27

Chapter Ten
LIVING AFTER POSITIVISM,
BUT NOT WITHOUT IT

Robert C. Scharff

Everyone knows there are no longer any positivists. The pinched epistemology that
makes everything from moral principles to Shakespeare’s sonnets “cognitively meaning-
less” is a relic of the past—as are the emotivist ethics, the hopelessly formalist concep-
tions of “unified” science, the strict behaviorism in social research, and the scientistic
hostility toward history and the humanities that went with it. Thanks especially to Quine
and Kuhn, the epistemological dogmas and factual misperceptions of scientific prac-
tice endemic to positivism—and especially to its logical empiricist version—have been
exposed and put behind us. Today we are all post-positivists; perhaps most of us were
never really positivists in the first place.
Yet like most of what everyone knows, this popular narrative is wrong. Old tradi-
tions are not like worn-out clothes, specific and fully accessible items to be taken off
at the end of the day. Shedding a philosophical orientation by renouncing its explicit
doctrines is as ineffective as “deciding” not to be prejudiced. The fact is, we still
live with positivism, and our long and problematic relation to it runs deeper than
the level where theories and methods come and go. To see how much positivism we
still inherit, one must look past the self-congratulatory post-positivist renunciations
of twentieth-century logical empiricism and focus more carefully on the actual tran-
sition from logical empiricism to the various species of post-positivism as they were
made—something, in fact, that a number of historians of analytic philosophy have
begun to do.1
From this better-informed perspective, it is obvious both that logical empiricists them-
selves should be given credit for taking at least some theoretically transformative steps
against their own initial claims, and also that Quine and Kuhn were never as “post-”
positivist as they might have seemed at first. Yet if recent studies are a welcome corrective
to the textbook narratives, they remain concerned primarily with the hidden continuities
and internal transformations that took place regarding theories and methods, and even
more specifically in connection with the reformation of the philosophy of science. The
features of our positivist inheritance that I consider in this chapter require both a less

1 See, e.g., Uebel (1992); also Zammito (2004, esp.  6–14 and n.1, Ch. 1); Carus (2013); and
Skorupski (2013).
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228 THE ANTHEM COMPANION TO AUGUSTE COMTE

intellectualist and a less specialized perspective. I want to argue that while all the atten-
tion was being drawn toward the noisy arguments over theoretical and methodologi-
cal reform in the philosophy of science, something like Comte’s “positive spirit” passed
silently into our general inheritance, so that today, this “Comteanism” remains for us a
kind of culture-wide positivism-by-default. “We” in the rich part of the Western world
call it the spirit of “development.”
Comte thought that humanity is ultimately destined to live under the auspices of
a fully flourishing third and final “stage” of intellectual and social development—that
is, prosper in a never-ending age in which scientific naturalism rules epistemology, and
technoscientific planning structures our lives in a way that promises an existence so
deeply satisfying that any further intellectual and social transformation of the sort that
prompted our move beyond theological and metaphysical ways of thinking and acting
would seem self-evidently unnecessary. This ultimate eventuality, says Comte, expresses
the basic law of all human development—in each individual, in every quest for knowl-
edge, in our societies, and in the whole history of the species. Of course, in the eyes of
his philosophical progeny, Comte’s “law” is no law at all. At best, it is an easily discredited
empirical hypothesis; at worst, it is the linchpin of an old-fashioned speculative philoso-
phy of history. In either case, it has no place in a “scientific” philosophy, and many logical
positivists felt so strongly about this that they rebranded themselves as logical empiricists
precisely to drive the point home. Yet in fact, Comte’s vision of a third and final “posi-
tively” scientific stage has outlived their objections. It survives not in pre-scientific spec-
ulation or post-positive theories, but in life—for example, in the widespread privileging
and overextension of the idea of technoscience in popular images of the good life; in the
notion that human practices are at their best when understood scientifically and guided
by science-like advice; in our allegedly scientific but actually ideological concepts of the
political economy and rational economic actor; and in the belief that the whole drift of
world history is necessarily toward what “we” in the capitalist West call “development.”
And perhaps still more problematically, Comte’s vision is alive and well in the common
philosophical assumption that anyone who objects to any of the above must necessarily
be wishing for a return to the bad old pre-scientific days of supernaturalism and specu-
lative metaphysics.”2

