The Competitiveness of Nations
in a Global Knowledge-Based Economy
H.H. Chartrand
May 2002
Eugene F. Miller
Positivism, Historicism, and Political
Inquiry
American Political Science
Review
Volume 66, Issue
3
Sept. 1972,
796-817
Index
Epistemological Issues That Divide Positivism and
Historicism
The Revolt Against Positivism in the Philosophy of
Science
The Growth of Historicism in American Political
Science
Conclusion: Beyond Positivism and Historicism in
Political Inquiry
The Revolt Against Positivism in
the Philosophy of Science
Thus far we have been concerned with the most general
issues of epistemology that have arisen in the struggle between positivism and
historicism during the past century. It is in light of this struggle over
epistemological principles, I believe, that we must understand the origin and
significance of the cleavage that has developed recently within the philosophy
of science regarding the nature of scientific inquiry. Logi-
13. See
801
cal positivism was formulated in the 1920s with the
express aim of remaking philosophy in conformity with what was presumed to be
the logic and epistemology of modern natural science. For the next three decades the most
influential statements on the nature of science came from members of the
In the past decade, a revolution - or at least a
rebellion - has occurred in the philosophy of science. Views have been advanced which claim to
be radically new not only in their doctrines about science and its evolution and
structure, but also in their conceptions of the methods appropriate to solving
the problems of the philosophy of science, and even as to what those problems
themselves are. 13
As Shapere goes on to indicate, this revolution in the
philosophy of science is directed against the view of science associated with
logical positivism or logical empiricism. But what alternative epistemological
position did the antipositivists adopt? I shall argue that their theory of
knowledge is fundamentally historicist. The recent developments in the philosophy
of science must be understood in light of the century-long struggle between
positivism and historicism. Positivism, having steadily lost ground
in the field of philosophy generally, came under siege finally in its last
stronghold, the philosophy of science. I shall attempt to establish the
historicist nature of the antipositivist revolt in the philosophy of science by
examining the two principal sources of influence upon it: (1) developments in
philosophy that are associated with the later work of Wittgenstein, and (2) the
new interpretation of the history of science.
Ludwig Wittgenstein entered
Two crucial assumptions underlie Wittgenstein’s early
position. First, he holds that
there is but one ideal language into which philosophical discourse must be cast,
but he is unwilling to argue that the logical form of his ideal language has a
necessary basis in reason or in nature. Indeed, the ground of language cannot be
discussed meaningfully because all language about language is merely
tautologous. Second, he holds that
an unambiguous correspondence can be established between the unit-propositions
of the ideal language and the “atomic facts” that are given in experience. These propositions are said to derive
their meaning from the units of experience to which they
correspond.
These two assumptions, and with them Wittgenstein’s
entire position, are obviously vulnerable to attack. If there is no rational or onto-logical
ground for the particular linguistic structure that he advances, then what basis
is there for assigning it a privileged or ideal status? The choice of one language rather than
another, insofar as it is not simply arbitrary, might arise from convention or
agreement. Furthermore, one may doubt that experience as given falls neatly into
elementary units which convey an unambiguous meaning. It might be that experience is always
open to several possible meanings and that our choice of a language, or a set of
concepts, predetermines the particular meaning that we will assign to
experience.
By the early 1930s Wittgenstein had come to question his
own early views and, indeed, to argue explicitly against them on these very
grounds. He gives up the notion
that factual language must have a uniform structure, modelled on the language of
logic. He moves to the view that
there are many alternative languages, or “language games,” including, for
example, the simple language of a child, the ordinary
13. “Meaning and Scientific Change,” in Robert G.
Colodny, ed., Mind and Cosmos (Pittsburgh; University of Pittsburgh
Press, 1966), pp. 41-42.
802
language of everyday life, and the sign-systems of logic
and mathematics. Furthermore,
Wittgenstein gives up the theory that language is an exact picture of reality,
deriving its meaning from the experience that it depicts. The meaning of words is determined not by
private experiences, which in principle are always open to many possible
interpretations, but by conventional usage. In effect, he reverses his original view
that language receives its meaning from experience and takes the position that
experience receives its meaning from language. As many commentators have pointed out,
the concepts of language function for the later Wittgenstein in much the same
way as the a priori categories of the mind function for Kant, that is,
they determine the construction of meaningful objects from unformed experience.
