Positivism: A Teaching and My Technical Response to Michael Hennessy’s Comment to Yesterday’s Blog

According to the Britannica Encyclopedia (2006 CD), positivism confines itself to the data of experience and excludes a priori or metaphysical speculations. It developed through several stages such as Empiriocriticism, Logical Positivism, and Logical Empiricism, and, in the mid_20th century, Analytic and Linguistic philosophy. Thus, all knowledge regarding matters of fact is based on the "positive" data of experience. Beyond the realm of fact is that of pure logic and pure mathematics.

Positivists became noted for their repudiation of metaphysics; i.e., of speculation regarding the nature of reality that radically goes beyond any possible evidence that could either support or refute "transcendent" knowledge Positivism is worldly, secular, antitheological, and antimetaphysical. Strict adherence to the testimony of observation and experience is the all_important imperative. Positivists have been Utilitarians and promote the maxim, "the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people."

Positivism has its roots in the French Enlightenment and in the 18th_century British Empiricism, particularly that of Hume and George Berkeley. The role of sense experience was stressed.. The thought of Auguste Comte designates positivism. He was influenced by the Enlightenment Encyclopaedists (such as Denis Diderot, Jean d'Alembert, and others) and, especially in his social thinking, was decisively influenced by the founder of French Socialism, Claude_Henri, comte de Saint_Simon, whose disciple he had been in his early years and from whom the very designation Positivism stems.

However, the positivism of Plato does not confine our minds to the task of explaining empirical data. In his Sophist (at 257b), Plato says, "When we speak of ‘that which is not,’ it seems that we do not mean something contrary to what exists but only something that is different." So, if we use the word ‘not’ to seek something that is not finite, we are free to posit ‘infinite.’ Our minds must make this posit, otherwise we cannot determine the origin of finite. Positivists reject this form of human reasoning. Without the gift of creativity from God, a positivist says that a person is the ‘subject’ of empirical data of objects. I, and other people who believe in God, say that every person is creative and is not merely part of an audience of empirical data.

On the use of Leibniz''s monads, I suggest the use of spiritual atoms because phyical atoms are not being found. I do not build a science on them because this science will be complex and will probablye require the development of Cantor's transfinite numbers. So, building a science on them by me is well beyond the scope of my book.