What is Positivism?

[@blaisegeorges1935]

Brillant ! Do not forget that there is a political side to the positivism of Comte, whose doctrine is "order and progress"

[@PHILOnotes]

Thanks, Blaise. It greatly helps.

[@Toukirahmedmunna]

The video is just fantastic..... The voice over and the texts are so synced that fells awesome to watch. The example of positivisim (sheep one) was superb... thanks ma'am

[@Suav58]

Manufacturing an echo chamber much?

[@asgharsufipakfaujkosalam8587]

Madam Thank you for this video clip, Positivism challenged emotive language and behavior and Positivism is an important philosophical movement. Sufi Muhammed Asghar M.A Philisophy Gujranwala Pakistan

[@PHILOnotes]

no worries, Asghar. And thank you for your inspiring feedback. best wishes!

[@speakup2042]

Amazing explanation 👏👏

[@idk-dz]

The founder of sociology is Ibn khaldoun not Auguste Comte.

[@mianusmansura6289]

Thank you.

[@anaya1012]

Thank you so much ma'am 🙏

[@PHILOnotes]

You're welcome! Cheers to more learnings! :)

[@Suav58]

I would like to mention Roger Penrose here, possibly the last living positivist. If in doubt, as to the accuracy of my statement, check his "The road to reality". Positivism made a long journey. There are two firm consequences of Comte's thought. First is the acceleration of scientific progress and second, but no less important a wave of educational zeal, which ensued. We are in deep trouble on both "directions of attack". In fact the two arms of the pincer movement are under heavy friendly fire. Positivist spirit of science is slowly evaporating in favour of "If it lies beyond complexity horizon of the publisher - publish, whatever the merit". The other is a direct consequence. The less you educate them, the narrower the group of those, who can say, what they like and the wider the group of those, who can not validate/invalidate statements of the latter. There is a massive intellectual jump from a spot on the relatively green background of a relatively black colour to "Sheep on the grass meadow, one side of which is black." We know this much since long ago, but this knowledge is widely available by now due to people dealing with Machine Learning and AI. There is an even greater jump from this observation to Peano Arithmetic and all the hypostasis of Projective Geometry. While the latter (classification of objects into sets) is being solved by ML to a degree sometimes exceeding human capacity and AI is making inroad into "human imagination" through means of "creative" writing and graphics. The jump from raw Neural Network, (possibly a network of weakly coupled networks and you know why) up to a well formed concept of number and geometric object seems to be very far away. Maybe it isn't, but it is a direction of research worth pursuing. So, what is left of Positivism after all the avalanche of impossibility theorems of the 20-th century? We can know more than we do. We are still capable of making progress up to and transcending scientific revolutions on a par with Relativity and Quantum Theory, but we seem to have, as a society, lost all the appetite. I am all for a positivist zeal coupled with sober understanding of our limitations.

[@anywallsocket]

really well done, although it avoids positivistic stance on conscious qualia as evidential or veratious of the first kind.

[@fettyballer3148]

Can you please give a brief relationship between positivism and idealism

[@PHILOnotes]

Sure, Fetty. We will include this in our list. Thanks!

[@anywallsocket]

idealism isn't even in the same category, google yourself.

[@lodielieb8482]

nice thanks

[@Enthos2]

How would a positivist respond to the pragmatist claim that, "an assumption which produces useful results is true enough"?

[@PHILOnotes]

Can't really think as of now

[@ndeungouenicole6799]

I'm grateful 👏👏

[@PHILOnotes]

thanks, Nikita!

[@jeremyfirth]

The "pathologies of that society" can only be revealed once the telos of the society is determined, which is not a product of sense data observations. Comte sneaked a presuppostion in there and is stymied by the is-ought problem.

[@chitrajoshi9683]

Thank u . It's helps me a lot

[@StanislavMudrets]

Since electrons can't be directly experienced should they be studied? What I mean by this is that electrons are used as an explanation for electrical phenomena, but we can't, as humans use our sences to sence them directly. So according to positivist ideas, wouldn't they be considered beyond scientific inquiry? How about numbers? We see a sign vehicle and we interprete it as a number. Wouldn't a number with all its rules be part of the content of human thought and therefore not something that can be studied? The only thing we can study are wiggles on a page that we usually interprete as numbers, but on a page, it isn't a number; it's just a wiggle.

