Positivism: Sociological

R.W. Outhwaite
Newcastle University, NE1 7RU, UK
William.outhwaite@ncl.ac.uk
Abstract
Positivism and sociology have a common origin, and it remains a significant approach in
sociology and the other social sciences. In positivist sociology, the scientific study of the social
world is identified with empirical research, statistical methods and often the pursuit of general
laws of social life which can be tested against experience.

Keywords
Comte, Vienna Circle, empiricism, explanation, scientism, hermeneutics, interpretivism, critical
theory, realism, social theory.
1. The Rise of Positivism

Auguste Comte (1798-1857) argued in his Course of Positive Philosophy (1830–42) that the
various sciences developed through three stages - theological, metaphysical, and, eventually,
positive. A positive science does not rely on spirits or abstract forces but on precise relationships
of the kind expressed in Newton’s law of gravity. The sciences move gradually into the positive
stage, with sociology representing the culmination of this process, in the work of Comte himself.
Comte, a strong influence on John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) popularized the name ‘sociology’ to
refer to what had earlier been called social physics, and a positivist approach was taken forward
in sociology by Herbert Spencer (1820-1903) and later Emile Durkheim (1858-1917). Spencer
made much of the parallels, as he saw them, between biological and social evolution and
between societies and (other) organisms and the functional relations between their component
parts. Durkheim’s evolutionism was more muted, though his study of religion looked to
Australian totemism for the ‘Elementary Forms of Religious Life’ (1912) and his earlier Rules of
Sociological Method (1895) argued for the study of ‘social facts’ as ‘things’. Insisting on the
distinctiveness of sociology and in particular its difference from psychology, Durkheim argued,
notably in his classic study of Suicide (1897), that one should look for the social causes of
regular differences in suicide rates in religious attachments or marital status, rather than invoking
psychological explanations or speculating about the motives of suicidal individuals.
Durkheim’s distinction between ‘normal’ and ‘pathological’ states of society echoes Comte’s
principle that science can lead to prediction and thereby to the control of natural or social
processes.

Positivism also had a presence in the study of history, for example in the work of Henry Thomas
Buckle (1821-1862) and others across Europe, and it was in Germany that this provoked the
strongest anti-positivist reaction, with the philosopher of history J.G. Droysen (1808-1884) and
his contemporary Wilhelm Dilthey (1833-1911), insisting on the distinctiveness of what came to
be called the ‘human sciences’ or Geisteswissenschaften. In these sciences, as Dilthey put it, the
mental activity of humans and of some other animals, and its products, can be understood.
Dilthey developed what we would now call a research programme for history and the other
human sciences based on the distinctiveness of human psychic expressions and the
understanding of those expressions. In a move which was to become a definitional feature of
later interpretive social science, Dilthey emphasised the continuity between everyday
understanding and more formal processes of interpretation.

In sociology, Georg Simmel (1858-1918) and Max Weber (1864-1920) also argued strongly for
the importance of understanding (Verstehen) in history and the other social sciences, and Weber
presented in his posthumously published Economy and Society (1920) the principle that
sociology as he conceived it should attempt the interpretive understanding of social processes in
order to explain them. His earlier classic study of The Protestant Ethic and the ‘Spirit’ of
Capitalism (1904-5) had applied this two-track approach by first showing (at least to his own
satisfaction) that ascetic protestants such as Calvinists were in fact more economically innovative
than Catholics in early modern Europe and then offering an explanation which ‘made sense’ of
their conduct.

By 1920, then, Weber had developed a strong alternative to positivistic sociology and offered a
way of combining understanding and causal explanation which continues to attract many
sociologists. In the years following his death however sociology became more polarized between
more radical versions of both positivist and interpretivist approaches.

2 The Vienna Circle and the Transformation of Positivism

Positivist philosophy of science had taken a strongly empiricist direction in the work of Ernst
Mach (1838-1916) who inspired the Vienna Circle, which met regularly in 1910-12 and again
from 1926 into the 1930s. These physicists, mathematicians and philosophers founded the Ernst
Mach Society in 1928 and published, in 1929, a manifesto under the editorship of the sociologist
Otto Neurath (1882–1945) (Neurath et al. 1929).

