Advantages and Disadvantages of Positivism

Advantages and Disadvantages of incontrovertiblenessQ. Discuss the advantages, strengths, disadvantages and flunkes of a convinced(p) get to the sociable cognizances.The profusion of engagement and multifariousness of meaning of the script favourableness results in a need for either essay on the subject to graduation give its own precise rendering for its subprogram of the term, distinguishing its particular context from its hire in other contexts. The term favourableness, prime(prenominal) coined by the philosopher Auguste Comte in the nineteenth-century, was first origin in tot onlyyy confined to the boundaries of philosophy and immanent recognition by the present, the term has spread its meaning to cover field as diverse as law, policy-making theory, the kind informations, philosophy and make up literature. In all told of these fields the dictionary definition of incontrovertibleness as . . . a system recognizing tho that which post be scientifically supp ort or logically proved, and therefore rejecting metaphysics and theism (Oxford, 1989 pp. 385-386) remains broadly true of just about of its uses, though it does little to reveal the subtle distinctions of use of the word positivism in each of these disciplines. For face, legal positivism is . . . a put on which, in contrast to the indispensable law view, claims that a legal system atomic number 50 be defined independently of evaluative terms or propositions is the view that in law (Hugh-Jones, S. Laidlaw, J, 2000 p88) in literature positivism refers to a specialized period of Polish literature where writers were inspired by the nascent achievements of accomplishment and technology and in philosophy the term logical positivism meant the scientific investigation of the philosophy of language as in writers such as Wittgenstein. All in all indeed, the term positivism has an umbrella use designated by the dictionary definition, but thence has s of all timeal further and more(prenominal)(prenominal) individualistic uses depending upon the context in which it appears. logical positivism is the view that serious scientific inquiry should non searchfor ultimate causes deriving from some extraneous source but must confineitself to the study of relations alert between facts which be directlyaccessible to observation(Hugh-Jones, S. Laidlaw, J 2000 p.3)The definition of positivism chosen for use in this essay, its particular domain macrocosm the kindly recognitions, is that stated above by Hugh-Jones and Laidlaw. According to this version of positivism, entropy collect from sense perceptions is the only possible data that may be used as a foundation for knowledge and thought. Hence, all data and phenomena taken from beyond sense perceptions or the properties of observable things is banished thuds a priori metaphysics and worship dismissed in toto. acquisition alone sets the perimeters for piece knowledge, and, accordingly, positivism maint ains the expected value that science volition ultimately extend to to solve all kind problems. As such, a hearty scientific definition of positivism regards the look of loving scientists as identical in importance to that of vivid scientists that is, genial scientists, comparable rude(a) scientists, employ theories and explanations for phenomena, inferred from sense data for the purpose of amicable benefit. With obedience to political science as a loving science Popper hence says We get the particular definition of one of the well-disposed sciences political science which tries to separate the subject from the values we apply to it, and argues that it is possible to ascend value- with nominate knowledge (Popper, 1983 p. 75). This quotation shows the extent to which one particular hearty sciences use of the term positivism has mutated from its cosmopolitan umbrella use.For the purposes of this essay, positivism will be regarded as having four essential characteri stics (King, 1994 p. 204). (1) It is concrned with the search for the conjugation of scientific method, that is, with the notion that logic and inquiry be universal principles extending crosswise all scientific domains. (2) That the ultimate end of scientific inquiry is to gives explanations of hearty phenomenon and to make portents about their behaviour as according to discernable laws of society. and so positivism in the fond sciences seeks also to develop a general law of kind understanding, by discovering necessary and sufficient conditions for every phenomenon. (3) Positivism maintains that social scientific knowledge must al elbow rooms be subject to proof through empirical experimentation. All subjects of reaseach and investigation in the social sciences should be based upon observations derived from sense-perceptions. (4) Social sciences must seek to free themselves of value-judgements as far as possible, and of moral, political, and religion ideas that might contami nate their research. frankincense, in short social sciences must seek to dicover universal conditions behind social phenomenaall social scientific empirical statements must be asolute truthes which atomic number 18 true at all times and true in all places lowestly, research mass proved only by empirical experimentation.In There Is More Than One focusing To Do Political wisdom Marsh Smith (2001), while debating whether the social sciences might legitimately birth both a overconfident and historicalist tone-beginning to science, argue that one of the brain strengths of positivism is that it is foundationalist that is . . . in ontological terms it argues that there is a real world out there, that it is independent of an agents knowledge of it and that . . . it is possible, exploitation