2 Positivism and logical positivism in mainstream psychology

Question 1

Define metaphysics

Answer 1

The universal conditions/ingredients of anything that exists or occurs in this world

Question 2

What is concerned with metaphysics?

Answer 2

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

Question 3

Define ontology

Answer 3

What exists/occurs and what does not exist

Question 4

Explain the definition of ontology and give an example

Answer 4

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

Question 5

Define epistemology

Answer 5

Knowledge; the nature of knowledge; justification of knowledge claims about what exists/occurs

Question 6

Explain what is meant by epistemology

Answer 6

How do we justify our knowledge claims; we make these claims that we think is knowledge and then we are asked to justify them

Question 7

Define semantics

Answer 7

The relation of signs to the existents/occurrences the signs stand for (represent)

Question 8

Give an example of semantics on memory effect

Answer 8

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

Question 9

Explain Positivism (in a nutshell)

Answer 9

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.

Question 10

Who helped with the development of Positivism?

Answer 10

Comte and Mach

Develop a rudimentary philosophy part of a science called positivism

Question 11

What stages of the development of human thought have they progressed through

Answer 11

Religious thinking (1st sage)
Metaphysical thinking (2nd stage)
Scientific thinking (3rd stage)

Question 12

What did Comte and Mach state in positivism?

Answer 12

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

Question 13

Where did logical positivism emerge?

Answer 13

Emerged primarily in Vienna, Austria, in first 20-30 years of 20th century (in the Vienna Circle)

Question 14

What shaped logical positivism?

Answer 14

Started with positivism but was also taking up developments in symbolic logic and developments in linguistics and had begun to shape logical postivism

Question 15

What theory drove logical positivism?

Answer 15

theory of “exact thinking”

Question 16

What is a key feature of logical positivism?

Answer 16

Metaphysics is nonsense

Question 17

Describe logical positivist in the 1930s

Answer 17

People were persuaded to take logical positivism seriously but also psychology was independent of philosophy at the same time

Question 18

What was the aim of logical positivist?

Answer 18

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

Question 19

What are the metaphysical statements according to logical positivist?

Answer 19

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

Question 20

Why was it named “logical”?

Answer 20

because it made use of research into logic at the turn of the century

Question 21

What did logical positivism do?

Answer 21

Drew a line between theoretical and observational statements to get rid of metaphysical “nonsense”

Question 22

Define theoretical statements

Answer 22

Contain terms/concepts that are unobservable

Question 23

When are theoretical statements acceptable?

Answer 23

Acceptable as far as they don’t exceed the bounds of the observational statements

Question 24

When are theoretical statements unacceptable?

Answer 24

Considered unacceptable as they generally contain concepts/terms that are unobservable -> therefore, unverifiable e.g. intelligence, trait, superego, self, mental representation

Question 25

Define observational statements

Answer 25

They are considered certain and reliable hence, science should rest on observational statements

Question 26

What is the stance in science on theoretical statements and observational statements

Answer 26

Science should be based on observation statements as science should be grounded in that which we are certain about

Question 27

What can be said about theoretical statements?

Answer 27

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

Question 28

Explain what happens when you apply the verifiability principle to a statement

Answer 28

You apply the verifiability principle to the statement and if it passes, you keep it and if it fails, it was metaphysical nonsense

Question 29

Define the verifiability principle

Answer 29

The meaning of a statement is its method of verification

Question 30

What does the verifiability test?

Answer 30

To test whether the theoretical statement is genuinely specific

Question 31

Elaborate on the verifiability principle

Answer 31

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

Question 32

How are sentences meaningful in verfiability principle

Answer 32

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

Question 33

Give an example of a theoretical statement

Answer 33

‘intelligence’

Question 34

Give an example of an observation statement as stated by (Boring, 1923)

Answer 34

‘Intelligence is the capacity to do well in an intelligence test’