Critical Theory and Positivism

[KevinDW78]

One of my college professors recently told me how she is a Critical Theorist and Positivist. I am trying to understand what these mean and, more importantly, how they relate to Objectivism and what the Objectivist argument for or against them would be. I've looked at the wikipedia entires for both these but it kind of just gave me that mind-wandering effect. What are some concise, to-the-point representations of what these mean and what Objectivism says about them?

I should also note that this conversation with my professor came about when I mentioned Rand in one of my writings, and she mentioned how she has never read Rand but is now interested in looking into reading AS and Fountainhead (which I had mentioned by title). I specifically am looking for something encouraging I could say that would appeal to her as a Critical Theorist and Positivist with regards to seeing that Objectivism would be better.

Edited July 1, 2008 by KevinDW78

[MrPickles]

Alright, first post.

This should help you out. I believe your professor is referring to logical positivism:

http://www.aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/logicalpositivism.html

As you can tell, Rand wasn't a big fan of positivism (or any other Kantian off-shoots, for that matter).

I can't really comment on the Criticial Theorist part.

Edited July 2, 2008 by MrPickles

[flyer79]

Critical theory is an attempt to understand and criticize the relationship between knowledge and power. "David Hume wrote that Blacks simply could not create a civilized society, this justified slavery and thus is wrong" is something you find in this area of literary critique.

Ayn Rand argued that parasites spread religion and other such ideas to mooch off rational people.

Similar to a point.

[eriatarka]

Critical Theory is an extremely vague term which was originally used to describe the work/methodology of the Frankfurt school (Adorno/Marcuse/Horkheimer/etc) but which has now had its meaning inflated to the point where it can refer to almost anything. Original critical theory tended to be fairly Hegelian/Marxist in flavour, although with a strong sociological focus - it was intended as both a widespread critique of modern ways of living/thinking, and an investigation into the historical factors which caused us to be what we are. I know this is a very vague description but its not something that can really be summed up in a few paragraphs.

Positivism also has a few different meanings. Within modern Anglo-American philosophy it normally gets used to refer to the logical positivism of the Vienna Circle (Carnap/Hempel/etc) and a few English philosophers (eg Ayer) who wrote during the early-mid 20th century. But within other disciplines (including Continental philosophy) it has a broader meaning and includes thinkers such as Mach (who was in a sense the first positivist), Comte, early Einstein, etc. Not all 'positivsts' would have been comfortable with the extremism of logical positivists such as Carnap. But anyway, positivism tended to involve a strong focus on sense data and particulars, scepticism towards all abstract concepts and universals, the belief that the meaning of all statements had to be reducible to sense data, and a very heavy scientism.

Original Frankfurt Critical Theory was largely opposed to positivism since they felt that positivist methods often led to people becoming far too focused on brute facts without bothering to try and fully understand these facts and examine how they came to be the case. This can lead to (among other things) a sort of apoliticism which ends up upholding the status quo rather than challenging it - a good modern example would be evolutionary psychology which often uses a dubious positivist methodology to infer facts about the nature of human beings based solely on studies carried out on people who live Western countries in the 20/21st century (although evolutionary psychology is perhaps too speculative to be 'positivist' in the sense that someone like Carnap would have accepted).

Theres a lot of farily complex issues here, but generally speaking critical theory and positivism are opposed frameworks. If you wanted a single text recommendation to get you acquainted with both, then Ayer's Language, Truth, Logic is a good introduction to logical positivism, and Marcuse's One Dimensional Man is a classic critical theory text which is much less dense/jargon-heavy than a lot of other associated works.

As always though, you cant really know what a person believes from a label alone - youll have to ask her more specific questions. These labels have become quite broad and could mean lots of different things.

edit: Examples make this sort of thing easier to understand. Imagine someone claimed that women were inherently less gifted at mathematics than men, and cited as evidence studies showing that men got better grades in maths at school, and that most PhD math students were male, and so on. This would be an example of a naive posivist approach - it focuses entirely on the existing facts (that men outperform women at maths) and bases the argument on them. However the critical theorist would respond that the positivst was guilty of 'undialectic' thinking, since he was taking the existing facts as being absolute rather than historically conditioned - yeah, men may be better at maths in modern society but this doesnt show that theyre inherently better. It may be the case that theres social forces at play which make women less likely to go into maths than men, and these could be uncovered by sociological/historical investigation. If there were social expectations that pressured women into doing artistic subjects rather than going into science, this may account for women getting lower grades and being less likely to do math PhDs without having to resort to the idea that men are inherently 'better' at it.

Someone who looked around in the 18th century would probably have noticed the fact that most Negros were unintelligent and uneducated, but this wouldnt imply that negros are inherently/genetically more unintelligent than whites because these differences can be explained sociologically without any reference to different 'natures'. Critical theory is generally sceptical of any approach which accepts the 'facts' as they are, without looking at how they came to be (this is a special case of what people like Hegel/Marx/Adorno referred to as 'dialectic thinking').

This is a bit of a silly example because no positivist would be as naive as this, but it gets the general point across.

edit2: the ironic thing is that a lot of the critique of capitalism in Marx and the Frankfurt school is in my opinion guilty of the same sort of undialectic approach that they attacked elsewhere. For example, a lot of Marx's negative beliefs about capitalism had very little to do with capitalism in general, and a lot to do with the particular social conditions during the industrial revolution where there was no social mobility and working conditions were horrible. Similarly, a lot of the things which Adorno/Marcuse attack (consumerism, anti-intellectuallism, the shallowness of modern culture) are specific problems with 20/21st century life rather than something intrinsic to the nature of capitalism. So I think theres definitely a bit of hypocrisy there.

Edited July 5, 2008 by eriatarka