Comte’s positivistic conception of science had stressed theory and opposed empiricism, arguing
that ‘the next great hindrance to the use of observation is the empiricism which is introduced by
those who, in the name of impartiality, would interdict the use of any theory whatsoever’ and
that ‘No real observation of any kind of phenomena is possible, except in as far as it is first
directed, and finally, interpreted, by some theory.’ Viennese positivism or logical empiricism
drew more on the formalization of logic and mathematics in the early years of the twentieth
century and its extension to the philosophical analysis of language by Ludwig Wittgenstein
(1889-1951), whose Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922) was a strong influence on members
of the Circle. As they saw it, language maps onto the world through precise observation
statements, to which the language of science has to be ultimately reducible. Whereas Comte had
stressed the distinct domains of the various sciences, on this model the social sciences were
reducible to psychology and ultimately to physics, which was no longer just the lead science in
the march towards a positive state, as it had been for Comte, but the fundamental basis of
‘unified science’.

This approach was disseminated in the 1930s as the members of the Vienna Circle fled from
Nazism, with several figures settling in the United States, where a similar approach to science
had developed independently (Platt 1996). (The American physicist Percy Williams Bridgman’s
operationalism, had, for example, been a major influence on the Vienna Circle itself.) Two
philosophers who popularized logical empiricism were Alfred Ayer (1910-1989) in the UK and
Karl Popper (1902-1994), who emigrated from Austria to New Zealand and then also settled in
London. Popper introduced the most important modifications to the Vienna Circle model and
also addressed issues of social and political philosophy. One of the central principles of logical
empiricism had been the ‘verification principle’, the Bridgmanian idea that the meaning of an
empirical statement depends on, or in some versions is identical with, its means of verification.
(One consequence, enthusiastically promulgated by Ayer (1936), was that value judgements
were meaningless, being neither empirical nor logical or mathematical.) Popper (1934)
demonstrated the impossibility of conclusive verification in science and stood the problem on its
head, arguing that testability was better understood in terms of falsification. The statement that
all swans are white can never be conclusively verified, unless we are sure that we have observed
all swans that ever existed and that they are now extinct, whereas the statement can be falsified
by the observation of just one black swan. Scientific theories expose themselves to testing, as
Einstein had done by making a prediction about the position of Mercury which was proved
accurate in 1910. In Popper’s analysis, this did not prove the theory but merely gave it greater
‘verisimilitude’ since it had passed a crucial test. Like a car which has passed an annual safety
inspection, it could be conditionally relied on until the next time. Pseudo-theories by contrast,
such as Marxism and psychoanalysis, could amass lots of supporting evidence but did not expose
themselves to falsification. Social science, Popper argued, could make conditional predictions,
but should avoid the temptation of ‘prophecy’.

3 Positivism and Sociology

This modified version of Viennese positivism has been massively influential in the philosophy of
science, including social science. Popper had undercut the search for certainty which had been
the Achilles heel of logical empiricism and offered an alternative model of scientificity. In the
social sciences, new quantitative techniques were developed for theory testing, and punched
cards gave way to computers. In the ‘covering-law’ model of causal explanation, empirical
findings were attached to general laws in the manner alleged to operate in the natural sciences.
(In the classic example, the general law that water freezes at 0 degrees explains the state of my
car radiator after a cold night.) This covering-law approach to explanation coexisted with the rise
of functionalism; Talcott Parsons suggested, quite implausibly, that his system theory might one
day be open to empirical testing. Max Weber’s plea for the avoidance of value judgements in
social science (which in Weber’s practice coincided with an almost existentialist position on our
choice of ultimate values and a variety of intensely political engagements) became the dominant
position justifying an apolitical stance for social science – which in practice tended to mean an
endorsement of the ideological status quo.

However, the history of positivism, like that of Stalinist economic planning, is largely the history
of attempts to modify or reform it, and it unraveled from a number of directions. In philosophy,
thinkers influenced by North American pragmatism such as W.V.O. Quine (1908-2000)
emphasized the importance of theoretical frameworks, questioning the idea of piecemeal testing
or instance confirmation. More seriously for Popper, the historian of science Thomas Kuhn
(1962) showed that scientists tend to work most of the time within unquestioned frameworks or
‘paradigms’, switching from one to another only in periods of scientific revolution, in a process
close to religious conversion. Paul Feyerabend (1924-1994) drew the extreme conclusion that a
good empiricist should be an epistemological anarchist and accept that ‘anything goes’: all
theories should be taken seriously. Wittgenstein (1953) had dropped his earlier theory of
language in favour of a much more holistic and sociological approach to ‘language games’
located in ‘forms of life’. This linked up with anti-positivist interpretive approaches in sociology
and social anthropology, as demonstrated by the British philosopher Peter Winch (1958).
Meanwhile the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor (1964), influenced both by analytic
philosophy and by continental European hermeneutics, argued that the behavior of humans and
other higher animals should be understood in terms of intentions and purposes rather than just
causal impulses.

