The introduction will provide a brief insight into the historical development of the natural science, especially physics and the influence this had on the positivists approach.
‘I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then, finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.’
Isaac Newton (1855)
The philosophy of natural science is said to be a modern phenomenon that has become apparent only in the late 18th and 19th Centuries. Before this main ideas about science were inspired by findings from the English mathematician and physicist – Sir Isaac Newton (1642 – 1727), based upon his Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy (1687). In this new Newtonian world all natural phenomena was regarded as having underlying ‘causal’ effects that behaved in regular structured and ‘law-like’ manners. Experimental scientific methods they believed should only be able to offer explanations to the laws of nature and have nothing to do with opinions or ‘unfounded’ explanations of causal events. In other words the Newtonian world was viewed as a ‘mechanical structured organisation’ that scientific theories could be applied to that could accurately predict natural phenomena. This became the inspiration to the birth of Positivism and the creation of the Social Scientist.
The French philosopher August Comte (1798 – 1857) was the originator of Positivism.
‘In my System of Positive Philosophy both these objects were aimed at. I attempted, and in the opinion of the principal thinkers of our time successfully, to complete and at the same time co-ordinate Natural Philosophy, by establishing the general law of human development, social as well as intellectual.’
August Comte. (1856)
(Source: General view of Positivism 1830 – 1842 translated by JH Bridges, Robert Spellere and Sons, 1957 Chapter One It’s Intellectual Character )
It is the way in which the Positivists view on Social Science and the way in which they believed it should be studied that this part of the essay will focus on. Logical positivism is a twentieth century philosophical movement revolving around the idea of using the verificationism to determine how meaningful statements are.
Einstein’s theory of Relativity (1915) had direct influence on logical positivism and gave rise to the main principle within it i.e. The Verifiability Principle.
‘The meaning of a declarative sentence is the method of it’s verification’
