Positivism Dispute
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Positivism Dispute
The positivism dispute (german: Positivismusstreit, links=no) was a political-philosophical dispute between the critical rationalists (Karl Popper, Hans Albert) and the Frankfurt School (Theodor Adorno, Jürgen Habermas) in 1961, about the methodology of the social sciences. It grew into a broad discussion within German sociology from 1961 to 1969. The naming itself is controversial, since it was the Frankfurt School proponents who accused the critical rationalists of being positivists—while the latter considered themselves to be opponents of positivism. Overview The debate began in 1961 in Tübingen, West Germany, at the Conference of the German Society of Sociology. The speakers at the conference were invited to discuss the differences between social and natural sciences and the status of values in the social sciences. In 1963, the debate was heated by Jürgen Habermas in the ''Festschrift für Adorno'' (writings in honour of Adorno). The debate became more intensely critica ...
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Critical Rationalism
Critical rationalism is an epistemological philosophy advanced by Karl Popper on the basis that, if a statement cannot be logically deduced (from what is known), it might nevertheless be possible to logically falsify it. Following Hume, Popper rejected any inductive logic that is ampliative, i.e., any logic that can provide more knowledge than deductive logic. In other words if we cannot assert it logically, we should at the least try to logically falsify it, which led Popper to his falsifiability criterion. Popper wrote about critical rationalism in many works, including: ''The Logic of Scientific Discovery'' (1934/1959), ''The Open Society and its Enemies'' (1945), ''Conjectures and Refutations'' (1963), '' Unended Quest'' (1976), and ''The Myth of the Framework'' (1994). Criticism, not support Critical rationalists hold that scientific theories and any other claims to knowledge can and should be rationally criticized, and (if they have empirical content) can and should be ...
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Vienna Circle
The Vienna Circle (german: Wiener Kreis) of Logical Empiricism was a group of elite philosophers and scientists drawn from the natural and social sciences, logic and mathematics who met regularly from 1924 to 1936 at the University of Vienna, chaired by Moritz Schlick. The Vienna Circle's influence on 20th-century philosophy, especially philosophy of science and analytic philosophy, is immense up to the present day. The philosophical position of the Vienna Circle was called logical empiricism (German: ''logischer Empirismus''), logical positivism or neopositivism. It was influenced by Ernst Mach, David Hilbert, French conventionalism ( Henri Poincaré and Pierre Duhem), Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Albert Einstein. The Vienna Circle was pluralistic and committed to the ideals of the Enlightenment. It was unified by the aim of making philosophy scientific with the help of modern logic. Main topics were foundational debates in the natural and social s ...
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Searle–Derrida Debate
John Rogers Searle (; born July 31, 1932) is an American philosopher widely noted for contributions to the philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, and social philosophy. He began teaching at UC Berkeley in 1959, and was Willis S. and Marion Slusser Professor Emeritus of the Philosophy of Mind and Language and Professor of the Graduate School at the University of California, Berkeley until 2019. As an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, Searle was secretary of "Students against Joseph McCarthy". He received all his university degrees, BA, MA, and DPhil, from the University of Oxford, where he held his first faculty positions. Later, at UC Berkeley, he became the first tenured professor to join the 1964–1965 Free Speech Movement. In the late 1980s, Searle challenged the restrictions of Berkeley's 1980 rent stabilization ordinance. Following what came to be known as the California Supreme Court's "Searle Decision" of 1990, Berkeley changed its rent contr ...
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Popper Legend
Positivism is an empiricist philosophical theory that holds that all genuine knowledge is either true by definition or positive—meaning ''a posteriori'' facts derived by reason and logic from sensory experience.John J. Macionis, Linda M. Gerber, ''Sociology'', Seventh Canadian Edition, Pearson Canada Other ways of knowing, such as theology, metaphysics, intuition, or introspection, are rejected or considered meaningless. Although the positivist approach has been a recurrent theme in the history of western thought, modern positivism was first articulated in the early 19th century by Auguste Comte.. His school of sociological positivism holds that society, like the physical world, operates according to general laws. After Comte, positivist schools arose in logic, psychology, economics, historiography, and other fields of thought. Generally, positivists attempted to introduce scientific methods to their respective fields. Since the turn of the 20th century, positivism has ...
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Gadamer–Derrida Debate
__NOTOC__ The Gadamer–Derrida debate concerns the issue of the containment of otherness in Gadamer's hermeneutics and it began with an encounter between Hans-Georg Gadamer and Jacques Derrida in April 1981 in a Sorbonne conference in Paris on "Text and Interpretation". Before this debate, there had not been any confrontation or dialogue between hermeneutics in Germany and post-structuralism in France. See also * Cassirer–Heidegger debate * Foucault–Habermas debate * Positivism dispute * Searle–Derrida debate John Rogers Searle (; born July 31, 1932) is an American philosopher widely noted for contributions to the philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, and social philosophy. He began teaching at UC Berkeley in 1959, and was Willis S. and Mari ... Notes References * Michelfelder, Diane. P. and Richard E. Palmer (eds.), 1989, Dialogue and Deconstruction: The Gadamer-Derrida Debate, Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Jacques Derrida Continental philosophy Philos ...
