<< 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. >>
This is rather clever, Popper,a s Jim probably knows, sais more or less the same thing in his contribution to the Frankfurt School critical theory volume on the "Positivists Dispute in German Sociology." In defense of the Frankfurters and the pomos, though, there is something correspomnding to their notion of "positivism." even of logical positivism is only an instance of it. What corresponds to this idea ofd "positivism" is the idea that science is the best way to gain knowledge about the world, so that if youy want to know something about ther way something woeks, you should do conreolled empirical research. This is a view shared by pragmatists, logicxl positivists, scientific realists, and others who fall under the opprobrium of critical theorists who are suspicious of science.
--jks