2 A recent collection makes what might seem to be the same point, by criticizing a “scientism”
that grew out of the Enlightenment and now constitutes the basic (and intellectually oppres-
sive) outlook in the Western world (Williams and Robinson 2015). In support of their argu-
ment, Williams cites Heidegger’s famous characterization of our age as set up and “enframed”
technoscientifically, such that “the rule of enframing threatens man with the possibility that it
could be denied to him to enter into a more original revealing and hence to experience the call
of a more primal truth” (Heidegger 2008a, 333). Here, says Williams, Heidegger “expresses
the concern of many, that successful effective technology subtly invites us to entertain the pos-
sibility that all problems are merely technological problems” (Williams and Robinson 2015, 2).
However, Heidegger thinks of enframing as an eventuation, a way of revealing everything, in
which we already find ourselves “dangerously” caught up, whereas Williams treats it as some-
thing the human mind constructs, using “technology” as a “sweeping metaphor,” in order to
produce a scientistic metaphysical system. The emphasis in the collection as a whole is thus
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LIVING AFTER POSITIVISM, BUT NOT WITHOUT IT 229

In the four main parts of this chapter, I consider further just what sort of positivism it
is that I think “survives” in our inheritance after the demise of logical empiricism. First,
I explain why this issue is better addressed in Comtean rather than anti-logical empiri-
cist or post-positivist terms. Second, I discuss Comte’s conception of the third stage of
intellectual development, in order to highlight a few of its familiar-sounding themes (part
two) and consider why we could never be as unrelievedly happy about them as Comte
was himself (part three). Finally, I offer a brief characterization of how Comte’s focus on
the “spirit” of positivism, not just on doctrines and methods that might be defended in its
name, might now be reinterpreted so as to help us address our own misgivings concern-
ing precisely this spirit. Throughout this discussion, a secondary thesis will be that oppo-
sition to positivism cannot in principle assuage these misgivings because such opposition
tends to be rooted in the same philosophical spirit as positivism itself.

The Positivism behind Post-Positivism

The position against which we usually think of ourselves as being post-positivist is, of
course, not Comte’s but that of the logical empiricism whose basic orientation is laid out
in a famous 1929 manifesto, “The Scientific Conception of the World.”3 The main task
for the (no adjective) philosopher, it declares, is philosophy of science; and philosophers
of science need make only two basic commitments. They must provide a formal-logical
analysis (i.e., a rational reconstruction) of the scientific method, and they must be strict
empiricists about the effective range of this method’s application. These two commit-
ments together constitute what all logical empiricists regard as philosophy’s “scientific

focused on certain ideas or ideological beliefs the contributors regard as a product of an exces-
sive and ultimately unscientific science-mindedness. Scientism, says Williams, “entails a meta-
physical commitment to naturalist, reductive or emergent [basically mechanistic] materialism
and tries to define science in a way that includes not only a commitment to empirical methods,
but also to this particular metaphysics” (Williams and Robinson, 3; cf. 6–7, 11–12). Not all
the contributors define scientism in precisely these terms; but all of them appear to follow the
editors in treating scientism as a position, one involving an unjustified elevation of certain con-
cepts or methodological features of science into an extra-scientific worldview, and they focus
primarily on either the historical issue of how this happened or the current epistemological
issue of how science can be separated from scientism. However, I do not think scientism stands
or falls on the basis of the embrace or modification of a conceptual system; nor do I think our
remaining problems with Comte’s legacy, insofar as it is scientistic, can be solved by achieving
better clarity about the real nature of science. Hence, my discussion focuses on what Heidegger
(and I think Comte also) regard as the prior question, viz., how must everything already seem
to be given to us and how must we already understand our relations with it—in other words,
how must we already be-in-the-world—such that the formulation of a scientistic metaphysics
might seem appropriate in the first place?
3 Otto Neurath, Rudolf Carnap and Hans Hahn (1973). The pamphlet is described as a joint
production, with Neurath writing the initial draft (318n.1). Hereafter cited as Neurath, et al.
Among the best brief accounts of logical empiricism during its heyday are Uebel (2013) and,
more comprehensively, the somewhat earlier essays in Richardson and Uebel (2007) and
Hardcastle and Richardson (2003).
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230 THE ANTHEM COMPANION TO AUGUSTE COMTE