In a further twist, Karl-Otto Apel (1967) demonstrated in more detail the affinities between
analytic philosophy of language and the Geisteswissenschaften tradition, and Jürgen Habermas,
who had joined in the critique of positivism in West German sociology in the early 1960s
(Adorno et al 1976), showed how phenomenology, analytic philosophy and Hans-Georg
Gadamer’s version of philosophical hermeneutics could combine against social scientific
positivism and yield a ‘critical social science’. (Habermas 1968a, 1968b) This type of science
combined causal explanation and understanding in an approach, exemplified by psychoanalysis
and the marxist critique of ideology, which identified and removed causal obstacles to
understanding. Positivism, for Habermas (1968b: vii) and his associate Albrecht Wellmer (1967),
meant an absence of reflection and the reduction of epistemology to methodology, whether in
natural or social science. In the latter case, however, the imitation of a natural scientific model
was particularly dangerous because it reinforced tendencies to technocracy which undermined
the possibilities of political deliberation. Habermas later reformulated his model of emancipatory
science, but it remains in a modified form in his idea of reconstructive sciences, which explicate
capacities which we exercise in daily life. His initial example was linguistics, which identifies
the rules which we unconsciously follow as native speakers of a language, but his own theory of
communicative action (Habermas 1981) also embodies this approach.

Whereas critical theory tends towards a dualism of natural and social science, but in an
increasingly muted form, the assumption that opposition to positivism also entailed dualism or
antinaturalism was however also put in question in the late 1960s and early 1970s by the realist
metatheory of science developed by Rom Harré and Roy Bhaskar. Both Harré and Bhaskar, like
Habermas, were substantially motivated by the desire to undermine positivistic theories and
approaches in the social sciences. They were interested in giving a more adequate account of
science as a whole, in world composed of relatively enduring structures and mechanisms. Some
of these could be isolated in scientific experimentation, given the contingent existence of homo
sapiens and homo scientificus. An important aspect of the realist programme developed by
Harré, Bhaskar and others was a conception of explanation as involving not an essentially
semantic reduction of causal statements to general laws (which in sociology tended to be either
vacuous or riddled with exceptions) but a reference to the causal powers of entities, structures
and mechanisms. The real explanation of the state of my radiator is not the mere generalization
that water freezes at zero degrees but the causal properties of mater molecules: their capacity to
freeze or evaporate. Causal tendencies may be outweighed by countervailing tendencies, and two
causal tendencies may neutralise one another, as do the centrifugal force of the earth's rotation
and its gravitational attraction, with the convenient consequence that human beings and other
animals are safely anchored close to the earth's surface but can jump over small obstacles.

This and other features of realism meant that the whole issue of naturalism could be rethought.
Human beings could be seen as having causal powers and liabilities, just like other entities; it no
longer mattered if their relations rarely sustained any universal generalisations of an interesting
kind, but only sets of tendencies regular enough to be worth exploring. It also seemed natural to
include among the causes of human action the agents' reasons for acting - reasons which must be
understood as far as possible. Reasons, such as a smoker’s reasons for giving up the habit, might
form part of a causal explanation of the cure. The fact that many of the entities accorded causal
force in social scientific explanations were necessarily unobservable was not, as it was for
empiricism, a problem of principle. And the understanding of meaning could, as Bhaskar (1979:
58-9) put it, be seen as in some ways equivalent to measurement in the natural sciences. Realists
diverge on the issue of naturalism, with Bhaskar arguing for it and Harré defending a more
interactionist and social constructionist position, focusing on interpersonal action and
questioning the existence of social structures.

Realism found a more comfortable home in sociology and the emergent discipline of
International Relations than in academic philosophy, and in Britain and Scandinavia more than in
other parts of Europe or in North America. Together, however, all these anti-positivist currents
meant that it was even harder than before to find explicit defenders of positivism. Jonathan
Turner (1981; 1985; 1992; 2013) in the United States is a significant example, and Peter Blau
also identified explicitly with positivism. For the most part, however, positivism tended to be
equated, by both supporters and critics, with empirical research and in particular with
quantitative methodologies. Turner is an exception, since his positivistic defence of scientific
theory in sociology was also highly critical of the vogue for quantification in the US. As he noted
in an earlier version of this entry, positivist books on ‘theory building’ and ‘theory construction’
in the late 1960s, beginning with Hans Zetterberg’s (1965) On Theory and Verification in
Sociology, and continuing through the 1960s and 1970s (e.g., Blalock 1969, Dubin 1969, Gibbs
1972, Hage 1972, Reynolds 1971) did not retain their initial appeal at a time when functionalism
was also going into decline.

