Positivism is a term used frequently in discussions of research in information systems, but rarely is it treated in depth or in terms of its historical development. Many philosophers of science regard positivism as defunct: ‘Logical positivism, then, is dead, or as dead as a philosophical movement ever becomes’ (Passmore, 1967). Why then is the term still used so uncritically in information systems? Positivism is discussed here in some detail to show the shortcomings detected by philosophers of science and to pave the way for less narrow views on theory from the philosophy of science.
Some sense of the historical development of positivist schools of thought is beneficial (see Godfrey-Smith, 2003; Magee, 1997). Comte (1864) is generally credited with the coining of the term ‘positivism’, using the word to contrast actual with imaginary, certainty with the undecided, the exact in contrast to the indefinite. Logical positivism as an extreme form of empiricism was developed in Europe after the First World War by what became known as the Vienna Circle, established by Moritz Schlick and Otto Neurath. It was formed in opposition to systems of philosophical thought that the logical positivists found pretentious, obscure, dogmatic and politically unattractive (such as Hegelian idealism). Logical positivism was a plea for Enlightenment values, in opposition to mysticism, romanticism and nationalism (Godfrey-Smith, 2003). A. J. Ayer, G. E. Moore and Bertrand Russell were responsible for the transposition of the ideas of logical positivism to England where they had a profound effect, with much of English philosophy retaining a strong empiricist emphasis ever since.
Many of the Vienna Circle were Jewish and had socialist leanings. They were persecuted to varying degrees by the Nazis, who made use of pro-German, anti-liberal philosophers, and who also tended to be obscure as well as anti-liberal. In contrast to the logical positivists, Martin Heidegger joined the Nazi party and remained a member throughout the Second World War. Some logical positivists – Carnap, Reichenbach, Hempel and Feigl – escaped to the United States where they were influential in philosophical development after the war. There was some softening and re-specification of the tenets of logical positivism and the later more moderate views are more usually called ‘logical empiricism’ (Godfrey-Smith, 2003).
At the base of logical positivism is the famous Verification Principle. This says that only assertions that are in principle verifiable by observation or experience can convey factual information and be meaningful. Assertions that have no imaginable method of verification must either be analytic (tautological) or meaningless (Magee, 1997). Thus, the two central ideas of logical positivism relate to language: the analytic-synthetic distinction and the verifiability theory of meaning. The first idea relates to the distinction between analytic statements, which are true in themselves (basically a tautology), and synthetic statements, which are true or false in relation to how the world is. The second idea is that experience is the only source of meaning and the only source of knowledge. Thus, if a sentence (in a theory, say) has no possible means of verification, it has no meaning. Scientific statements were to consist of verifiable, and hence meaningful, claims.
Karl Popper in his autobiography (Popper, 1986) takes the credit for ‘killing’ logical positivism as early as 1934 by pointing out some of its mistakes in Logic der Forschung (Popper, 1934), not published until 1959 in English as The Logic of Scientific Discovery (Popper, 1980). Popper was opposed to the concentration upon minutiae and especially upon the meaning of words by the logical positivists, and the avoidance of metaphysical problems. A difficulty with the Verification Principle is that it is neither analytic nor empirically verifiable itself and therefore, according to its own criterion, is meaningless. The Verification Principle has the effect of outlawing more or less the whole of metaphysical speculation in philosophy – everything apart from logic. Popper also showed that the Verification Principle eliminated almost the whole of science. An aim of science is the search for natural laws, which are unrestrictedly general statements about the world that are known to be invariantly true: for example, Boyle’s Law, the law of gravity, or E=mc2. Popper showed that these laws are not empirically verifiable, acknowledging that the English empiricist David Hume had made this observation two-and-a-half centuries before. The problem is that of induction: from no finite number of observations, however large, can any unrestrictedly general conclusion be drawn that would be defensible in logic. For example, we cannot prove ‘all swans are black’ no matter how many swans we observe.
The point of this discussion of positivism is that positivism is just one philosophical perspective on science, and a form that has largely been debunked. Focussing on positivism as being representative of views about theoretical formulation and epistemology in science obscures the rich value that can be found in many other writings in the philosophy of science, as discussed in the following section. The information systems literature provides many instances where ‘positivism’ is a label given to various, often conflicting, impressions of what scientific thought means. This habit is so widespread that no opprobrium should attach to the identification of particular instances. Positivism is characterised as being associated with naïve realism, a ‘value-free’ view of scientific enquiry, hypothetico-deductive methods, unilateral causal relationships or laws, statistical analysis and so on (see Orlowski and Baroudi, 1991). This depiction obviously does not match the original tenets of logical positivism, and neither is it compatible with the writings of prominent philosophers of science (see Nagel, 1979). Discussion of positivism is lingering on in information systems and our researchers are seemingly unaware that it is moribund. Orlowski and Baroudi (1991), for example, footnote the possibility that positivist dogma may be losing its currency among mainstream natural scientists, seemingly unaware of its recognised killing-off many years previously in what can only be regarded as very mainstream philosophy of science (Popper, 1936; Passmore, 1967).
The author believes that ‘positivism’ should no longer be even mentioned as a defensible position in discussions of theory or epistemology in information systems. If what is meant is a scientific perspective, then it is better to say so; to go directly to writings in the philosophy of science and to examine issues separately and carefully. The conclusion from this summary of positivism is that it is not a fruitful source of ideas on theorising in information systems.