view of the world.” Statements of this basic mission were repeated countless times, in
both professional and popular form, but always with these two commitments promi-
nently displayed.4 And, of course, it is toward the logical empiricist “position” portrayed
in these explicit statements that subsequent critiques were directed.5
There is, however, another voice in this manifesto. The authors explain in strikingly
unpositivistic terms that all philosophers who possess epistemologically the “spirit” or “atti-
tude” of the formal and empirical sciences, also tend to share similar ethical, social and
political opinions (i.e., views on “questions of life”), both with each other and with all those
who display the same “intellectual attitude which presently manifests itself in many other
walks of life … we feel all around us.”6 Especially given the recent turn in world events,
this claim certainly seems exaggerated today, but what is important here is the authors’
insistence that this personal fact about those who embrace the scientific worldview, inter-
esting as it might be, is not a philosophical topic. There is, they say, “no such thing as phi-
losophy as a basic or universal science alongside or above the various fields of the one empirical science”
(Neurath, et al. 1973, 316, authors’ emphasis). Strictly speaking, there are no “philosoph-
ical” assertions, no substantive pronouncements about life’s meaning or its norms. To the

4 The other locus classicus for the movement, generally regarded as the source of the phrase, “log-
ical positivism,” is Blumberg and Feigl (1931). In similarly manifesto-like terms, they explain
that it is precisely because logical positivism proceeds “by means of the theory of knowledge
[…] constructed [in accordance with recent developments in factual and formal sciences],”
that it “goes beyond the Comtean and pragmatic rejection of metaphysics as useless or super-
fluous and shows that the propositions of metaphysics, in most senses of the term, are, strictly
speaking, “meaningless” (282). Friedrich Stadler summarizes the outlook as “a basic scientific
orientation grounded in logical and linguistic analysis, an explanatory and epistemological
monism in terms of methodology and research subjects, and finally a sort of fallibilistic episte-
mology with interdisciplinarity featuring as a program that opposes any sort of foundationalist
‘system’ ” (Stadler 2003, xii). As Stadler’s statement shows, “logical and linguistic analysis” is
the vehicle for establishing the sort of epistemology the movement deems appropriate, but the
appropriateness of this epistemology is already understood scientistically. Hence, it would be to
confuse the means of defense with the thing defended to argue that logical empiricism must be
interpreted above all as constituting a mathematico-linguistic turn.
5 Alan Richardson makes the important historical point that because Kuhn and others per-
haps too often framed their critiques of logical empiricism in terms of the movement’s more
manifesto-like writings, they too easily (and sometimes quite wrongly) concluded logical empir-
icism cannot in principle acknowledge that scientists often use very unscientific ideas and
methods in their search for knowledge, when in fact all that their epistemic position requires
is that when scientists finish their research, their assertions of scientific law must satisfy certain
formal conditions (Richardson 2007, 351–53). The same thing can be said about work that
assumes logical empiricists cannot acknowledge the political and cultural significance of sci-
ence. See, e.g., Howard (2003, 25–93). However, neither of these historical corrections changes
the equally important point I am emphasizing here, viz., that there simply is a fundamental
distinction between what logical empiricism can and cannot in principle acknowledge philo-
sophically, and this distinction figures crucially both in how logical empiricists handled their
own extra-“philosophical” concerns and in post-positivist critiques of the position.
6 This specific phrasing is from Carnap (1967, xvii-xviii); cf. Neurath et al. (1973, 304–5,
317–18).
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LIVING AFTER POSITIVISM, BUT NOT WITHOUT IT 231

