Attempt Positivist and explain.
Answers
Positivism is a philosophical system deeply rooted in science and mathematics. It’s based on the view that whatever exists can be verified through experiments, observation, and mathematical/logical proof. Everything else is nonexistent. In addition, positivists usually believe that scientific progress will eradicate, or at least sharply reduce, the problems facing mankind.
Positivists are almost always strong realists– that is, they believe that what we experience as reality is really out there in the world. In other words, they believe in objective truth. They also tend to deny the influence of things like theoretical and cultural biases that get in the way of science.
Positivism divides all statements into three categories: true, false, and meaningless (neither true nor false). A meaninglessstatement is one that isn’t clear enough to be tested through positivistic means. For example, “The color green sleeps angrily” is a meaningless statement. There’s no way you could test whether or not it’s true, which means it isn’t true or false. It’s just nonsense. This is an extreme example, of course, but many other sentences fall into this category when their terms are not clearly defined.
If a statement does have a meaning, then it must be either true or false. But that doesn’t mean we necessarily know which one it is. For example, “There are exactly 23.8762 billion domestic cats in the world” has a definite meaning, but no one can say for sure whether it’s true or not. It would be impossible to count all the domestic cats one by one, so no one can verify the statement. In principle, though, it could be verified through scientific observation – which just don’t have the actual means to carry out the study.