>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?
There are a few: Norman Denzin, Steven Seidman, and some others whose names escape me at the moment.
>more importantly, exactly
>what is this critique of positivism that logical positivists have made?
Yes, i've quite forgotten all this stuff, it seemed so utterly irrelevant at them time; care to remind Jim?
>> To sociologists 'positivism' means roughly the same thing as scientific
>> objectivity. Which is automatically suspect.
Well, no. There are many different versions of positivism and of the positivism that sociologists reject. For instance, I know of one fellow who thinks that it's just the idea that we can look and see what's out there. For others, positivism is the claim that there must be an absolute dissociation between the logic of discovery and the logic of justification.
Others are simply out to reject the notion that there is a unity between natural and social science. Now, I'm hazily recalling Hempel's concession speech re that topic, but I do think that he clearly adhered to the ultimate possibility that everything could be reduced to physics. Btw, there are a number of sociologists in the US who proudly proclaim their positivism, Randall Collins is one who comes readily to mind. Oh and Jonathan Turner.
>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 -
Yeah....and wasn't Saussure trying to create a science out of semiotics. And honest to good red blooded Science?
>> 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.
Oh and btw I seem to recall that Horkheimer did refer to Popper's critique as useful to his own. Horkheimer seems to have been rejecting the attempt to reduce justification to the process of empirically testing theories. For Horkheimer, "If the truth of the pudding is in the eating, then the eating is still in the future" (paraphrased) He was rejecting Popper's 'plaints about politics and science, though again it's been a long time.