extent that there is philosophy at all, it consists in the “logical clarification of scientific
concepts, statements and methods” that “ provides science with as complete a range of
formal possibilities as possible, from which to select what best fits each empirical finding”
(317). Philosophy establishes the conditions of meaning and truth. It does not contribute
to “the metaphysical and theological debris of millennia.” Hence, “philosophy” (again,
typically with no modifying adjective) cannot officially recognize as a proper topic its own
shared sentiment about the importance of what it is doing.
But an interpretive trap lies in wait for us. The textbook conclusion usually drawn from
this apparent conundrum is that here the Vienna Circle positivists are caught in one of
their notorious attempts to reject metaphysics metaphysically. In fact, however, something
more serious—and potentially more instructive—is going on. Certainly, if we simply take
its adherents at their anti-metaphysical metaphysical word, it seems easy to conclude that
logical positivism is indeed, as Passmore puts it in a much-quoted remark, “as dead as a phil-
osophical movement ever becomes.”7 Yet even if all the main features of the positivist pro-
gram have been rejected, this rejection is not as “post-positivist”—that is, as radically beyond
logical empiricism’s scientific view of the world—as advertised, and this fact ultimately has
little to do with the logical empiricist program and everything to do with the scientific atti-
tude or “sentiment” we were assured philosophers do not have to talk about.
In one respect, the survival of positivism in post-positivist thought is perfectly under-
standable. As is often the case with positions that start out as reactions to other positions,
the underlying “spirit” of the original position still tends to be shared by its opponents.
Atheism, for example, often embarrassingly resembles the theology it rejects, that is, by
being a contrarian position formed with negative signs placed in front of the original arti-
cles of faith.8 Thus similarly, much opposition to logical positivism involves rejecting overt
features of its analysis of science while continuing to rely on the orthodox conception of
science itself. For example, to push for epistemological pluralism by arguing that there
are “other” sciences with “other” purposes using “other” methods (e.g., to “understand”
rather than “explain”) depends upon one’s leaving in its hegemonic position precisely
the positivist sense that the “real” sciences are the mathematical and physical sciences.9

7 Passmore (1967, 56; 2006, 529). Less quoted is his qualification a few lines earlier that he is
talking about logical positivism “considered as the doctrine of a sect” (emphasis supplied).
8 I am thinking here of those whose atheism is motivated by intellectual commitments to sci-
entifically conceived epistemology, rigorous naturalism and ethical humanism like Stephen
Hawking, Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins and Samuel Harris, who are primarily concerned
to produce arguments that “refute” religious beliefs and believing. For recent critical discussion
see, e.g., Amarasingam (2010). Very differently motivated are those (e.g., Marxists) concerned
primarily with socio-political reform who see religious superstition, dogmatism and monothe-
istic belief systems as mainstream vehicles for supporting the status quo (or worse). The former
group is more anti-theological than anti-religious, though of course there is often some overlap
(most famously, perhaps, in the case of Bertrand Russell). The worry I am expressing here is
above all about the way scientific theory is wielded as an extra-scientific weapon as if this were
self-evidently a good philosophical procedure.
9 In fact, this approach adds problems of its own, e.g., by implying that there are two (or more?)
“ontologies,” one (or more?) for natural science, one (or more?) for the human sciences. This
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232 THE ANTHEM COMPANION TO AUGUSTE COMTE

And to insist that considering the discovery of scientific theories is philosophically just
as important as their justification, does little to undercut the positivist assumption that
the confirmation of predictive theories is the “essence” of scientific practice.10 Nor does
positivism go away because one is currently inclined to “contextualize” scientific thinking
so as to rid philosophy of science of the notoriously ahistorical conception of rationality
promoted by logical empiricism. For “adding” an account of the circumstances within
which thinking takes place does nothing by itself to challenge the assumption that sci-
entific rationality—never mind who uses it and under what conditions—remains a topic
hegemonic unto itself.11
In spite of the impression one might still get from mainstream textbooks, such “sci-
ence studies”-based criticisms of post-positivism as these are now widely recognized.12
However, the problem is not just that logical empiricist doctrines and methods have
often been opposed in a positivist way. The real problem lies in the fact that, in spite of
convincing appearances to the contrary, by assuming that one becomes post-positivist
through opposing doctrines or methods, one actually revitalizes the positivist sentiment
Neurath, et al., urged everyone to ignore. Granted, the analysis of right thinking has now
been pluralized and deformalized and contextualized. First-person input is now gener-
ously allowed to supplement third-person analyses. Philosophical contact is now per-
mitted between the history of science/philosophy and the current practice of science/
philosophy. And even if epistemology does still tend to favor natural scientific rationality, we
are assured that all our pluralizing, contextualizing and historicizing has rendered this
traditional gambit harmless. Yet if all these moves can make one appear post-positivist,
everything that every positivist since Comte has understood to be definitive of scientific
philosophy is silently reaffirmed. One still starts with epistemology, privileges the episte-
mology most suited to the natural sciences (where science is already “really” happening),
tacks on the naturalist “metaphysics” that is actually presupposed by this epistemology
and then, with great generosity of spirit, allows discussion of “other features” of scientific
practice that logical empiricism rejected, writing this rejection off as merely the tempo-
rary effect of an excessive enthusiasm for the new project of defending reason and truth
without reference to mere history and the “slag” of natural languages.

