Philosophy of Being and Knowledge

Philosophy of Science

Positivism

A significant phase in the development of the philosophy of science was the emergence of positivism. The founder of this philosophical direction was the French thinker Auguste Comte (1798—1857), the author of the six-volume Course of Positive Philosophy. Comte asserted that humanity had passed through three stages of development, each distinguished by a different mode of understanding reality. The first stage was that of myth, where people explained everything through mythological narratives. For example, in the past, people believed that thunder and lightning were the arrows of Jupiter, and that the Sun was born each morning and died each evening. This mode of understanding was incapable of fostering technological progress. The second stage was the metaphysical stage, during which people began to provide rational explanations for phenomena, but these explanations remained disconnected from experience. Finally, humanity advanced to the positive stage, characterized by the rise of science. Scientific knowledge, according to Comte, is positive, meaning it is grounded in experience. Elevating experience to the highest pedestal of epistemological value was not entirely new, as similar ideas had already been expressed by English and French Enlightenment thinkers.
Comte’s declaration that science was the only reliable means of knowing had a profound impact on subsequent philosophical thought and culture. From this point onward, the tendency to call knowledge "scientific" when reliable, and "unscientific" when not, became deeply ingrained in global culture. To this day, the phrase "That is unscientific!" serves as the harshest indictment of any claim, while the phrase "Scientists have proven..." evokes unquestioning trust from the average person.
In the latter half of the 19th century, a philosophical movement emerged known as empirio-criticism or the second positivism. The most prominent figures of this movement were the Swiss philosopher Richard Avenarius (1843—1896) and the Austrian Ernst Mach (1838—1916). Empirio-criticism represents a critique of knowledge from the standpoint of experience. Adherents of this school were not concerned with the subject or object of knowledge per se, but with the experiential data the subject receives from the object. For example, if a scientist is studying electricity, the phenomenon that, according to Avenarius, should interest the philosopher is neither the scientist nor the electricity itself, but the experience of electricity as perceived by the scientist. The facts of the external world are of interest to science only when they are perceived. Until a fact becomes an object of knowledge, it holds no significance for scientists.
Empirio-criticism's proponents believed that since all people use the same means of perception, they all access the same empirical data. If empirical data are the same for everyone, they can be considered universally true and indisputable. If experience reveals that an object is rectangular, this means that it is rectangular for all who perceive it. Thus, empirical data become the criterion for the truth of any knowledge. The followers of empirio-criticism reduced science to experience, rejecting any other factors in the process of scientific inquiry.