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I now want to have a close look at positivism, using the work of Jorge Rivas .Rivas links positivism back to classical empiricism. He says that classical empiricism conflates the empirical and the actual levels of reality, as:
It holds that the only thing that really exists is our experience. The early Positivists adopted this empiricist ontology as the very core of their philosophy of science to distinguish themselves from metaphysical and religious explanations based on unobservables, and it continued to be the basic ontological position of some branches of Positivist philosophy of social science as late as the 1970s....However, most Positivists today recognize only the events which actually occur as real (often calling true empiricism “Naïve Empiricism”). This position is known as actualism.
He adds that even where Positivists are actualists with regards to natural phenomena, many Positivists still hold to true empiricism when it comes to social phenomena. They hold that material reality can be distinguished from the empirical observation of it (in other words, that it is actual), but that social reality cannot i.e. that social reality is inherently subjective and has no external reality beyond human consciousness or cognition. Moreover, while actualist Positivists distinguish between the actual and the empirical domains (in other words, between events and perceptions of those events):they do not distinguish between the actual and the generative
domains (in other words, between events and the often unobservable underlying causes of those events). Actualism denies the reality of the generative domain. This form of empiricism does not accept that there are hidden, unknown or unrecognized mechanisms really generating actual events. Interpretivists also deny the generative domain.
He adds that an area where the Scientific Realist and Positivist approaches diverge radically is in the conception of scientific explanation, and the role of scientific laws in scientific explanation.
The Positivist conception of explanation, exemplified by Carl Hempel and still adhered to by philosophers of science critical of some other aspects of Positivism, such as Karl Popper, claims that science has explained an event when it has formulated a universal law, or “covering law”, from which the event can be deduced (known as subsumption under a generalization). In this nomological model of explanation, a scientific law is seen to reflect the actual constant conjunction of empirically observable events. This “constant conjunction” conception of scientific laws, first developed by David Hume, derives directly from the empiricism of early Positivism because it refers to the empirical instantiation of the law itself. In other words, due to the empiricist ontology of Positivism, a scientific law cannot refer to unobservable causes. Because it is referring to the constant conjunction of events, the basic form of the law is: “if y then z”. If we identify y, then we can predict that z will follow. This means that prediction is built into the Positivist formulation of explanation. Thus, the explanation of a phenomenon also entails the ability to predict it. This is known as the “deductive-nomological” (D-N), “Humean”, or “covering law” model of explanation and scientific laws and, importantly, it produces the Positivist thesis of the symmetry of explanation and prediction.
According to Scientific Realism the propensity of objects of study to behave in certain ways results from their internal and external structures at the generative level, so that while these generative structures may be unperceived, we can attempt to know of them through their effects:
Thus a crucial difference between the Scientific Realist and Positivist conceptions of science is that Realists
argue that when scientists talk about “scientific laws” (e.g. “laws of nature”, “laws of history” or “laws of supply and demand”) they are referring to those causal mechanisms of the objects of study which makes such a law-like formulation (relatively) accurate, not to the empirical instantiation of the law itself (which is the empiricist Positivist position).
1
The meaning of the word ‘conflate’ as used in the passage is closest to
a. Exaggerate
b. Expand
c. Merge
d. Distort
2
Which of the following statements are true regarding ‘The positivist conception of scientific explanation’?
A. The positivist conception of scientific explanation denies the existence of the generative domain as it is not possible to predict events if the generative domain is affirmed to be true.
B. The positivist conception of scientific explanation draws its fundamentals from classical empiricism.
C. The positivist conception of scientific explanation believes in a universal law behind a set of events which can be observed or experienced.
a. Only A
b. Only B
c. A and B
d. B and C
3
The primary purpose of the passage is to
a. Portray the clarity with which Jorge Rivas understands positivism.
b. Show how Positivism has been influenced by classical empiricism.
c. Explain the various branches of positivism.
d. Argue that classical empiricism has become obsolete when we look at present day positivism.
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