As the theoretical wave of the later twentieth century passed over sociology and began to
dissipate, with more interdisciplinary conceptions of ‘social theory’ tending to break away from
mainstream sociology, the theoretical debates between positivism and hermeneutic and other
antipositivist approaches tended to be trivialized into a choice between quantitative and
qualitative methods or between ‘empiricism’, identified with any empirical research, and
‘theory’, meaning any sociological work not involving empirical research. Some prominent
figures labelled as theorists did empirical research, for example Pierre Bourdieu in France;
others, like Zygmunt Bauman or Anthony Giddens in the UK, did not, but this was not generally
felt to be a significant difference.

4 The Prospects for Positivism

Positivism in the very general sense of an aspiration to scientificity and to the construction and
empirical testing of formal theories remains a significant presence in contemporary sociology,
and to a much greater extent in economics, political science and some parts of international
relations. As Peter Halfpenny (2001: 382) notes,

…large numbers of investigators continue to produce research that conforms to the

positivist image of science, explaining social activities in loosely deductive-nomological
 terms, and these explanations are used to guide and evaluate a wide variety of social
programmes.

It may be that the important dividing line is now between formal conceptions of theory and more
informal ones such as the ‘theory’ of structuration or risk society or theoretical approaches such
as actor-network theory. This dividing line (Turner 2013; Outhwaite 2014) runs through several
theory families, such as rational choice or rational action theory, which encompasses a highly
formalized, even formalistic mainstream, following Gary Becker (1976), and more flexible and
sophisticated approaches such as those of Martin Hollis (1938-1998), for whom ‘rational action
is its own explanation’ (Hollis 1977: 135) or Jon Elster (1989; 2007). Hollis and Nell (1975)
deconstructed the powerful alliance between positivism and neo-classical economics, while
Hollis and Smith (1990) provided what remains one of the best statements of what is at stake in
the oppositions between ‘explaining’ and ‘understanding’ in the social sciences and between
‘agency’ and ‘structure’. As Smith wrote in the exchange with which they end the book:

I, too, reject the Positivist notion that there is a world waiting to be mapped. There may
be regularities in human affairs but I do not accept the idea that we can construct a
neutral theory, valid across time and space, that allows us to predict in the same way as
occurs in the natural sciences. (Hollis and Smith 1990: 203)

Evolutionary sociology, mentioned above in relation to Herbert Spencer, has recently

experienced a certain revival, though in forms which are mostly dismissive of Spencer’s earlier
efforts (O’Malley 2007). Marxism is another example, with formal and mathematical
reformulations of central Marxist propositions (including French structuralist Marxism,
analytical Marxism, also known as ‘no-bullshit Marxism’, and ‘rational choice Marxism’), co-
existing with more humanistic variants which shade off into critical theory, in both its Frankfurt
School and broader literary and cultural variants. As Peter Halfpenny (1982: 120) concluded,

Positivism maybe dead in that there is no longer an identifiable community of

philosophers who give its simpler characterisations unqualified support, but it lives on
philosophically, developed until it transmutes into conventionalism and realism.
Since then, the term ‘post-positivism’ has come into use. Like most ‘post-‘ formulations, it tends
to be used in a wide variety of sense, ranging in this case from modifications of an essentially
still positivist programme to strong versions of social constructionism. (Alvesson and Sköldberg
2010) ‘Positivism’ has tended to become a term of abuse, while the positivistic impulse towards
formalization and (presumed or hoped-for) certainty continues to pervade our increasingly
rationalized and performance-oriented social sciences.

See also:
Comte, Auguste (1798–1857); Durkheim, Emile (1858–1917); Empiricism, History of; Hempel,
Carl Gustav (1905–97); Hermeneutics, History of; Logical Positivism and Logical Empiricism;
Popper, Karl Raimund (1902–94); Positivism, History of; Sociology, Epistemology of;
Sociology: Overview; Spencer, Herbert (1820–1903); Theory: Sociological; Wittgenstein,
Ludwig (1889–1951)
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