the proper research methods for an observer to discover these real relationships between social phenomenon (Marsh Smith, 2001 p. 529). thereof the great strength and advantage of a incont rovertible approach shot to the social sciences is that it grounds anthropology, sociology, political science and so on upon a hard and definite foundation of empirically testable data, and makes theories out of this data from which unassailable laws of social behaviour may be attained. A mho distinct advantage then of positivism is that it permits an analysis of the causal relationships between phenomena. Positivism thus allows the social sciences to make certain predictions about the phenomenal world. Thus Dowding states . . . all good political scientists produce models with definite predictions . . . which they can then test one way or another against data gathered from the actual world (Dowding, 2001 p. 92). A chief strength then of a positivistic approach, is that it brings to the social sciences the desire to emulate the excellence of the immanent sciences in respect of their rigorous experimentation, precisely stated hypotheses, definite laws, and thus prediction of beha viour. By draw near its investigations thus, social scientists attain a richly level of truth in their results and in their predictions, and thus come scalethe likes of to a total description of the behaviour of social phenomenon. By approaching the social sciences from a positivist position, social scientists argon able to slue away from existing knowledge many prejudices, suppositions, superstitions and other non-scientific opinions that harbour gathered about these social phenomena (Marsh Smith, 2001). In other words, positivism, by declaring valid only those things which set to its vigorous standards of investigation, strips social phenomenon of their perceived nature and reveals them as they in reality are.A bit key advantage of taking a positivist approach to the social sciences is that such a move solidly root the social sciences in the accomplishments of the innate sciences over the past four 100 years. Early positivists like Comte, Spencer and Saint-Simon unde rstand their theory and work as something evolution directly out of the experimental and theoretical achievements of the great natural scientists like radicalton, Spinoza, Darwin and others. Comte knew that the natural sciences and natural scientists, were essentially positivist that is, they appealed to the perception and mea currentment of butt sense-data from which to make experiments, analyze results and make theory, predictions and laws. Comte and the other early positivists thus understood their work as an act of making explicit the theory which natural scientists had adhered to for centuries. When, in the twentieth-century, social positivists like Ernst Laas, Friedrich Jodl and Eugen Duhring began to establish the theoretical and experimental parameters of the social sciences, they also understood their work as a branch of the natural sciences and as a continuation of its discoveries. Anthropologists, sociologists, social scientists of the early twentieth-century faced a c hoice they could orientate their subjects within the battlefield of natural science and its big harvest of the past cardinal decades, or they could orientate it in the sphere of theology and the liberal arts which had dominated all compassionate tarradiddle before the advent of natural science. Laas, Jodl, Duhring and later Marsh, Smith and others deliver all agreed that the social sciences must be built upon the platform establish by the natural sciences. These sciences occupy been the predominant intellectual place for occidental Europe for nearly four hundred years, and social scientists think that the positivist approach to the natural sciences offers greater objectivity, certainty of prediction, and darker insight into their subjects than could achieved by any other method of inquiry.Further, the allegiance of the social sciences to the natural sciences, through a shared conviction in the positivist philosophy, means that the social sciences can constantly draw upon the fund of new empirical hooey nonchalant unearthed by these natural sciences. In other words if the social sciences ingest an exchange of knowledge between themselves and the natural sciences, then every purification of experimental method, theory, or analysis achieved by the natural sciences may be immediately seized upon and utilized by the social sciences also. And, vice-versa, this interchange allows the social sciences to more freely disseminate their discoveries within the world of the natural sciences. Moreover, by share a positivist philosophy with the natural sciences, the social sciences may draw from its authority in the presentation of their results to the wider scientific and academic confederation. That is, the employment of positivism by the social sciences, dispels and neutralizes the accusations from some quarters of the scientific and outside world, for instance those of Karl Popper, that such sciences are pseudo-sciences. This claim can hold no cant over if it is seen that the natural and social sciences share alike the homogeneous methodology and principles of operation. Nonetheless, it should be make clear that whilst the social sciences derive authority and knowledge from the natural sciences, that they do not depend upon it exclusively for authority. Indeed, the social sciences have made their own refinements to positivism, and thus their methods of experimentation and analysis, quite independently of those achieved in the natural sciences. The social sciences have adapted the positivism they received from the social sciences