positivism?

Question

I have to write a 5 page essay on positivism. and I think it is far too boring for me to be able to do it. Can anyone provide some sort of hook or insight into this oh so dry philosophy? there has to be some sort of lengthier more interesting angle to it than "the only true knowledge is scientific knowledge"

while I appreciate you copying and pasting of the wikipedia enty on positivism it isn't exactly what I need....
I asked for some interesting angle. not more info. (that I already had)

Answer 1

At the time that positivism arose, the first world war had ended, and usually lots of different ideas arise out of the sort of wake-up-call effect that wars tend to have. At the time, there was so much uncertainty in knowledge, and uncertainty opens the door for radical or ultra-nationalistic thinking that can propel the masses into the insanity of war. So by establishing a new criteria for knowledge, one can, in effect try to prevent catastrophe by requiring a strict verifiable condition for claiming that something is knowledge. The effect of this is that mainly only scientific knowledge is left, because it is possible to support scientific knowledge with claims, while matters of opinion and rhetoric are left out of the picture. A sort of problem comes in when one must ask then - how do we develop an ethical or moral theory based on scientific knowledge? Other philosophers, such as Karl Popper, broke ranks with the positivists, and demanded an even more rigorous criteria for knowledge, introducing the concept of "falsification". A similar event happened in philosophy with Descartes when he tried to establish a rational foundation for knowledge with his "i think therefore i am" stuff. The positivists, it seems have come full circle, demanding an empirical foundation for knowledge.

Answer 2

Positivism is a philosophy developed by Auguste Comte (widely regarded as the first true sociologist) in the middle of the 19th century that stated that the only authentic knowledge is scientific knowledge, and that such knowledge can only come from positive affirmation of theories through strict scientific method. This view is sometimes referred to as a scientist ideology, and is often shared by technocrats who believe in the necessary progress through scientific progress. As an approach to the philosophy of science deriving from Enlightenment thinkers like Pierre-Simon Laplace (and many others), positivism was first systematically theorized by Comte, who saw the scientific method as replacing metaphysics in the history of thought, and who observed the circular dependence of theory and observation in science. Comte was thus one of the leading thinkers of the social evolutionism thought. Brazil's national motto, Ordem e Progresso ("Order and Progress") was taken from Comte's positivism, also influential in Poland. Positivism is the most evolved stage of society in anthropological Evolutionism, the point where science and rational explanation for scientific phenomena develops. Marxism and predictive dialectics is a highly positivist system of theory.

The key features of positivism as of the 1950s, as defined in the "received view"[1], 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 falsified 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.
Positivism is also depicted as "the view that all true knowledge is scientific,"[2] and that all things are ultimately measurable. Because of its "close association with reductionism,"[2] positivism and reductionism involve the view that "entities of one kind... are reducible to entities of another,"[2] such as societies to numbers, or mental events to chemical events. It also involves the contention that "processes are reducible to physiological, physical or chemical events,"[2] and even that "social processes are reducible to relationships between and actions of individuals,"[2] or that "biological organisms are reducible to physical systems

Answer 3

you cant babble for a whole page about how it was created, then some on logic and what not, then some on its influences on normal culture, then some on how it became the base for authoritarian polistics (mexico brazil)

Answer 4

To whom it may concern:
I hereby resign from this boring philosophy class.


Sincerely,