most influential.
The book is written as a dialogue (quadrilogue?) between four philosophers of science: a realist (Karl Selnam), a positivist (Rudy Reichfeigl), a pragmatist (Percy Lauwey), and a relativist (Quincy Rortabender). If you know anything about the field, you can guess the identities of the contributors to these various (poly-) portmanteaux. Popper, Carnap, Laudan, and Rorty, respectively, are clearly in there. Since I know pragmatism the best, I’m pretty confident that “Percy Lauwey” == Charles Sanders Pierce + Larry Laudan + John Dewey. “Karl Selnam” may be Karl Popper + Bertrand Russell + Hilary Putnam (not sure about the “Sel” part, but “sel” is contained in Russell). “Rudy Reichfeigl” is probably Rudolf Carnap + Hans Reichenbach + Herbert Feigl. The relativist is the hardest one for me. I guess “Quincy Rortabender” == Willard Van Orman Quine + Richard Rorty + Paul Feyerabend?
On Feyeraband
This is an amazing interview with Paul Feyerabend. the year before he died. The dude was amazing. I find the origin story of his most famous work, Against Method, really compelling. Basically, Imre Lakatos goaded him into writing something more extreme than what he really believed. You wouldn’t guess it by the way he discusses it, but apparently the unexpected death of Lakatos was totally devastating to Feyerabend.
He was a professor at Berkeley from 1958-1989, obviously spanning the famously volatile late sixties. Feyerabend lectured on revolutionaries during the student uprising, invited Malcolm X and Lenny Bruce as guest lecturers, and addressed issues of gay rights and racism way ahead of his time at an institution that, despite its reputation for radicalism in the broader public consciousness, had a famously conservative philosophy department (e.g., Wallace Matson, John Searle), not to mention was home to some pretty awful scientific racists (e.g., Vincent Sarich, Arthur Jensen). Feyerabend believed that Searle tried to get him fired, and only gave up when he realized how much paperwork would be involved. See: Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s (archived) article on Feyerabend.
Feyerabend was a methodological pluralist. That’s really what Against Method is about, and in it, he wrote, “Science is an essentially anarchistic enterprise: theoretical anarchism is more humanitarian and more likely to encourage progress than its law-and-order alternatives.” I am in full agreement with him on this and find this view totally compatible with my approach to thinking about both science and applied topics of central interest to me like adaptation.
References
Feyerabend, P. 1975. Against Method. London: Verso.
Hacking, I. (ed.). 1981. Scientific Revolutions. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Laudan, L. 1990. Science and Relativism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.