Positivism denotes the epistemological position that only what is empirically verifiable yields meaningful knowledge. Whatever cannot be measured, observed, or experimentally tested is held to be meaningless or at best a subjective opinion. In its strict form (the Vienna Circle, logical positivism), the whole of metaphysics is dismissed as meaningless.
For the question of personhood, positivism is consequential: if only what is empirically measurable counts as real, then personhood — which cannot be weighed, measured, or photographed — cannot be acknowledged as a real state of affairs. The dignity of the person, the soul, the freedom of the will — all of this falls outside the domain of the knowable. What remains is the body as a physical object.
Performative self-contradiction
Positivism contradicts itself: the thesis “only what is empirically verifiable is meaningful” is itself not empirically verifiable. It is a metaphysical thesis about the limits of knowledge — and thereby refutes itself in the act of its assertion. This is a form of performative contradiction.
Planck’s critique from within natural science
In 1937 Max Planck formulated a remarkable critique of positivism from within natural science itself. Positivism, he held, is sterile as a purely critical method: “Progress requires new, creative combinations of ideas that cannot be derived from measurement results alone — and toward such combinations positivism is on principle dismissive.” Planck shows that natural science itself depends on presuppositions that are not won empirically: the existence of a real external world, the validity of causality, the reproducibility of measurements. Consistent positivism, he argued, issues in an “unreasonable solipsism.”
Positivism as oblivion of the person
Positivism is a form of theoretical oblivion of the person, because it methodically renders personhood invisible. Whoever admits only what is empirically measurable cannot know the first dimension of personhood — the fundamental spiritual existence. Positivism thereby prepares the way for scientism and the empirical-functionalist concept of person: if only the observable counts, personhood comes to be bound to observable functions.
Chapter assignment: Chapter 5: Oblivion of the Person (German), Chapter 2: Method (German)
Ontological classification: Subclass of: Theoretical Oblivion of the Person. Contradicts: Philosophy, Metaphysics.
Sources: Generated by querying the Personhood ontology. Bexten 2017, pp. 218—254 (Theoretical oblivion of the person).
Further sources:
- Planck, Max (1937): “Religion und Naturwissenschaft.” Lecture given in the Baltic region in May 1937. Reprinted in: Planck, Max: Vorträge und Erinnerungen. Stuttgart: Hirzel, 1949.
- Spaemann, Robert (1996): Personen. Versuche über den Unterschied zwischen „etwas” und „jemand”. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta.