A Short Critique of Positivism

In the blog of 9/04/07, I discussed a brief history of positivism. I show that its focus is on sensual data. Thus, it rejects metaphysics. Positivism developed empiricism, which developed a major debate with rationalists such as Descartes and Leibniz. To solve this debate, Kant’s worked on transcendent reasoning by using Aristotle’s categories. But his transcendentalism was not accepted.

The debate was reopened in the 1920s when many Western world linguists concluded that sensual data are primarily symbolic. By this time physical scientists had developed many physical laws. These laws use six primary symbols (charge, temperature, mass, length time and angle) and secondary symbols such as ‘density.’ The meanings of all of these symbols are precise and thus work together to expose new physical laws. However, these symbols are not working together in the infinitely small (free atoms) and the infinitely large (cosmology).

Since the life scientists have not been able to build their own symbols and laws, they expect physical scientists to produce living things from nonliving things. So, life scientists are using physical symbols to build life sciences such as sociology, psychology, neurology, etc. However, these life scientists are not solving medical problems such as cancer, diabetes, autism, and muscular dystrophy and human problems such as crime, child molestation, drug use, and poverty. Further, physical scientists have tried, but have never produced life from nonliving physical matter.

I say that something is wrong with positivism and the sciences that it is creating. At this time followers of Abraham, Moses, Plato, Nicholas of Cusa, Gottfried Leibniz, Friedrich Hegel, Georg Cantor, and me will say that reasoning goes beyond logic and thus that the origin of all finite things is an infinite God. From these followers, you can thus expect a debate against positivism.

Today, many physicists say that origin of all finite things is not God. Instead, they say that Big Bang is the origin of all finite things. However, the Big Bang is a finite thing. Essentially, these physicists are saying that ‘a‘finite thing is the origin of all finite things.’ This saying is illogical. Something is wrong with positivism.