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Foucault–Habermas Debate
The Foucault–Habermas debate is a dispute concerning whether Michel Foucault's ideas of "power analytics" and "genealogy" or Jürgen Habermas' ideas of "communicative rationality" and " discourse ethics" provide a better critique of the nature of ''power'' in society. The debate compares and evaluates the central ideas of Habermas and Foucault as they pertain to questions of power, reason, ethics, modernity, democracy, civil society, and social action. Overview The debate was a dialogue between texts and followers; Foucault and Habermas did not actually debate in person, though they were considering a formal one in the U.S. before Foucault's death in 1984. Habermas' essay ''Taking Aim at the Heart of the Present'' (1984) was altered before release in order to account for Foucault's inability to reply. Habermas wrote: Nancy Fraser's contentious, but oft-quoted, claim that Foucault's work is a mixture of "empirical insights and normative confusions" exemplifies the most com ...
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Cassirer–Heidegger Debate
The Cassirer–Heidegger debate was an encounter between the philosophers Martin Heidegger and Ernst Cassirer from March 17 to April 6, 1929 during the Second Davos Hochschulkurs ( Davos University Conference) which held its opening session in the Hotel Belvédère in Davos on 17 March 1929. Cassirer gave four lectures and Heidegger gave three lectures. The debate was about the significance of Kantian notions of freedom and rationality. Cassirer argues that while Kant's '' Critique of Pure Reason'' emphasizes human temporality and finitude, he also sought to situate human cognition within a broader conception of humanity. Cassirer challenges Heidegger's relativism by invoking the universal validity of truths discovered by the exact and moral sciences. After this series of debates, Heidegger wrote ''Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik'' (1929), perhaps in response to this encounter with Cassirer. In '' Continental Divide: Heidegger, Cassirer, Davos'' (Harvard University Press, 20 ...
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Antipositivism
In social science, antipositivism (also interpretivism, negativism or antinaturalism) is a theoretical stance that proposes that the social realm cannot be studied with the methods of investigation utilized within the natural sciences, and that investigation of the social realm requires a different epistemology. Fundamental to that antipositivist epistemology is the belief that the concepts and language that researchers use in their research shape their perceptions of the social world they are investigating and defining. Interpretivism (anti-positivism) developed among researchers dissatisfied with post-positivism, the theories of which they considered too general and ill-suited to reflect the nuance and variability found in human interaction. Because the values and beliefs of researchers cannot fully be removed from their inquiry, interpretivists believe research ''on'' human beings ''by'' human beings cannot yield objective results. Thus, rather than seeking an objective persp ...
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Historicism
Historicism is an approach to explaining the existence of phenomena, especially social and cultural practices (including ideas and beliefs), by studying their history, that is, by studying the process by which they came about. The term is widely used in philosophy, anthropology, and sociology. This historical approach to explanation differs from and complements the approach known as functionalism, which seeks to explain a phenomenon, such as for example a social form, by providing reasoned arguments about how that social form fulfills some function in the structure of a society. In contrast, rather than taking the phenomenon as a given and then seeking to provide a justification for it from reasoned principles, the historical approach asks "Where did this come from?" and "What factors led up to its creation?"; that is, historical explanations often place a greater emphasis on the role of process and contingency. Historicism is often used to help contextualize theories and narrati ...
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Karl Marx
Karl Heinrich Marx (; 5 May 1818 – 14 March 1883) was a German philosopher, economist, historian, sociologist, political theorist, journalist, critic of political economy, and socialist revolutionary. His best-known titles are the 1848 pamphlet ''The Communist Manifesto'' and the four-volume (1867–1883). Marx's political and philosophical thought had enormous influence on subsequent intellectual, economic, and political history. His name has been used as an adjective, a noun, and a school of social theory. Born in Trier, Germany, Marx studied law and philosophy at the universities of Bonn and Berlin. He married German theatre critic and political activist Jenny von Westphalen in 1843. Due to his political publications, Marx became stateless and lived in exile with his wife and children in London for decades, where he continued to develop his thought in collaboration with German philosopher Friedrich Engels and publish his writings, researching in the British Mus ...
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Logic Of Scientific Discovery
''The Logic of Scientific Discovery'' is a 1959 book about the philosophy of science by the philosopher Karl Popper. Popper rewrote his book in English from the 1934 (imprint '1935') German original, titled ''Logik der Forschung. Zur Erkenntnistheorie der modernen Naturwissenschaft'', which literally translates as, "Logic of Research: On the Epistemology of Modern Natural Science"'. Summary Popper argues that science should adopt a methodology based on falsifiability, because no number of experiments can ever prove a theory, but a reproducible experiment or observation can refute one. According to Popper: "non-reproducible single occurrences are of no significance to science. Thus a few stray basic statements contradicting a theory will hardly induce us to reject it as falsified. We shall take it as falsified only if we discover a reproducible effect which refutes the theory". Popper argues that science should adopt a methodology based on "an ''asymmetry'' between verifiability a ...
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