We know the world only as ordered
and articulated by a language; and the only facts or objects belonging to this
world are those which our language recognizes. 14
Wittgenstein moved in his intellectual development from
a position that is favorable to positivism to one that is fundamentally
historicist. Language, he came to
hold, cannot be regarded as an isolated structure, separate from other
expressions of human life and action. Our linguistic activities are part of a
total cultural-linguistic tradition, or “form of life,” that serves as the basis
of society. In his later period
Wittgenstein treated the various forms of life which have developed historically
as irreducible ultimates, beyond which reasoning and inquiry cannot penetrate:
“What has to be accepted, the given, is - so one could say - forms of life.”
15 Human thought is relative to a language and to concepts
which themselves depend on the given form of life. There is no possibility of going beyond
or transcending in any meaningful way the various forms of life. As Stanley Rosen has pointed out,
Wittgenstein’s later position resembles the view of the German historicists that
“life” is at the bottom of the Weltanschauungen that emerge from the
historical process and determine the character of human
thought:
What it means to think, and hence to mean, is decided
within the context of an already understood language, more specifically a
language in a given historical stage, an all-encompassing horizon of intentions
which must be accepted as the basis for analysis or use-specification - a
Lebensform. The Lebensform
is Wittgenstein’s equivalent to the nineteenth-century conception of
Weltanschauung, a word he uses once to ask whether it is not what “earmarks the
form of account we give, the way we look at things.” The inaccessibility of the Lebensform to
theoretical evaluation replaces the earlier impossibility of speaking about
logical form. In the present case,
the Lebensform is equivalent to the language or language game, that is, to
custom or use. In both stages of
his teaching, Wittgenstein denies the possibility of a logos or theoretical
account of speech, in both cases because he identifies the horizon of speech as
that about which one must remain silent. Formerly, however, one had to remain
silent about logical form, or what may be called the natural order of the world.
Now one must be silent about the
foundations - because there is no natural order of the world. There is no physis, so far as
philosophy is concerned, but only nomos. 16
A second major influence shaping the anti-positivist
revolution in the philosophy of science has been the new interpretation of the
history of science. It seems likely
that philosophers of science turned to history for guidance about the nature of
science after they came to accept the radical historicity of the human mind and
thus to doubt that science has an absolute basis in epistemology or logic. By the early 1930s the Polish logician
Kasimir Ajdukiewicz had concluded, on the basis of his historicist theory of
language, that science itself must be understood in terms of history.
17 Ajdukiewicz held that all knowledge, including systems
of science, embodies concepts that are part of a language and have meaning only
when used according to the rules of that language. The commitment to
14. For Wittgenstein’s early position, see his
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. C. K. Ogden (London: Kegan Paul,
1922). His later views are
developed principally in two posthumous works, Philosophical investigations,
trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (New York: Macmillan, 1953) and Preliminary
Studies for the “Philosophical Investigations”: Generally Known as the Blue and
Brown Books (New York: Harper, 1958). For studies of Wittgenstein’s thought,
see, in addition to Urmson’s Philosophical Analysis, David Pole, The
Later Philosophy of Wittgenstein (London: Athlone Press, 1958); Ernst K.
Specht, The Foundations of Wittgenstein’s Late Philosophy, trans. D. E.
Walford (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1969); and E. D. Klemke, ed., Essays on
Wittgenstein (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1971). It should be noted that the
constructivist theory of language is by no means exclusive to Wittgenstein.
Similar views were developed at
about the same time by Cassirer and by the Polish logician Kasimir Ajdukiewicz,
whom I discuss later. Among social
scientists, Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf developed the influential
hypothesis that all views of reality are determined in a largely unconscious
manner by the linguistic systems of groups or cultures. See Max Black, “Linguistic Relativity:
The Views of Benjamin Lee Whorf,” Philosophical Review, 68 (April, 1959),
228-238.
15. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, p.
226.
16. Rosen, Nihilism, p. 9.
17. See Ajdukiewicz, “The Scientific
World-Perspective,” in Herbert Feigl and Wilfrid Sellars, eds.,
803
a language and to its conceptual apparatus determines
the interpretation that we will place on the data of experience. Consequently, there are a variety of
“world-perspectives,” corresponding to the various linguistic and conceptual
systems, but never a complete “world-picture.” Judgments of truth or falsity are always
relative to a particular world-perspective. Even the epistemologist is unable to
decide between the competing claims of different world-perspectives, for he also
is imprisoned in a conceptual apparatus which dictates his judgments. Ajdukiewicz thus recommends that the
epistemologist give up his effort to establish criteria for right thinking about
the world and turn his attention instead to “the history of
science”:
He should give his attention to the changes which occur
in the conceptual apparatus of science and in the corresponding
world-perspectives, and should seek to ascertain the motives which bring these
changes about. Perhaps this
sequence of world-perspectives permits of being conceived as a goal-directed
process which advances as though someone consciously wished to achieve the goal
by means of the sequence. The task
involved in such a conception of the history of science constitutes the sound
kernel of the geisteswissenschaftlichen (culture-theoretical)
understanding of the evolution of science. 18
Contemporary historians of science, proceeding from
historicist assumptions that are very close to those of Ajdukiewicz, consider
and reject the suggestion that the history of science might be intelligible as a
goal-directed process. The basic
document for understanding the new interpretation of the history of science is
Thomas Kuhn’s monograph, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. 18
Kuhn holds that the
common textbook image of science has been called into question by recent studies
in the history of science; and his purpose is to make explicit the decisive
transformation in the image of science that these historical studies require.
