"When philosophy paints its grey in grey then has a shape of life grown old. By philosophy's grey in grey it cannot be rejuvenated but only understood. The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of dusk." -- G.W.F. Hegel, 'Preface', Philosophy of Right.
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'Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainity and agitation distinquish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones ... All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.' Marx
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questioning positivism
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August 14, 2009
In an earlier post entitled questioning economics I explored the relationship between economics and positivist in order to question neo-classical economics' claim to be a positivist science. I ended the post by saying that the self-questioning of neoclassical economics needs to include a discussion of its underlying positivist philosophy of science.
I now want to have a close look at positivism, using the work of Jorge Rivas in Scientific Realism and the Study of Political Economy. Rivas links positivism back to classical empiricism. He says that classical empiricism conflates the empirical and the actual levels of reality, as:
It holds that the only thing that really exists is our experience. The early Positivists adopted this empiricist ontology as the very core of their philosophy of science to distinguish themselves from metaphysical and religious explanations based on unobservables, and it continued to be the basic ontological position of some branches of Positivist philosophy of social science as late as the 1970s....However, most Positivists today recognize only the events which actually occur as real (often calling true empiricism “Naïve Empiricism”). This position is known as actualism.
He adds that even where Positivists are actualists with regards to natural phenomena, many Positivists still hold to true empiricism when it comes to social phenomena. They hold that material reality can be distinguished from the empirical observation of it (in other words, that it is actual), but that social reality cannot (i.e. that social reality is inherently subjective and has no external reality beyond human consciousness or cognition.
Moreover, while actualist Positivists distinguish between the actual and the empirical domains (in other words, between events and perceptions of those events):
they do not distinguish between the actual and the generative domains (in other words, between events and the often unobservable underlying causes of those events). Actualism denies the reality of the generative domain. This form of empiricism does not accept that there are hidden, unknown or unrecognized mechanisms really generating actual events. Interpretivists also deny the generative domain.
He adds that an area where the Scientific Realist and Positivist approaches diverge radically is in the conception of scientific explanation, and the role of scientific laws in scientific explanation.
The Positivist conception of explanation, exemplified by Carl Hempel (and still adhered to by philosophers of science critical of some other aspects of Positivism, such as Karl Popper), claims that science has explained an event when it has formulated a universal law, or “covering law”, from which the event can be deduced (known as subsumption under a generalization). In this nomological model of explanation, a scientific law is seen to reflect the actual constant conjunction of empirically observable events. This “constant conjunction” conception of scientific laws, first developed by David Hume, derives directly from the empiricism of early Positivism because it refers to the empirical instantiation of the law itself. In other words, due to the empiricist ontology of Positivism, a scientific law cannot refer to unobservable causes. Because it is referring to the constant conjunction of events, the basic form of the law is: “if y then z”. If we identify y, then we can predict that z will follow. This means that prediction is built into the Positivist formulation of explanation. Thus, the explanation of a phenomenon also entails the ability to predict it. This is known as the “deductive-nomological” (D-N), “Humean”, or “covering law” model of explanation and scientific laws and, importantly, it produces the Positivist thesis of the symmetry of explanation and prediction.
According to Scientific Realism the propensity of objects of study to behave in certain ways results from their internal and external structures at the generative level, so that while these generative structures may be unperceived, we can attempt to know of them through their effects:
While we may see a person engage in some behavior, we do not see the complex sets of relationships between the ideas, beliefs, norms, and attitudes held by that person which generated their behavior. Some generative structures and mechanisms are inherently unobservable, like gravity and magnetic fields, but the fact that they are unobservable does not mean they are not real. This is just as true of social structures, such as, for example, marriage, religion, economic class, or racism, regardless of whether they are composed of and constituted by material relations, social institutions, belief-systems, discourses and/or psychological attitudes. Realism explains how it is that reality is “deeper” than both what we can observe and what actually happens, by arguing that real, causal structures generate the “surface” manifestations of phenomena.
Thus a crucial difference between the Scientific Realist and Positivist conceptions of science is that Realists argue that when scientists talk about “scientific laws” (e.g. “laws of nature”, “laws of history” or “laws of supply and demand”) they are referring to those causal mechanisms of the objects of study which makes such a law-like formulation (relatively) accurate, not to the empirical instantiation of the law itself (which is the empiricist Positivist position).
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| | Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 1:06 PM | Permalink |
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