EDUCATIONAL RESEARCH, THEORY AND METHODOLOGY

Educational Research, Theory and Methodology



Educational Research, Theory and Methodology

Part A

Comparing Positivism and Phenomenology

Positivism

Positivism, in its most general sense, is a doctrine that maintains that the study of the human or social world should be organised according to the same principles as the study of the physical or natural world. In simple terms, positivism maintains that the social sciences should be modelled on the natural sciences. This broad definition encompasses numerous variants, depending first on what are taken to be the characteristic features of the natural sciences and second on which of these features are to be applied in the social sciences. Accordingly, a very wide range of social theories have been designated positivist, even though they show little similarity in terms of notions of data, mode of analysis, or explanatory objective.

Historically, the popularity of positivism has waxed and waned as enthusiasm for science has fluctuated, most notably from the optimism 150 years ago that science provided the basis for the progressive understanding and control of the natural and social worlds to the current pessimism about science's part in the despoliation of the natural environment and degradation of the human condition. Particularly influential on positivism's rise and fall has been the varying strength of the counter doctrine, which maintains that the social world—the actions and interactions of human beings—cannot be studied according to scientific principles. This counter doctrine too has taken a variety of forms, depending on what properties of individual people or social collectivities are considered to be beyond scientific analysis.

The Early Roots

Positivism has its origin in the eighteenth-century French Enlightenment, the doctrine being a key component of what is now known as the modernist project, which was founded on the belief that human endeavours—especially the rational pursuit of empirical scientific inquiries—would generate knowledge that could be deployed for human betterment. The term positivism was coined by Auguste Comte to describe the ideas, largely drawn from earlier thinkers, that he set out in a series of lectures and which were later published in the six-volume Cours de philosophie positive (1830-1842). From his conspectus of the sciences, Comte believed he had established a law of three stages through which knowledge in all disciplines necessarily progresses. In the first, theological stage, people explain by appeal to divine agents. In the second, metaphysical stage, explanations are proposed in terms of abstract forces and powers. In the third and final, scientific or positive stage, explanations eschew appeal to mysterious abstractions and are instead cast in terms of invariable natural laws relating observable phenomena and events, with Newton's laws of motion being the paradigmatic case. Different disciplines pass through the three stages at different rates, and therefore fall into a natural hierarchy, with the highest and most complex taking the longest to arrive at the positive stage. The queen of the sciences, argued Comte, is sociology, for its laws guide the application of the lower sciences for the benefit of humanity. The Cours is, in effect, a sustained argument that ...