only exacerbates the already problematic essentialism in traditional philosophy of science that
is one of the factors that led to the campaign for epistemic pluralism in the first place. See
Rouse (2002, 81–95; 1987, Ch. 6).
10 So, e.g., the two pioneering collections by Thomas Nickles (1980a; 1980b) that quite explicitly
try to legitimize the idea that discovery “also” has its own “logics.” Nickles’s later work reflects
the degree to which this silent deference to rational reconstruction, together with the underly-
ing adherence to the context of discovery/context of verification dichotomy itself has disap-
peared with the rise of science studies (Nickles 2010).
11 How to relate what philosophers, historians and natural and social scientists themselves now
say about the practice of science is certainly not a settled question. See, e.g., Gavroglu and
Renn (2007).
12 This does not mean, of course, that everyone who recognizes them agrees on what they imply
for either philosophy of science or philosophical critiques of positivism. A good survey of the
terrain might start with Laudan (1996) and Biagioli (1999), as well as Zammito (2004).
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LIVING AFTER POSITIVISM, BUT NOT WITHOUT IT 233

But what of this deeper set positivist preferences? By what right is lifeworld experi-
ence designated as “first” person-like? (Implicit answer: because it is the “third” person
perspective that has already been determined to be the detached, objective and truth-
seeking outlook, which makes the first-person perspective deserve at best to be supple-
mentary, incurably subjective and feeling-bound)?13 What good does it do to admit that
the natural sciences are just as “interpretive” as the human sciences—that is, just as
much a particular sort of articulation of what is “practically pre-understood” in life as
any other kind of science—if one then fails to face the much more disruptive conclusion,
namely, that if all scientific activity is interpretive, then all science is in this respect onto-
logically on par whether we are engaged with material nature, other people or things like
“the social” and “the political”? (Implicit answer: Because it is already settled that we
must all be ontological naturalists—in a way that covers any use of reason and any reality
whatever—and that the primary purpose of language is still to picture, represent, mirror
or perhaps even constitutively fashion Nature). Instead of answers to questions like these,
we get positivism lite.14
Asking questions like these might seem to make one a spoil sport in an era of gen-
erously revisionary philosophical tendencies. Yet that is precisely what is bothersome.
Something (that is already deeply in place) is merely being revised (in terms of another set of
articulations). As is well known, some philosophers (e.g., Heidegger, Derrida, Rorty, per-
haps the later Wittgenstein) argue that this “something” is the continuous playing-out of