to conform to their own empirical material and the idiosyncratic and diverse domains encountered in societies and the human world. In short, the social sciences have moulded positivism to the world of empirical human affairs, thus entering a territory that the natural sciences had previously not trodden.Historically, perhaps the greatest weakness and hence disadvantage of positivism generally, and with respe ct to the social sciences in particular, has been its insistence upon methodological supremeness. Since the time of positivisms foundation in the philosophy of Auguste Comte, positivists have persistently sought to use its scientific methods to explain every conceivable aspect of social phenomenon that is, they have wanted to observe an object in its totality, tracing its entire phenomenological casuistry, its material composition, and thus produce a arrogant theory of knowledge about that phenomenon. According to this scientific philosophy positivism must produce absolute laws to describe the behaviour and nature of phenomenal objects. The naivety of this search for the flawlessness of methodology and absoluteness of social scientific laws was exposed in the second half of the twentieth century, firstly by the advent of post-modernism (Popper, 1989 p.109-128), which showed the epistemological difficulties impossibilities? of extending science to such thoroughgoing levels seco ndly, positivisms applicability in all instances was increasingly undermined by the new theories of social scientists themselves. The various discoveries of anthropology, sociology, political science and other social sciences led researchers to an ever clearer conclusion the phenomena of social science are far too sophisticated and involve the intimate fundamental interaction of too many separate objects, people and processes to be scientifically sight in their totality.Sociologists for instance, in their investigations into the mechanisms of the smallest of social units, the family, soon realized that no absolute and all-encompassing laws could be applied to the behaviour of these units (Gerrad, 1969 pp. 201-212) the great complexity coming from the need for the axioms and paradigms which are true of one family unit must, according to sharp positivism, be shown to be true of all family units in all places and at all times. Pure positivism states that the laws of social science a re of the comparable type and significance as the laws of physics, biology and chemistry but for these laws to attain this equality, the laws of social science must be slow expressible and as rigorously testable as those of the natural sciences. The difficulty of attaining such equality is easily demonstrated by Gerrards (Gerrard, 1969) experiments, where he discusses the complexity of social issues affect in a four member family unit in America, and then postulates the near im curtain raising of scientifically demonstrating that family units in Northern France, in Thailand, in Hawaii and in all other places can be shown to succeed the same exact rules as those affecting the family in America. Thus social scientists from the 1950s onwards, confronted with the sheer vastness of ethnic, racial and community diversity, began to question the possibility of producing social laws that would be universally and ubiquitously binding. And in 2006 when even natural scientists have no certa inties even about the exact behaviour and nature of a single atom how can social scientists hope to prove laws for something as complex as a city?Another weakness of extreme positivism has been its inability to accurately prove its hypotheses through empirical experiments (Popper, 1983 p. 12 also Dowding, 1995 p. 138). Whereas experimentation in the natural sciences usually involves the investigation of non-living or relatively simple objects such as metals, stars, chemicals and so, these having the same properties constantly, in contrast, social phenomenon people, communities, organizations etc., are animate and are compositions of vast complexly intertwining feelings, emotions, thoughts, volitions, passions, motives, associations and so on. Thus, to undertake a social experiment, a social scientist has to be sure that he can separate the single mental or behavioral element, say a criminal tendency that he wants to investigate, and then to omit or control the influence of the other mental and social factors that will otherwise affect the accuracy of the experiment. In many instances such expulsion is nearly impossible to the degree of purity demanded by extreme positivists a human being cannot be put in a test-tube or a vacuum and so shielded from external influences in the way that magnesium or atoms can. Thus social scientists have become ever more conscious that a major limitation of the positivist approach in respect to their discipline is its insistence upon perfect conditions for experimentation and for the accuracy of hypotheses and predictions (Dowding, 1995).Further, other discoveries in the social sciences have begun to place an ever greater emphasis upon the life of the individual and upon ingrained experiences as vital factors in the constituency of societies (Marsh Furlong, 2002). The hermeneutic or interpretive approach has come to assume ever greater importance within the social sciences, setting up for itself an discipline of investig ation of phenomenon quite different from positivism, and therefore undermining the legitimacy of positivisms claims to describe the totality of social phenomenon. Positivism is, according to this view, the outcome of a particular culture and particular history (Western European) what legitimacy then does it have to proclaim its results as of universal