[@PHILOnotes]

thanks

[@jeremyfirth]

I think your questions reveal a LOT of hidden presuppositions in positivism. Categories, logic, consistency of results over time, numbers, consistency of identity over time...these all get sneaked in without mention, let alone examination.

[@StanislavMudrets]

@@jeremyfirth Why do you think that I sneaked something in or that I don't examine any of these? For example, I'm not a basic nominalist - or I should say that I'm a nominalist of absences. That is, I subscribe to the view that what doesn't exist, but could've existed, can be influential by the mere fact that what is kept absent in a system can't propagate its influence to a coupled system. This includes intrinsic constraints on how an identity could've changed over time. So, for example, the identity of a 50 year old person isn't identical to what it was when the person was 2 years old, since identity keeps differentiating over the entire lifespan. However, it is possible to introduce rejection tests. For example, pick a person at age x and the same person or a different person at age x-delta x at random. Ask them who their 5th grade math teacher was. If they utter different names, reject both of them. If they utter the same name, don't reject both of them. You can even have a computer with speech processor doing the evaluation based on the sounds they produce. So I bet that the people who end up not being rejected would be more similar by being less different than the random people selected from the entire population. The same person of different ages is more likely not to be rejected - thereby showing that there's some consistency of identity over time. This is a simplistic example, but you can be as complex as you wanna be and see whether the person's identity over time is more stable than the comparison between person A with person B. So I don't understand what hidden presuppositions you are describing.

[@jeremyfirth]

@@StanislavMudrets I don't think you ignored what I mentioned. I am saying that positivism has many hidden presuppositions, including all the ones I listed, and that your question highlighted the fact that positivism has many presuppositions that are just taken for granted, but that may or may not actually even live up to the criteria that positivism rests upon. For example, what is the sense data for the rules of logic? What is the sense data for the identity of a chair? Does a table become a chair if I sit on it? Does the ground become a chair if I sit on it? Is the chair still a chair if I break it into pieces?

[@StanislavMudrets]

@@jeremyfirth I see what you're saying. Those are problems of positive definitions, of whether reductionism sometimes destroys important constraints of that which it studies, making it impossible to understand how the whole works (because the whole relies on these constraints to be present). Also, nothing can't be analyzed (that is being broken down into parts and studied how the parts contribute to the whole). In other words, when you flip the foreground and background, you realize that the nothing, that is absence, a potentiality that doesn't exist, absent characteristics, absent variety can't be broken down into parts to be studied since that which doesn't exist has no parts to put together and study even though that absence still has an effect on the world around us.

[@shhlie]

Michele Foucault was once quoted as calling himself “a happy positivist”. I do think that he saw his analyses in the context of Comte’s positivism.

[@sweatpantsromance]

hey, the transcript is locked behind a paywall. does anyone have a free version?

[@languageandmana9255]

🙏

[@nareshkohar3856]

Nice clip for NOU team.

[@PHILOnotes]

thanks

[@wincelsosa7273]

How to define the two goals of positivism?to formulate abstract

[@omiorahman6283]

Great work

[@PHILOnotes]

Thank you so much, Omio! Cheers!

[@rabincalica2229]

Is there a problem with the positivist approach in writing history?

[@jonathanvilario5402]

Funnily enough, the religion of Bahai follows a lot of what he preached for, but rather then it being secular, it supports the doctrines of ALL religions, believing that all religions are a unionism of humanity. And that science and religion mutually benefit one another

[@cpt.kagoul]

Yeah but you need to believe in something that is completely unverifiable, or rather infalsifiable and so completely different from positivism.

[@blaisegeorges1935]

Has Comte's work been translated into English? Are the translations available in pdf?

[@PHILOnotes]

I'm not really sure, Blaise.

[@c4sh3w]

Still hard to grasp...

[@mardocheebouanga1890]

and why do you think it relates to “happiness?”

[@PHILOnotes]

I'm not sure if there is part in the video lectures that relate to happiness.

[@mardocheebouanga1890]

I have a question what is Auguste Comte's doctrine of positivism?

[@PHILOnotes]

We will do research and make notes on this topic soo, Mardochee.

[@mardocheebouanga1890]

PHILO-notes ok I will be waiting for the answer

[@PHILOnotes]

sure

[@winkyk3237]

why dont have video of postpositivism?

[@gurjotsingh8934]

I guess next video shall be on logical positivism

[@PHILOnotes]

hahaha...brilliant guess, Gurjot! that's next in the pipeline!

