Positivist

His talents were many an intuitive grasp of mathematics, a remarkable memory and an original approach. Fourier was a man of great common sense, a utilitarian, and a positivist. 

If there are no laws in biology, then biological theories cannot be related to one another in ways that satisfy the post-positivist conception of reduction. For the bridge principles that this formulation of reduction requires are laws, and the derivations they consists of require laws. Without recourse to laws, reductionism must be rejected or reformulated. 

For the past century and a half, mainstream science has assumed a positivist stance, one which increasingly seeks to describe the world in nonpersonal terms (Simon, 1963 Kolakowski, 1968). Positivism carries several meanings and has been notoriously difficult to define, yet certain precepts... 

Here I want to draw the implications of this position for understanding the relationship of biomedical reductionism as the dominant positivist orientation to holism - in this case, the restitution of the intact person to his or her full personhood. I maintain the following ... 

This positivist attitude is well-established in the biomedical world, and, to be sure, it was hard-won and hardly to be disparaged. However, at the same time, the price for objectifying disease has diluted, if not too often replaced medicine s ancient calling of care. I mean by care, attention to each facet of the individual, namely, treating the patient as a person, as a whole. A medicine that fails to address those elements of personhood that have no scientific basis - the social, the emotional, the moral - is ultimately fractional and therefore incomplete. Only by the physician committing to comprehensive care can the multifarious elements of being ill be addressed effectively. There is no one else to assume that responsibility, and we must invoke the ethics of responsibility to re-define the entire enterprise.5... 

This research attempts to identify clear, observable facts which are precursors of accidents. From these precursors possible causal factors which enable accidents to occur will be derived. The findings can be generalized by analysing several cases and eventually verified by some practical examples. This results in the philosophical positioning of this research as positivistic. 

Other, often made distinction in types of research, are between exploration, description, explanation, and testing, van der Zwaan (Zwaan van der, 1990). Exploration is conducted when theoretical knowledge in literature lacks information on which variables are important. Description types of research aim at the relevance of the variables. Explanation types of research aim at identifying the causal links between variables and phenomena. Finally, testing types of research aim at proving the hypotheses derived from the causal links. The research project discussed in this thesis is mainly explorative in nature. The emphasis is to design concepts and a protocol, which increases the understanding of the problem of how and why accidents continue to occur in companies in the chemical process industry. In this way a contribution to the solution of the problem will be made and consequently this research can be typified as applied positivistic exploratory research. 

The interpretation of the priority of physics over chemistry in the logic and history of the scientific disciplines has been strongly rooted in Comte s positivist history, the general outline of which still dominates much of popular scientific teaching as well as the classification of scientific knowledge. 

Comte s account of disciplinary formation, with its conflation of logical structure and historical order of the sciences, both reflected and influenced the science of its time. In reflecting the science that he personally learned in Paris around 18141818, Comte s positivist history drew on the claims of Lavoisier s colleagues and acolytes that Lavoisier had created the science of chemistry, where none existed before. Comte also relied on this group s demarcation between "physique" and "chimie," a distinction developed more clearly in the French scientific community of the late eighteenth century than elsewhere. 

In influencing the history and philosophy of science of later decades, Comte s positivist classification created the conviction that the constitution of mathematics and physics was historically prior to chemistry and conceptually more fundamental than chemistry. 4 But the positivist history we often have accepted from Comte is flawed. "Chemistry" as a discipline preceded "physics." In the next two chapters, I will deal with the claim that physics is conceptually a more fundamental science than chemistry and will analyze the characteristic aims and methods of nineteenth-century chemistry, particularly as reinforced through the hegemony of organic chemistry. 

This interpretation that Lavoisier was a "physicist" who brought a new physical program into a previously incoherent chemical tradition is in keeping with the Comtian positivist legacy. But what could this mean in an eighteenth-century context ... 

Dumas was at a crossroads in the mid-1830s, and his interpretation of the explanatory aims of chemistry was shifting from an atom-and-force program of explanation to a structure-and-function one. In so shifting, he appears to move in the direction of Lavoisier s definition of chemistry and away from the notion of a chemical philosophy of mechanical forces that he and Davy had espoused. In short, Dumas was shifting to positivist and conventional methods of chemistry from the more mechanical, realist, and "philosophical" method. 

It often is noted that van t Hoff made the apparently "positivist" statement that "the representations themselves, atom, molecule, their dimensions, and perhaps their shapes, are after all something doubtful, as is the tetrahedron itself. "103 However, as the theoretical chemist Roald Hoffmann has aptly suggested, this does not necessarily mean that van t Hoff doubted "chemistry in space" but perhaps that he did not feel committed to the exact geometrical form that is the Platonic tetrahedron, a form that is not only idealized but static. 104... 

The aim of this chapter is to analyze aspects of late-nineteenth-century chemistry that led Lespieau to organize his own school of research in theoretical chemistry, to delineate the members and characteristics of this disciplinary school, and to assess its achievements over a period of some forty years. Particularly given the so-called positivist bias in French chemistry against the introduction of physical atomism and physical mechanisms into late-nineteenth-century chemical theory, the history of Lespieau s avowedly "theoretical" school of chemistry helps delineate styles and practices among specific, nationally distinct schools within the wider field of theoretical chemistry. 

This statement of the meaning of theoretical chemistry lies within the methodological tradition of chemistry that we have termed "positivist" or "exact," in contrast to the "philosophical" or "realist" tradition of the chemical philosophy that aimed, in the words of Humphry Davy, to "ascertain the causes of all [chemical changes], and to discover the laws by which they are governed" and that, according to Dumas, studies "the material particles chemists call atoms and the forces to which these particles are submitted. "24... 

Consciousness has been off limits to science for almost a century because subjective experience was thought not to be objectifiable. Although I understand why positivist critics of mentation are worried about this issue, I think it is fundamentally mistaken. Furthermore, I think the problem can be solved and, more shockingly, I am sure that it has been solved Before you close the book or even snicker condescendingly. 

Can this result in enhanced production of concrete, valid, and feasible solutions assessable by the pragmatic criteria of modern industry and positivistic science ... 

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