validity, as it must, to meet its own standards of scientific investigation? Moreover, social scientists themselves bring to their experiments their own inbred experiences, their own thoughts, volitions, prejudices etc., and these all affect experimentation and thus the security of results just as for sure do these things in the subjects of analysis. Thus David Marsh and Martin Smith have stated, in their powerful metaphor derived from Marshs earlier article, that In the social sciences . . . subjective ontological and epistemological positions should not be treated like a pullover that can be put on when we are addressing such phil osophical issues and taken off when we are doing research (Marsh Smith, 2005 p.531). That is, they should not be treated as a pullover, as irregular measure, as they have been by positivists to date.In the final analysis, it seems clear that incomplete the extreme positivism once advocated in the wake of Auguste Comtes first philosophical writings, nor extreme anti-positivism nor anti-foundationalist positions as have recently been taken by some hermeneutists and realists, can lead to significant approaching progress in the social sciences. The chief strength and advantage of a positivist approach is the vigorous process of setting hypotheses, of empirical experimentation to test these hypotheses, of deep analysis to measure the results, and then the ability to codify the results in a set of laws and predictions. Claiming for themselves, in this sense, a parallel certainty of laws and predictions as and laws demanded by the natural sciences, positivism reveals to the social scie nces phenomenal objects as they really are as they are when stripped of superstitions, fallacious theories, prejudice and so on. Positivism demands a definite residue of facts and truths that are universally applicable to social groups and communities irregardless of time, place or environment. In striving so vigorously for such ideals, positivism gives the social sciences a high degree of authority and respectability within the wider scientific and academic community as a whole. Further, a positivist approach in the social sciences affords a lay down means of comparison and exchange of knowledge between other disciplines such law, philosophy, literature and so that employ positivism also. Indeed, in seminal respects, such is the importance of positivism for the social sciences that it is difficult to see how they could justify being sciences without it.The two principal disadvantages of a positivist application to the social sciences are these firstly, that its search for ideal a nd perfect standards of scientific methodology and analysis are too unrealistic when set beside the extreme complexity of social phenomenon the second weakness, is positivisms lack of empathy and consideration of the subjective, individual and hermeneutic aspects of social phenomenon. Dealing with the first objection, critics of positivism argue that it cannot working as it does in the outside world, in cities and in companies, in villages and mass organizations attain the same standards of empirical excellence, either in experimentation or in checkout of results, as can natural scientists working in the controlled conditions of a lab and deriving principles mostly from inanimate matter of slighter sophistication than human beings. Moreover, social scientists have a nearly insuperable difficulty in codifying laws of social phenomena with the precision that physics or chemistry allow for material phenomena. Thus positivism in the social sciences attains a lower level of predictio n and accuracy with respect to the phenomenon it observes, than do the natural sciences. The second major weakness of a positivist application is its failure to take sufficient number of the subjectivity of individual life and to interpret the meaning of that phenomenon for the subject and the community of the subject. On these matters positivism has nearly nothing to say, and thus it is barred from a whole hemisphere of human social experience.As the first convict of this conclusion suggested neither an extreme positivist not an extreme subjective or hermeneutic attitude can dominate the future of the social sciences. Rather, social scientists must learn to join positivism with subjectivism, thus fusing the two halves of social phenomenal experience. If positivism can be brought into union with the subjective in the social sciences, and if positivists can learn to tolerate something less than nonpareil in their methodological approach, then positivism must still be said to have a large contribution to make to the future of social science. In might be said then, in our final words, that positivism is simultaneously an advantage and disadvantage for the social sciences whether one or other of these qualities is dominant remains to be seen.BIBLIOGRAPHY Dowding, K. (2001). There Must Be An End To Confusion Policy Networks, Intellectual Fatigue, and the Need for Political Science Methods Courses in British Universities, in Political Studies, Vol 1., pp. 89-105. Dowding, K. (1995). Model or simile? A Critical Review of the Policy of Network Approach. Political Studies, Vol. 45, Issue. 1, pp. 136-158. Green, D. P. Shapiro, I. (1994). Pathologies of logical Choice Theory A Critique of Applications in Political Science, pp. 89-95. New Haven, London. Gerrard, James. (1969). The Sociology of the Family, pp. 303-316. Ford Press,Pittsburgh. King, G. (et al.). (1994). Designing Social Enquiry Scientific Inference in Qualitative Research, pp 201-208. Princeton Univer sity Press, Princeton. Hugh-Jones, Steven Laidlaw, James. (2000). 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