2 Positivism and logical positivism in mainstream psychology Flashcards
Define metaphysics
The universal conditions/ingredients of anything that exists or occurs in this world
What is concerned with metaphysics?
Concerned with the very general aspects of anything that exists in the world
No matter what it is, there will be universal aspects common to everything e.g. causation
Define ontology
What exists/occurs and what does not exist
Explain the definition of ontology and give an example
Is what exists or occurs and typically a discipline has its own ontological interests e.g. in psychology we’re interested in memories, human emotion, cognition etc
Define epistemology
Knowledge; the nature of knowledge; justification of knowledge claims about what exists/occurs
Explain what is meant by epistemology
How do we justify our knowledge claims; we make these claims that we think is knowledge and then we are asked to justify them
Define semantics
The relation of signs to the existents/occurrences the signs stand for (represent)
Give an example of semantics on memory effect
Memory effect: making an ontological claim the semantics is whether that claim is true or not and how the words link to what’s going on in the world
Explain Positivism (in a nutshell)
Dismisses religious thinking, anything to do with metaphysics and proposes that a system of philosophy whereby you only recognise positive facts and observable phenomenon that which you can experience through observation - that is all that gets recognised
An extreme form of empiricism.
Who helped with the development of Positivism?
Comte and Mach
Develop a rudimentary philosophy part of a science called positivism
What stages of the development of human thought have they progressed through
Religious thinking (1st sage) Metaphysical thinking (2nd stage) Scientific thinking (3rd stage)
What did Comte and Mach state in positivism?
Comte and Mach took metaphysics to be highly speculative and referring only to mystical, unobservable forces -> considered unscientific because of metaphysics considered causes to be unknowable and unobservable
Where did logical positivism emerge?
Emerged primarily in Vienna, Austria, in first 20-30 years of 20th century (in the Vienna Circle)
What shaped logical positivism?
Started with positivism but was also taking up developments in symbolic logic and developments in linguistics and had begun to shape logical postivism
What theory drove logical positivism?
theory of “exact thinking”
What is a key feature of logical positivism?
Metaphysics is nonsense
Describe logical positivist in the 1930s
People were persuaded to take logical positivism seriously but also psychology was independent of philosophy at the same time
What was the aim of logical positivist?
Logical positivist had lots of aims but there was one core aim: to rid science of metaphysical claims that they thought were compromising the epistemology integrity
What are the metaphysical statements according to logical positivist?
Extreme statements - neither true or false but we got to get rid of them
Distinguish between two sides of statements: theoretical statements and observational statements
if you can’t specify the method you would use to confirm that statement then the statement is meaningless and becomes metaphysical nonsense and has to go
Why was it named “logical”?
because it made use of research into logic at the turn of the century
What did logical positivism do?
Drew a line between theoretical and observational statements to get rid of metaphysical “nonsense”
Define theoretical statements
Contain terms/concepts that are unobservable
When are theoretical statements acceptable?
Acceptable as far as they don’t exceed the bounds of the observational statements
When are theoretical statements unacceptable?
Considered unacceptable as they generally contain concepts/terms that are unobservable -> therefore, unverifiable e.g. intelligence, trait, superego, self, mental representation
Define observational statements
They are considered certain and reliable hence, science should rest on observational statements
What is the stance in science on theoretical statements and observational statements
Science should be based on observation statements as science should be grounded in that which we are certain about
What can be said about theoretical statements?
That they could be scientific or metaphysical but we need a criterion to distinguish between scientific theoretical and metaphysical theoretical to get rid of the metaphysical and keep the scientific -> verifiability principle
Explain what happens when you apply the verifiability principle to a statement
You apply the verifiability principle to the statement and if it passes, you keep it and if it fails, it was metaphysical nonsense
Define the verifiability principle
The meaning of a statement is its method of verification
What does the verifiability test?
To test whether the theoretical statement is genuinely specific
Elaborate on the verifiability principle
How a researcher would go about verifying the existence of the concept or statement
Need to know the meaning to determine how to verify the statement -> need to have some sense of what you are looking for
How are sentences meaningful in verfiability principle
Sentences are meaningful if they are in principle capable of being verified by observational test and this involves:
- Describing a way of verifying it
- Saying what must be done
Give an example of a theoretical statement
‘intelligence’
Give an example of an observation statement as stated by (Boring, 1923)
‘Intelligence is the capacity to do well in an intelligence test’