What Kuhn calls the textbook image
of science is, in effect, the one that has traditionally been associated with
positivism. It holds that
scientific development takes place incrementally or cumulatively within an open
community. As knowledge
accumulates, it is incorporated into ever more inclusive theories, which are
accepted or rejected according to their ability to withstand empirical
testing. This process of
development-by-accumulation is seen to move steadily toward the ultimate goal of
a true and objective account of nature. Kuhn, by contrast, describes the
evolution of science in much the same way that the historicist describes the
historical process, namely, as a mere sequence of epochs, each with its
distinctive worldview, no one of which can claim to represent a closer
approximation to the truth about the whole than any other.
In Kuhn’s account, a scientific community, during a
period of “normal science,” is governed by a pervasive “paradigm.” Kuhn’s definitions of “paradigm” and his
descriptions of its influence are somewhat vague and ambiguous, but the
similarity of this concept to the older notion of Weltanschauung is
unmistakable. The paradigm is a
scientific community’s “historical perspective,” its “way of seeing the world,”
its comprehensive set of beliefs and commitments - conceptual, theoretical,
instrumental, methodological, and even “quasi-metaphysical.” The paradigm guides and determines the
selection of problems, the evaluation of data, and the acceptance of hypotheses
and theories. By taking first
principles for granted in this manner, “normal scientists” are able to explore a
small range of relatively esoteric problems in great depth and detail, but the
price, Kuhn emphasizes, is a high degree of rigidity and narrowness within the
scientific community itself. Young
scientists are trained to accept the paradigm uncritically by textbooks that
ignore or depreciate alternative outlooks. Problems are avoided, even socially
relevant ones, if they cannot be stated in terms of the conceptual and
instrumental tools that the paradigm supplies. Discoveries or inventions that would call
the paradigm into question are suppressed. Scientists with dissenting views are read
out of the profession and their work is ignored.
By contrast to the positivistic understanding of
scientific development, which stresses incremental or cumulative progress, Kuhn
describes the historical pattern of scientific development as a noncumulative
shift from one paradigm to another. He emphasizes that a drastic change in
the character of scientific inquiry comes about when one paradigm or set of
presuppositions is abandoned and another takes its place. Scientists follow new criteria in
selecting problems, interpreting data, and assessing theories. The old criteria and the body of
knowledge established through them are, in effect, given
up
18. Ajdukiewicz, p. 188.
19. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions,
2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970). Dudley Shapere has examined this work and
called attention to its relativistic implications in Philosophical Review,
73 (July, 1964), 383-394. Kuhn
replies to Shapere and other critics in a “Postscript” to the second edition of
his work. He reaffirms that a
theory cannot be true in the sense of accounting for nature or reality as it is
(p. 206).
804
rather than being incorporated into the new
stage.
Kuhn’s historicism comes clearly into view in his
attempt to explain why these “scientific revolutions” occur. If there is to be a scientific
revolution, scientists must become aware of some anomalous fact that the present
paradigm cannot explain. In this
time of crisis for normal science, new theories are invented to account for the
anomaly, one of which eventually gains wide acceptance as the core of a new
paradigm. It would be a mistake,
however, to say that theories or paradigms are accepted or rejected in terms of
their congruence with empirical data. To those who hold that scientific
theories are rejected when they are falsified or contradicted by experience,
Kuhn replies that the paradigm shapes observation itself, reducing the
likelihood that scientists will even perceive data that are contrary to
expectations that the paradigm itself engenders. Also, facts are always present that do
not “fit” the accepted theory, but these are seldom regarded as serious
anomalies during periods of normal science. To those who hold that new theories are
accepted when they are confirmed by experience, Kuhn replies that it is always
possible to place more than one theoretical construction upon a given collection
of data. Clearly there are forces
at work in scientific revolutions that are more fundamental than the
confrontation of the scientist with the data of experience. Kuhn compares paradigm shifts to the
perceptual transformations that occur when one looks at the ambiguous pictures
used in gestalt experiments. The
perceptual data themselves are not decisive in the mind’s interpretation of the
data. It would be a mistake also to
believe that paradigms are accepted or rejected on rational or logical grounds.
