Trends in the Development of Contemporary World Philosophy

Philosophy of Neopositivism and Postpositivism

The transformation of science in the 19th and 20th centuries into a leading factor of social development manifested in the emergence of positivism (from the Latin positivus - positive), which denied the value of traditional philosophy and recognized only the special sciences, grounded in empirical experience, as the sole source of "positive" knowledge. The positivist movement underwent several stages in its development: classical positivism, or the so-called "first positivism" of the 19th century; "second positivism," or empiricist criticism from the late 19th to early 20th century; and the third stage—neopositivism, or logical positivism. Positivism was formulated in the works of Auguste Comte (1798-1857), who is considered its founder, as well as John Stuart Mill (1806-1879) and Herbert Spencer (1820-1903).

In his work Course in Positive Philosophy, Comte analyzes three stages in the historical development of humanity:

• The theological stage—where all phenomena are explained through supernatural forces, religious consciousness prevails, corresponding to a theological-military civilization.
• The metaphysical stage—when phenomena reveal essences and causes inaccessible to perception, philosophy dominates—"metaphysics" characterizes this phase, aligned with a metaphysical-legal civilization; common to both the religious and metaphysical stages is humanity's aspiration for absolute knowledge of the world.
• The scientific or positive stage—when knowledge is grounded in facts, humanity renounces insoluble theological and metaphysical questions, embarking on the path of scientific understanding, aligned with a scientifically-industrial civilization.

According to Comte, the true spirit of science lies not in the quest for ultimate causes—not in answering the question "why" phenomena occur—but in describing "how" they occur. Through observation and the collection of facts, science can uncover laws that express the necessary connections and relationships between phenomena. Although philosophy, as metaphysical knowledge, according to Comte, may have exhausted itself in the positive era, it should not altogether perish, as new tasks of integration and generalization of the results of the special sciences arise before it.

Science does not require any philosophy that stands above it, as it does not deal with metaphysical problems. Comte's credo is: "science must be its own philosophy," hence all problems of traditional philosophy must be discarded as pseudo-problems. Thus, Comte’s positivism denied the role of philosophy in the development of theoretical thinking, the formation of concepts, and the clarification of worldview issues in science. The task of science is to gradually accumulate facts and extend the principles of empirical natural science to all spheres of life, while philosophy should integrate and generalize the results of special sciences.

At the end of the 19th century, the philosophy of empiricist criticism (the philosophy of critical experience) emerged, also referred to as "second positivism." Its creators were the German physicist and philosopher Ernst Mach (1838-1916) and philosopher Richard Avenarius (1843-1896), who sought to "purify" experience from excessive assumptions introduced by the subject that do not stem from experience itself. They justified their stance of clearing experience from the burden of "objectivity" and "causality" by principles of economy of thought (Mach) and minimal expenditure of energy (Avenarius).

Beginning in the 1920s, the third historical form of positivism—neopositivism, or logical positivism—emerged and developed. Among its forerunners were representatives of the so-called "Vienna Circle," such as Moritz Schlick (1882-1936) and Rudolf Carnap (1891-1970) in Austria, while English neopositivism was represented by Ludwig Wittgenstein (1869-1951), who emigrated from Austria, and Bertrand Russell (1872-1970). The Lviv-Warsaw School was represented by K. Twardowski (1866-1938), J. Łukasiewicz, and A. Tarski.

Philosophy, they argued, only holds value when it becomes scientific, i.e., oriented toward strict models of natural science and mathematical knowledge. Traditional philosophy is deemed as transcendent knowledge, the connection of which to practice is challenging to trace. In contrast, "positive" knowledge is grounded, reliable, and verifiable, serving as the foundation for effective rational action. Hence, according to neopositivists, philosophy must be evaluated for its scientific validity, leading to the development of a procedure of "verification" (from the Latin veritas - truth), which entails assessing the truth of theoretical propositions against experimental or observational data—that is, against the sensory experience of the subject.

The criterion of the objectivity of knowledge becomes intersubjectivity, defined as the recognition of certain propositions by the scientific community—not as individuals but as a collective subject. The concept of intersubjectivity, alongside verification, stands as one of the foundational ideas in neopositivist philosophy.

Neopositivists assert that the genuine subject of philosophy should be the development of a methodology for scientific cognition: the logical analysis of the language of science, clarifying the content of scientific statements, and purifying it of senseless concepts and judgments unverified by experience. They claimed that logic should replace traditional philosophy.

However, in the attempt to rigorously apply the verification procedure, insurmountable difficulties emerged: it became evident that not only many philosophical statements but also numerous scientific theoretical propositions could not be reduced to experience. Subsequently, to salvage the idea of separating scientific knowledge from non-scientific, Karl Popper ("The Logic of Scientific Discovery") introduced a weakened version of the verification principle—the principle of falsification. The idea of falsification proposed considering that scientific knowledge is not final and thus can be subjected to refutation, whereas non-scientific knowledge cannot be disproven. Another softened version of the procedure for verifying scientific validity is linked to the idea of conventionality (from the Latin convenio - agreement)—where the foundational propositions of science are accepted by consensus among the majority of members of the scientific community.

Although neopositivism played a positive role in the history of 20th-century science and philosophy, facilitating the refinement of scientific language and the development of mathematical logic, its aim of completely eliminating "metaphysical concepts," that is, expelling philosophy from science, proved unattainable and fruitless. In its stead arose postpositivism, which developed during the 1960s and 70s. While neopositivists primarily focused on the logic and structure of established knowledge, showing little interest in the evolution of scientific knowledge and failing to develop it, postpositivism directly addressed the discovery of the regularities involved in the production of scientific knowledge.

The intellectual driving force behind postpositivism was the English philosopher Karl Popper (1902-1994), who began to examine the patterns of the growth of scientific knowledge through the replacement of one theory with another. Distinguished figures of postpositivism include Thomas Kuhn (1922-1955), Imre Lakatos (1922-1974), Paul Feyerabend (1924-1994), and Stephen Toulmin (b. 1922).

• Pre-paradigmatic period: Competition among various schools; absence of widely accepted concepts and methods of research; disputes regarding the legitimacy of methods, problems, and standard solutions.
• Period of "normal science": The disappearance of discrepancies following the victory of one school; scholars are occupied with resolving specific and specialized problems based on the accepted paradigm.
• Crisis of normal science: The accumulation of “anomalous facts” that defy explanation based on the given paradigm; a state of professional uncertainty within the scientific community; an intensification of the search for new explanatory approaches to facts.
• Scientific revolution: The complete or partial displacement of an old paradigm by a new one; a change in the "conceptual grid" through which scholars view the world; a recourse to philosophy when discussing fundamental propositions.

The historical dynamics of evolving knowledge received profound elaboration in Thomas Kuhn's seminal work The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Kuhn proposed to abandon the image of science (which prevailed in neopositivism) as a system of knowledge governed in its development by the canons of methodology and logic, replacing it with an image of science as the activity of scientific communities. Central to his concept is the notion of "paradigm"—a conceptual scheme recognized by the scientific community as the foundation of its practical activity for a specific period

The representatives of postpositivism made significant contributions to the philosophical understanding of science, deepening the comprehension of its development and the activities of scientists.