13 It should be remembered that the title of Thomas Nagel’s famous book is often employed to
be more critical of the Cartesian–Comtean–Logical Empiricist philosophical stance than its
author. For in The View from Nowhere (1986), Nagel makes it very clear that his efforts to find
room for the first-person perspective are designed only to give it a carefully limited value and
distinctively secondary status. As he later explained, Nowhere was certainly interested in estab-
lishing that first-person reports are useful, e.g., in reminding us that reason’s quest for “unqual-
ified results” is nevertheless “something we do” (Nagel 1997, 6–7; and Ch. 1); but he insists that
he himself has always been someone whose objectivist “sympathies are with Descartes and
Frege” (Nagel 1997, 7). Hence for Nagel, although we can expect that even our best efforts
at scientific knowing will always be superseded, this means only that we should keep trying to
develop a detached perspective that can coexist with and comprehend the individual one—
and then at least be confident that “the objective self, though it can escape the human perspective, is
still as short-lived as we are” (Nagel 1986, 86; cf., 9–10).
14 Actually, as Rouse explains, there are at least two competing conceptions of what it means to
say that all sciences are interpretive, or “hermeneutical”—a Wittgensteinian–Heideggerian
hermeneutics of practice and a Quinean–Davidsonian hermeneutics of (linguistic) transla-
tion. For the latter, it is still “a question of my deciding which sentences to accept.” It is only
for followers of Heidegger and Wittgenstein that the question becomes: “How can I be freed
to encounter what is at stake, what is truly questionable, in living now” (Rouse 1987, 48–49).
Quinean hermeneutics thus reaffirms the traditional empiricist-positivist aim to “interpret
what is the case”; whereas a Heideggerian hermeneutics embraces a phenomenological alter-
native and “interprets what[ever] is the matter” (48; also 50–80) It goes without saying that, at
least in the Anglophone world, since the Quinean–Davidsonian view still shares most of the
commitments of traditional philosophy of science, it tends to win by default. Appeals are then
made to Heideggerians just to prove how open-minded the mainstream has become, and to
mine Continental texts to further orthodox aims.
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234 THE ANTHEM COMPANION TO AUGUSTE COMTE

a basic understanding of what is real and what to do about it that was already established
at the beginning of the modern era—or perhaps even earlier, when the pre-Socratics
responded in wonder to cosmic presence, asked how we can know it, and assumed that
since we are part of the cosmos, acquiring knowledge of it will in the process tell us who
we are and what we should do, and also reveal the proper meaningfulness of everything
else as well. This longer, controversial story we obviously cannot consider here. However,
a quick review of its Comtean chapter—set up in the form of a renewed analysis of the
differences between logical empiricism and nineteenth-century positivism—is worth the
space.15 For Comte is a self-reflective positivist who can show us a way to criticize logical
empiricism that has nothing to do with its claims, theories, methods or closet metaphysics.
Comte actually defends positivism, and his way of doing so can remind us that having
what is misleadingly labeled philosophical sentiments, or attitudes or a general sympathy
(or antipathy) for the “spirit” of an age is not only normal but unavoidable. Articulating
such sentiments is possible and philosophically desirable, for they live at the very heart
of any philosophical practice—always most importantly, one’s own—and thus present
us with a forced option: Either fall for the self-deceptive idea that we might “choose”
to philosophize with or without them, or be honest about this situation and make it
one’s philosophical obligation to critically analyze the sentiment one inherits. Logical
empiricists—and many later philosophers who seem to embrace post-positivism—take
some variant of the first option; Comte rightly insists upon the second.

Comte on “Third-Stage” Life
For Comte, it is in fact a philosopher’s first duty to develop a reflective self-understanding
of how it is to properly philosophize in “the present era” and for him, that means at the
dawn of the technoscientific age in which we ourselves are now more fully installed.16
Hence, what Comte calls “positivist” or scientific philosophy is his articulation of what
he takes to be intellectually central to the general situation that he already finds himself
inheriting and developing—rather like the way that we at a certain point identify the
native language we already have and are developing. We can thereafter consciously enact
it and adapt it to new circumstances, reflect on it, cultivate a feel for the variability of
its uses, stretch and reshape its possibilities by learning another language, but we cannot
choose to walk away from it in favor of another primary choice. Without pushing this
analogy too far, we might say that Comte discovers himself intellectually already becom-
ing a positivist as much as he finds himself already speaking French. His famous three-
stage law explains this.

15 I have argued for this “Heideggerian” interpretation of Comte—and especially of his three-
stage law—elsewhere. See, e.g., Scharff (2014b, 318–28). I doubt, however, whether accept-
ance or rejection of this longer argument makes much difference to my claim here. That
Comte’s positive spirit is still demonstrably the dominant underlying sense of things that
informs our current talk about the “developed” world can certainly be established without
Heidegger’s help.
16 This section is a condensation of several other discussions, with extensive citations to Comte’s
writings (Scharff 2014a, 103–54; 2010, 441–58; and 2002, 73–91).