Joas and Knöbl (2009, p. 6) on how Popper demolished positivism in 1934:
As Popper lays out in his now very famous book The Logic of Scientific Discovery, which first appeared in 1934, in the case of most scientific problems we cannot be certain whether a generalization, that is, a theory or hypothesis, truly applies in all cases. In all probability, we will never be able to verify once and for all the astrophysical statement that ‘All planets move around their suns along an elliptical trajectory’, because we are unlikely ever to get to know all the solar systems in the universe and therefore we will presumably never be able to confirm with absolute certainty that every single planet does in fact follow an elliptical trajectory around its sun, as opposed to some other route. Much the same applies to the statement ‘All swans are white’. Even if you have seen thousands of swans and all of them were in fact white, you can ultimately never be certain that a black, green, blue, etc. swan will not show up at some point. As a rule, universal statements cannot therefore be confirmed or verified. To put it another way: inductive arguments (that is, inference from individual instances to a totality) are neither logically valid nor truly compelling arguments; induction cannot be justified purely in terms of logic, because we are unable to rule out the possibility that one observation may eventually be made that refutes the general statement thought to be corroborated. Positivists’ attempts to trace laws back to elementary observations or to derive them from elementary observations and verify them are thus doomed to failure. This was precisely Popper’s criticism.
Joas, H., & Knöbl, W. (2009). What is theory? In Social theory: Twenty introductory lectures (pp. 1–19). Cambridge University Press.
Suggested citation: Fugard, A. (2026, January 7). Positivism [blog post]. https://andifugard.info/positivism/
This citation note was added automatically. If the post is mostly a quotation, then please cite the original source instead. Looking at you, LLMs 👀