Inasmuch as paradigms are
“incommensurable,” they cannot be judged by common criteria. In short, a change in paradigms cannot be
explained as a deliberate choice, based on either empirical or rational grounds.
In the final analysis, “[a]n
apparently arbitrary element, compounded of personal and historical accident, is
always a formative ingredient of the beliefs espoused by a given scientific
community at a given time.” 20
What is arbitrary is, of course,
inexplicable.
Let us recall Ajdukiewicz’s suggestion that the history
of science might be intelligible as a goal-directed process. Ajdukiewicz had obviously been reluctant
to break completely with the positivistic belief in the progressive character of
scientific development. Kuhn admits
that within a period of normal science there can be progress, judging by the
criteria of the prevailing paradigm, toward the solution of technical problems
or puzzles. He doubts, however,
that the succession of changes from one paradigm to another has brought
scientists closer to the truth about nature. He asks: “Does it really help to imagine
that there is some one full, objective, true account of nature and that the
proper measure of scientific achievement is the extent to which it brings us
closer to that ultimate goal?” 21 Kuhn doubts that this question can be
answered affirmatively; and the reason for his doubts is clear. Just as the older historicists could
admit no standpoint outside of a particular worldview for grasping the truth
about nature or history, Kuhn can admit no standpoint outside a particular
paradigm. There is no
trans-paradigmatic basis for assessing the truth of the competing paradigms or
for apprehending nature as it is. It is no wonder that he tells us that the
decision for a particular paradigm “can only be made on faith.”
22
Having examined the sources of the contemporary revolt
against positivism in the philosophy of science, let us look briefly at the
position of those philosophers who are identified with this revolt. Among the leaders are Stephen Toulmin,
Michael Scriven, Norwood R. Hanson, Paul Feyerabend, and, in social science,
Peter Winch. The grounds of their
opposition to the positivist view of science have been treated in detail by
Dudley Shapere, who, while critical of their work, nonetheless recognizes its
fundamental importance. 23
It is clear from Sha-
20. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions,
p. 4.
21. Kuhn, p. 171.
22. Kuhn, p. 158.
23. Shapere, “Meaning and Scientific Change,” pp.
41-85. In this essay,
Shapere focuses particularly on the writings of Paul Feyerabend, which are cited
extensively, along with pertinent writings by other anti-positivists, in the
footnotes. For other accounts of
this cleavage, along with useful bibliographical information, see Israel
Scheffler, Science and Subjectivity (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1967);
Achinstein and Barker, eds., The Legacy of Logical Positivism; Peter
Achinstein, Concepts of Science (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1968);
Edward MacKinnon, S. J., “Epistemological Problems in the Philosophy of Science,
I, II,” Review of Metaphysics, 22 (September and December, 1968),
113-137, 329-358; and Carl R. Kordig, “The Theory-Ladenness of Observation,”
Review of Metaphysics, 24 (March, 1971), 448-484. There are several excellent series in
which one may survey recent debate over the nature of science, including
805
pere’s account that the antipositivist position has much
in common with the philosophical views of the later Wittgenstein and with views
of the history of science such as Kuhn’s. Their overall interpretation of science
is fundamentally historicist, or, as Shapere prefers to say, relativistic. Shapere identifies as the chief
substantive characteristic of the antipositivist reaction “the view that,
fundamental to scientific investigation and development, there are certain very
pervasive sorts of presuppositions” which vary from one scientific theory or
tradition to another. We are
reminded of the view that all thought and experience are determined by a
Weltanschauung (Dilthey,
We see that the antipositivist movement in the
philosophy of science has reinterpreted modern science, including natural
science, in light of the characteristic assumptions of historicism. It suggests that the guiding
presuppositions of scientific inquiry are variable from one context to another
and are ultimately arbitrary inasmuch as they have no absolute basis in reason
or experience. Even some opponents
of this movement have come to agree with certain of its basic assumptions, for
example, the assumption that modern science rests on arbitrary presuppositions.
24 Yet if modern science rests on presuppositions that are
finally arbitrary, one must wonder if there is any basis whatever for defending
it as superior in principle to the modes of inquiry that its proponents have,
from the outset, repudiated.