PSITIVISM AND THE EXPLANATORY TRADITION

 Nineteenth century positivism

Nineteenth-century positivism, represented by Comte and Durkheim, proposes a way of producing knowledge based on empirical demonstration and causal explanation of social facts. For this epistemological current, only that which comes close to the objectivity and generalization of the natural sciences can be considered science.

Taking up the ideas of his intellectual father, the Count of Saint-Simon, Comte will proclaim that the sciences are governed by the passage of three historical and cognitive stages:

The second important thinker in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries for the foundation of positivism is Émile Durkheim, a French sociologist who establishes, in his well-known text The Rules of Sociological Method (1895), the methodological pillars for the successful completion of scientific research. For him these would be the basic rules:

The logical positive

It aims to overcome the nineteenth century by focusing it’s research on empirical demonstration, the measurable experimental basis is the legitimization of any attempt at theoretical or rational abstraction. Without an empirical basis it is not possible to validate something as scientific, that is, its concrete verification.

Logical positivism develops with empirical rigor the differentiation between science and non-science, establishing the following mechanisms of scientific demarcation:

•   Scientific demarcation: It is the differentiation of matters that are unclear and difficult to demonstrate empirically and measurably, from those matters that can be approached quantitatively or scientifically. This focus makes it possible to demarcate the subjects and objects of study of science from those subjects and objects of non-scientific knowledge, such as, for example, the question of the spirit, the soul or God. On the other hand, topics such as energy, force and inertia can be studied and measured scientifically.

•  Differentiation between analytical and synthetic scientific statements: They are the containers of great theoretical complexity and are not very predictable in everyday description. Their enunciation implies coherence with a previous theoretical system and has no immediate factual or empirical demonstration; for example, a square has four equal sides, a triangle has three sides, the whole is greater than the parts it contains. As can be seen, its demonstration is only feasible in the field of a mathematical, geometrical and logical system of reference.

Critical rationalism

It transcends nineteenth-century positivism and logical positivism in that it defends investigative debate or falsification as the foundation of scientific development. Thus, the sciences advance in the proliferation of debates and constant academic confrontations. Hence, criticism is the ability to debate the existing.

The falsification

Falsification allows in science a continuous renewal of its academic bases and a constant updating of the critique of existing knowledge. It could only be said that Physics advances in the constant confrontation between physical theories, or the advance of Psychology insofar as there is a continuous debate of psychological theories.

It is understood that science exists given the openness to new theses within it. Falsification occurs in two ways:

•  First, as a finding of previously unexplained facts, issues that appear in the field not previously considered.

•   Secondly, the claims of argumentation of the existence of the new facts, not only their existence but also their explanation.