Positivism: paradigm or culture?

Abstract

Much post-positivist policy theory implies that positivism exists as a self-protecting paradigm. Inspired by a one-sided reading of Kuhn, this understanding suggests that policy positivism must be overcome as a whole. This approach is problematic. In particular, there are important contradictions between various elements commonly said to be part of the positivist paradigm, contradictions that make it difficult to believe that the paradigm can be embraced as a whole. An alternative approach views positivism as a culture. Since components of any culture can evolve independently of each other, a cultural approach would focus its critique on specific dimensions of positivism. This approach would provide more rigor to policy critique, and push post-positivists to overcome weaknesses in their own theories, in particular those concerning the question of truth.

Keywords:

• positivism
• post-positivism
• Hawkesworth
• Fischer
• Kuhn
• paradigms

Acknowledgement

The author thanks his colleague Les Pal and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments.

Notes on contributor

Phil Ryan is the author of After the New Atheist Debate and Multicultiphobia. The author thanks his colleague Les Pal and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments.

Notes

1. Recent examples of such ‘it goes without saying’ reference include Fransen (2011), Zittoun (2009), McAuliffe Straus (2011), and Auer (2010).

2. Examples include: Palys and Atchinson (2008), Leith and Phillips (2012), Hammersley (2013), Gabrielian, Yang, and Spice (2008), Bryman and Bell (2011), Hennink, Hutter, and Bailey (2011), and McNabb (2013).

3. Influential for a time in the philosophy of science, this is the positivism that Karl Popper claimed to have ‘killed’ (Popper 1974, 69).

4. Morçöl tested just five dimensions of the positivist list. His finding of a lack of full commitment to those five elements applies a fortiori to the longer list.

5. Fischer too declares that ‘the facts do not speak for themselves, as is commonly believed and affirmed by the positivist theory of knowledge’ (2003, 13).

6. While the previous passages are drawn from different texts, Fischer is consistently inconsistent, so to speak. Though Fischer (2003) advises us to eschew ‘truth-seeking’, the first few pages of that work contain various references to this or that being ‘clear’ or ‘made clear’, and six references to ‘recognizing’ this or that. Later, the book even reproduces an entire table of ‘myths’ and ‘findings’ concerning science.

7. That is, there is no one-to-one relationship between knowledge claims and things in the world: many true things can be said about any given object.

8. Ironically, one reviewer declares that Piketty himself ‘does not escape from the positivism that afflicts most contemporary social science’. One of his positivist sins is that ‘he supports his argument by presenting numerical evidence’ (Fainstein 2014, 365).