Becky_Positivism

Positivism Pages

Examples of Positivism - Week one -

It is interesting that positivism arose out of the turmoil of the french revolution and the british industrial revolution. Comte, the founder of positivism, developed this theory as a grounding for social order. He saw how britian was outstripping France in terms of industrial advancement and he felt that this industrialism guided the social order. "The absence of any integrated, organic culture after the disorder that followed the Enlightenment and the Revolution indicated to Auguste Comte the deep malaise that beset French society. The organic worldview of medieval Christianity had been disturbed. … He approached the problems of society with reason alone; in that he was a philosopher. But he wrote from … the side that had learned the cost of corrosive criticism.[|[3]]" Comte felt, "Positivism was ‘scientific’ because knowledge had practical value and the growth of science was for the benefit of humankind" (para 11).

What is ironic, I think, is Comte's view that Christianity didn't fit a positivist mode of thinking when organizations such as the Catholic Church are still Positivist in nature. They are structurally functional organizations that have, so far, survived many revolutions and attacks. The Bible as a guide for life informs how believers live. It is grounded in the "is of God" not the "ought of God" which is, by nature, positivist. The church adheres to the ideas of structural differentiation which states that as the organization grows it will break into small subgroups of specializations. In essence, a complex heirarchy is created as the organization grows accompanied by bureaucracy. It is a rules bound organization and its rules are really not meant to be interpreted. Therefore, it can be described as objective in these terms. []

The military could also be characterized as a positivist organization with its complex heirarchy and enduring structural functionalism. Like the Catholic Church it is rules-bound and concrete. In this way, it is deviod of value judgements. This is what is - not what ought to be. The rules inform the prescription and behavior where little choice is given.

Another example of positivism is manufacturing. Materials are input into machines producing predictable output based on the machine's functionality. X causes Y. Input material X into machine and output is Y everytime. This is concrete, generalizable and of course observable. There are no value judgements. Material cannot choose to be something other than Y once they enter the mechanistic process.