>> Logical Positivism is not the enemy. The Vienna Circle were all progressives,
>Neurath
>> was a Marxist.
It's true that if you read any contemporary social theory there is an obligatory passage denouncing 'positivism'.
But first, the critics rarely mean the same thing by 'positivism' as the few logical positivists there are mean by it.
And second, all of the criticisms that the sociologists make of 'positivism' have already been made by the logical positivists themselves.
To sociologists 'positivism' means roughly the same thing as scientific objectivity. Which is automatically suspect. Such things as 'facts' are instantaneously suspect to sociologists who proceed to bore us rigid with the schoolboy profundity that people tend to disagree over the facts (a discovery that they think is new).
Before you know where you are the very word 'facts' is spat out with a precocious ironic sneer, as if one only had to say the word to ridicule the poor naive who actually believes that there might be some things on which we could agree. Doubtless such a cavalier attitude to the truth comes in useful when you want to make up stories like I Rigoberta Menchu.
Such philistinism is for some unknown reason more common on the left today, though in the past it was the natural province of the right. But as anyone who reads carefully knows, the whole canon of marxist criticism of the capitalist economy is rendered null and void by the rejection of scientific objectivity.
Still the critique of "positivism" is sustained by a mythical re-write of the past of social theory. This mythical history suggests that only now is critical theory liberating academia from positivism. Only now do we understand that facts are arbitrary verbal constructs. Only now do we know that there are no essences.
But lo and behold! Were did we learn such things? Why, from the logical positivists themselves. It was not Adorno or Horkheimer who coined the phrase 'anti-essentialism' as a pejorative rejection of objectivity, it was Karl Popper. It was Max Schlick who saw facts as elements of consciousness at around the same time as Edmund Husserl did. And it was Ludwig Wittgenstein's concept of truth as a language game that inspired Clifford Geertz to start making up his anthropology, not Jacques Derrida.
And what conclusion could you draw from all this? I suggest that the 'positivism' that is criticised by writers like Marcuse, Horkheimer and so on is in fact a mythical object. It in no way corresponds to what those theorists who bore the name 'positivist' were doing. Rather the 'positivism' that the Frankfurt School, existentialists and later post- structuralists were criticising is a creation of their own imaginations. In fact this 'positivism' is something that is merely a negative projection of what they were saying, a kind of fall-guy, or foil. I would say that if positivism did not exist they would have had to invent it; except that, strictly speaking, the positivism that they criticised did not exist, so they did invent it. To employ the proper terminology, 'positivism' is the imaginary Other that critical theory projects to ground itself. -- Jim heartfield