if there's no such thing as positivism, why do you expend so much defending it, or whatever it is you think you are defending when you write this stuff? why do you feel so interpellated? (since you're being provocative, i'll rise to the bait... but only this once... there are much more interesting ways to approach this discussion. kelley's extract is i think a good place to start.
Jim heartfield wrote:
> Sam Pawlett wrote
>
> >> Logical Positivism is not the enemy. The Vienna Circle were all progressives,
> >Neurath
> >> was a Marxist.
many people have claimed to be marxists, many people are if one takes a broad view of the tradition. is this supposed to be the limit point of discussion?
> It's true that if you read any contemporary social theory there is an
> obligatory passage denouncing 'positivism'.
i haven't read anything much about positivism recently. i have seen a lot of stuff on how 'postmodernism' - whatever that is beyond tabloid and publisher fantasy - is destroying Truth, History, in short all that is Good and Worthy. i tell you i'm afraid.
> But first, the critics rarely mean the same thing by 'positivism' as the
> few logical positivists there are mean by it.
no doubt. which begs the question: why?
> And second, all of the criticisms that the sociologists make of
> 'positivism' have already been made by the logical positivists
> themselves.
such as? i don't know of any self-declared sociologists who don't have a commitment to a positivist or empiricist view - care to name some? more importantly, exactly what is this critique of positivism that logical positivists have made?
> 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).
oh please jim. can't your polemic come up with anything better than this? i think you could, but this is really scratching. care to suggest any critics of positivism who criticise it from a position which uphold relativism? since you only refer in the following to adorno et al, i would think - if you are referring to them - then you cant have actually read them at all. i don't remember any marxist critics of objectivism arguing for relativism or indeed that the problem with the very idea of 'scientific objectivity' is that it has a commitment to facticity. the issue - if you care to actually move beyond this schoolboy polemic of yours - is whether or not facts are artefacts (as marx claimed they were) in which case, the assertions of facticity by positivism are rendered - yes - suspect.
> Doubtless such a cavalier attitude to the truth
> comes in useful when you want to make up stories like I Rigoberta
> Menchu.
so menchu is an anti-positivist now? gee, i can see now why it's so important to defend positivism: all these awful things keep happening. yawn.
> Such philistinism
the world is full of unbelievers isn't is?
> is for some unknown reason more common on the left
> today,
i wonder why that is? maybe it has something to do with positivism being the epistemic attempt to conserve and defend what is from a critique which would show that what is is made, that is: is artefact.
> though in the past it was the natural province of the right.
what was a natural province of the right? a critique of positivism, enlightenment was generated by the 'right', if you mean the aristocratic, feudal and patriarchal, since - as an episteme, positivism tried to substitute formal rules for substantive ones (the privileging of method, for instance), and in so doing open up the space for the formation of new subjectivities more akin to the formal reign of the commodity-FORM, the market as a space of atomised exchangees, etc.
so what does this tell us? it certainly doesn't suggest that positivism is beyond critique form the left, and it definitely does not make marx a sub-species of positivism, no matter how much the technocratic marxism of which you are so fond of jim, would like to make out.
> 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.
eeeoo.... the whole canon? maybe lenin, maybe even a bit of engels, but the whole? come now, this is pretty wild stuff. if a critique of positivism renders null and void an objectivist marxism, i say yippee.
> 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.
no one has claimed that facts are 'arbitrary verbal constructs'. if you're thinking of saussure, then this is about the relation between the signifier and the signified, nothing to do with facts, unless you somehow - in your peculiar vocabulary - start confusing the word 'arbitrary' with 'without cause', AND if you think that there is somehow a given reason why when the actual typography of words bears some special relation with what they are supposed to signify.
> 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.
maybe so. haven't read popper for a very long time, and have little inclination to go back. but i'll take your word for it. what do i care? adorno et al were concerned with a critique of identity, which is not exactly the same thing, and i think a far better take on the issues of 'essence' than folks like derrida et al, in any case.
> 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.
so? what does this tell you other than positivism is not reducible to empiricism. if people talk bout them in the same breath, it is because they have a similar lineage, where empiricism turns out to be a variant of positivism, and that positivism turns out to be a form of idealism.
> To employ the proper terminology,
> 'positivism' is the imaginary Other that critical theory projects to
> ground itself.
a nice bit of punning on a certain crude derrideanism. but crude it is. i don't recall derrida once denying facticity, nor indeed do i recall marx asserting the need for a positivist methodology. where does your polemic get us, except a cuddle with the far right in the academic skirmishes?
truly yours,
angela