John Paley
Senior Lecturer, School of Nursing, Midwifery and Health
University of Stirling
Read
any book on qualitative research methods, and it probably won’t be long before
you come across a reference to positivism – and it’s unlikely to be
complimentary. Positivists are the living dead of academic writing, the zombies,
vampires and werewolves of research texts. When you see one coming, reach for
the sharpened stake or equip yourself with silver bullets. The ‘living dead’
metaphor is not as fanciful as it might seem, because one weird thing about
positivism is... it’s dead, but it still needs to be killed. Over and over
again. People who write about it usually do two things: first, they say that it
was demolished and discredited 50 years ago; second, they give it a jolly good
drubbing anyway.
So
here are some of the things which everyone knows about positivism, and which
methodologists are obliged to repeat at every opportunity: (i) positivists
believe it is possible to know things with certainty; (ii) they believe in a
single, objective reality; (iii) they have a correspondence theory of truth;
(iv) they think everything has a cause, including human behaviour; (v) they
think the aim of scientific enquiry is to explain, not to understand; (vi) they
think it’s possible to be objective; (vii) they think knowledge is quantitative;
(viii) they are, or were, political reactionaries.
If you
find a writer making these claims, you can be sure of one thing: they haven’t
read any positivist authors. What they’ve done instead is read
authors-who-are-critical-of-positivism. Because here is the score card: (i)
wrong; (ii) wrong; (iii) wrong; (iv) wrong; (v) wrong; (vi) wrong; (vii) sort
of right, but misleading; (viii) wrong. The only reason why people think these
claims are true is because they are constantly repeated in the literature,
recycled by writers who assume that repetition is an indicator of truth. Or
possibly ‘truth’.
What,
then, is positivism if it isn’t any of these things? Hard to say. Although it’s widely assumed
that the positivists stuck obsessively to a rigid set of ideas, they actually
changed their minds a lot. Having a scientific outlook, if an idea didn’t work,
they rejected it and tried something else. Still, we can say that at the heart
of positivist thinking is the idea that all knowledge comes from what we experience
– either directly, with our senses, or indirectly through instruments. So
positivism is a form of empiricism (that gets a bad press, too).
Logical
positivism gives empiricism a very specific twist. It says that there is one
(but only one) type of knowledge that is not derived from experience, and that
is logic. Hence ‘logical positivism’. Included in logic are other formal
systems that can be derived from it, like mathematics. All the other so-called
‘ways of knowing’ (theology, intuition and metaphysics, for example) are ruled
out, because they are based on neither experience nor logic. So positivism is
sceptical of anything which is not observable, or which cannot be given a
logical form.
This
is why the claims listed earlier are wrong. Most positivists did not think that
‘certain knowledge’ is possible, precisely because not everything can be
observed. They wanted to stick to observable data, and were non-committal about
the existence of unobservable items such as electrons, neutrons, values,
societies, and cultures (they were ‘anti-realists’). Because they were
sceptical about any ‘reality’ which is unobservable, they could hardly have a
theory according to which truth is what corresponds to that ‘reality’. Because
many alleged ‘causes’ are unobservable, they reserved judgment about the
concept of causation. They did not believe that subjectivity can be eradicated,
but they did believe that it is possible to adopt procedures which minimise its
effect. They believed it was sensible to pursue the possibility of
quantification where possible (given the success of mathematics, it would be
silly not to) but recognised that not everything is quantifiable. And they were
politically on the left, which is why
they had to leave Nazi Germany (unlike, say, Heidegger and Gadamer).
The
interesting question is why the ritual of positivist-monster-slaying has to be
repeated so constantly. My suspicion – this is no more than armchair
speculation – is that positivism represents the Shadow (in Jungian terms) or
the Scapegoat (in anthropological terms) for the qualitative community. The
features attributed to positivism really belong to qualitative researchers
themselves; but this cannot, for obvious reasons, be acknowledged. So they are
projected on to the ‘Other’ figure of positivism, which is then symbolically
killed so that the community can relieve itself of unconscious guilt and
celebrate itself as free of epistemological sin. The Scapegoat itself is
innocent of the charges. It does not have the features ascribed to it, but it
serves as a symbolic figure on to which those features can be offloaded, and
which can then be expelled or slaughtered as the bearer of epistemological
evil.
For
example, qualitative authors often use causal concepts – when they talk of
experience and identities being ‘shaped’, ‘influenced’, or ‘determined’ by
culture, history, discourse – despite the fact that they officially reject the
concept of causation. The dissonance which this tension creates can be
alleviated by projecting the commitment to causality outwards onto the
positivist Shadow/Scapegoat, where it can be ritually condemned as belonging to
the Epistemological Other.
If qualitative
researchers could get over their scapegoating reaction to positivism, they
might discover ideas which sit comfortably with their own convictions. For
example, the ‘multiple realities’ favoured by constructivists are not too
distant from the position arrived at by some logical positivists. Carnap’s
mature view, for example, was that there are a number of different linguistic
frameworks in terms of which the world can be described, and that the choice
between them is conventional and pragmatic, a matter of what is suited to a
particular purpose. Consequently, all standards of ‘correctness’, ‘validity’
and ‘truth’ are relativised to the rules and principles associated with
whichever framework has been adopted. This is not a view which constructivists
should find uncongenial.
