Talk:Sociological positivism

Philosophy
Positivism (philosophy) should be merged here, it's the same subject (Comte etc.). Santa Sangre 02:32, 20 May 2006 (UTC)

Agreed, in sociology, positivism is seens as branch of philosophical thought and there is no difference between its relevance across the fields of study. (Unsigned comment by LiamTolan)

Surely its a moot point, social positivism is merely the occurance of positivism in sociology, where as positivism is evident in many academic fields  (Unsigned comment by 150.203.2.85)

If a merger occurs, it should of course be done not in the proposed direction but in the opposite direction: Sociological positivism should be incorporated as a sub-subject of the general page Positivism (Philosophy).

But if it is true, as the current page states, that "Positivism also involves a belief in the social progress which would be necessarily be brought by scientific progress", then I would argue against merging. Positivism as discussed in the Positivism (Philosophy) article is a philosophy of knowledge and science, and would absolutely not deal with value judgements about "social progress" or make unverifiable statements about such progress "necessarily" being brought by scientific advances. A positivist (in the philosophical sense) would dismiss such statements as unfalsifiable, and therefore meaningless. Instead of merging I would suggest cleaning out the general Positivism material from this article and leaving only the uniquely sociological aspects. Mglg 01:09, 15 June 2006 (UTC)

Combining articles
Positivism is the primary article, sociological positivism is a branch of that philosophy. A sociologist did create this perspective within philosophy, however it is applied in a variety of different fields, such as geography; therefore, I feel that we should merge this article into positivism, not the other way around. Should geographical positivism become a branch of sociological positivism in wikipedia? SCmurky 23:28, 8 July 2006 (UTC)

merge
the merge is removed because there was no action and the discussion did not have consensus.--Buridan 02:41, 9 July 2006 (UTC)

Principles - induction v deduction.
I would've thought that Positivism is actually deductive - moving from abstract theories to hypotheses which are then confirmed or disconfirmed by the evidence - Jameses —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 130.102.2.60 (talk) 03:20, 1 May 2007 (UTC).

Quality must be improved!
It's amazing such an important sociology article has slipped through the net. Generally (and I don't mean in this article per se) the sense of criticism against positivism is too strong - one must remember that positivism is alive and kicking in the billion dollars of research that businesses and governments spend on numerical data, and that Durkheim was actually a very liberal and reasonable thinker in his time, not such a grand, nefarious, humanist schemer. Only by comparison with Marx was he a conservative. (You might want to read the book by Jonathan Fish, 'Defending the Durkheimian tradition'. Anyway, yes, this article needs a hell of a lot of work. --Tomsega (talk) 23:24, 10 November 2009 (UTC)


 * This page is so brief, poor, unreferenced, and infrequently edited, that the few decents nuggets of information have been moved to the main positivism article, and this page directed to the subheading of that article, 'sociological positivism'. --Tomsega (talk) 20:25, 30 November 2009 (UTC)