[@alfonso201]

What happens then when a positivist applies his method to the scientific method or the assumptions of science wouldn't that cause a contradiction in his world view?

[@PHILOnotes]

the positivist method is also employed in science

[@PHILOnotes]

hmmmm....yeah

[@alfonso201]

I meant applying the scientific method on itself as the logical postvist moto is a proposition is only meaningful if it's verifiable empiricaly verification thru the scientific method but can you verify the scientific method by the scientific method?

[@PHILOnotes]

@@alfonso201 yeah, got it, Alfonso. thanks.

[@Sir_Pumpington_Of_Dumpenshire]

@@alfonso201 Your question is nonsensical. The scientific method is similar to a tool or a manual to help us arrive at objective truths. There are many different ways and many fields of study that arrive at objective truths through various means, these various means are collectively scientific in their methodologies if they produce consistently repeatable and verifiable results. Think of the scientific method as a tire on your car. The purpose of a tire is to assist in the forward/backwards motion of the vehicle. You wouldn't "apply a tire to a tire" for the same reason you wouldn't "apply the scientific method to the scientific method", it's pointless.

[@WAJDIflah]

Is there r a link between a positivist and realist?

[@PHILOnotes]

yeah, somehow. they are of kindred spirit. however, they differ significantly in the sense that Realism focuses more on the understanding and representation of a phenomenon or reality, while Positivism focuses more on describing and making predictions about a phenomenon or reality.

[@WAJDIflah]

@@PHILOnotes Straight to the point. Thank you.

[@PHILOnotes]

@@WAJDIflah No worries, WAJDI. Cheers!

[@daviddulom8258]

I wish every educator on KZbin makes an educative video like this, short and to the point. Indian educators suck. they will make an hour-length video rambling, talking about non-related things and promoting their code lol.

[@dashry1283]

Classical philosophy >>>

[@amihart9269]

This doesn't sound any different than empiricism. I don't get the difference.

[@__-cd9ug]

this is all new to me, i'm beginning to look into those concepts, but wikipedia says that positivism is an empiricist philosophical theory. From what I gather, Empiricism is a wider philosophical theory, inside of which exists Positivism? Or maybe Positivism comes chronologically after Empiricism. I'm not sure. I'll try to learn more about those subjects

[@rafaels.5374]

The original Truths are all rooted in Positivism. The revelation of Positivism is that All Good is Positive in origin. ALL GOOD has no equal or reality that can compete with ALL GOOD. The idea or ideology that there exist a force equal to or competitive to the ALL GOOD is ludicrous at best. This is the origin of dualistic mentality. And the beginning of the Evil one, or negative thoughts and actions. The ALL GOOD is self explanatory. The ALL GOOD has no conflict. It is only when this negativity became activated against the ALL GOOD that conflict became rooted in our reality. I didn't want to enter a concept of GOD and the devil but the reality is all too clear. Negativity is real and is forever at odds with the ALL GOOD. It damages the original mind and roots itself in our being. Once perpetuated by damaged minds it seems to take on a life of it's own. This is the origin of the real great war that we must fight. The origin of greed, hate, assumptions, speculations about our origin, the fanciful tales of evolution or creation by aliens which is fictional, the grandiose theories that have no foundation in sciences, wrongdoings, diseases, mental illness and all the woes of our earthly reality are all rooted in this negativity. Oh yeah, don't forget confusion. When we are confronted! by confusion of any kind it is an influence of negativity. The evil-one is author of all confusion. Doubt of GODs WORD is a negative influence. When WE all choose to fight this war, WE will begin to take back our power over negativity. Are you ready to take up arms against this insidious reality put on us by negative influences. We have not far to look for the answers. The Champion is Christ. The disciplines are his Commandments. And the warnings are found in the WORDS OF THE ALL GOOD. WE WILL WIN IN THE END, as it is written. And we have been given the tools to make a difference, to change the damaged minds of Humanities confusions. Without these changes the trials and tribulations in store for us WILL certainly happen. There, LIFT UP GOD's STANDARD.😀

[@joaoromero8867]

"I see sheep one side which is black" got me, yes there are sheep that are black on one side and who knows what color may be on the other side 🤣🤣 I think it may not even be a sheep on the other side 🤣🤣 perhaps it's not even alive or it is a unique specie 🤡🤡🤡🤡🤡🤡🤡