Can we have a positive science for human society critically evaluate?

 Positive Science for Human Society

Positivism describes an approach to the study of human society that specifically utilizes scientific evidence such as experiments, statistics, and qualitative results to reveal a truth about the way society functions. It is based on the assumption that it's possible to observe social life and establish reliable knowledge about its inner workings.

Positivism also argues that sociology should concern itself only with what can be observed with the senses and that theories of social life should be built in a rigid, linear, and methodical way on a basis of verifiable fact. Positivism is also the name for the scientific study of the social world. Its goal is to formulate abstract and universal laws on the operative dynamics of the social universe. Law is a statement about relationships among forces in the universe. In positivism, laws are to be tested against collected data systematically.

Five Principles of Positivism.        

1.      It asserts that the logic of inquiry is identical across all branches of science.

2.      The goal of inquiry is to explain, predict, and discover.

3.      Research should be observed empirically with human senses.

4.      Positivism also maintains that science is not the same as common sense, and it should be judged by logic and remain free of values.

5.      All factual knowledge is based on the "positive" information gained from observable experience.            

Positive science and human society.       

When most people in our society think about science, they think about some guy in a white lab coat working at a lab bench mixing up chemicals. They think of science as boring, cut-and-dry, and they think of the scientist as narrow-minded and esoteric. A lot of our stereotypes about science come from a period where science was dominated by a particular philosophy which was positivism.  In its broadest sense, positivism is a rejection of metaphysics. Positivism rejected metaphysics but it is very significant in human society, there are so many abstract concepts in human society. The purpose of science is simply to stick to what we can observe and measure. Knowledge of anything beyond that, a positivist would hold, is impossible.

When I think of positivism, I think of the behaviorists in mid-20th Century psychology. These were the mythical ‘rat runners’ who believed that psychology could only study what could be directly observed and measured. Since we can’t directly observe emotions, thoughts, etc. In a positivist view of the world, science was seen as the way to get at the truth, to understand the world well enough so that we might predict and control it. But is not fully true in the case of human society there are so many things in human society that cannot be predicted and controlled.

In a positivist view of the world, science was seen as the way to get at the truth, to understand the world well enough so that we might predict and control it. The world and the universe were deterministic – they operated by laws of cause and effect that we could discern if we applied the unique approach of the scientific method. Science was largely a mechanistic or mechanical affair. We use deductive reasoning to postulate theories that we can test. Based on the results of our studies, we may learn that our theory doesn’t fit the facts well and so we need to revise our theory to better predict reality. The positivist believed in empiricism – the idea that observation and measurement were the core of the scientific endeavor. The key approach of the scientific method is the experiment, the attempt to discern natural laws through direct manipulation and observation.

Conclusion.      

In conclusion, we can say that this method stresses the use of quantitative evidence and is mostly used in the study of natural objects but in human society, there are so many qualitative abstract concepts. Many new discoveries and findings have been made. At this time, the study of human society is still at a stage of the study of abstract ideas and something metaphysical. Because the study of human society is more complex than the study of science that is why we can say that positive science is not suitable for human society.