Positivist Quotes (5 quotes)
[An outsider views a scientist] as a type of unscrupulous opportunist: he appears as a realist, insofar as he seeks to describe the world independent of the act of perception; as idealist insofar as he looks upon the concepts and theories as the free inventions of the human spirit (not logically derivable from that which is empirically given); as positivist insofar as he considers his concepts and theories justified only to the extent to which they furnish a logical representation of relations among sense experiences. He may even appear as Platonist or Pythagorean insofar as he considers the viewpoint of logical simplicity as an indispensable and effective tool of his research.
In 'Reply to Critcisms', Paul Arthur Schilpp (ed.), Albert Einstein: Philosopher-Scientist (1949, 1959), Vol. 2, 684.
I am by training a positivist, by inclination a pragmatist, in temperament a mystic, in practice a democrat; my faith Jewish, educated by Catholics, a habitual Protestant; born in Europe, raised in the Midwest, hardened in the East, softened in California and living in Israel.
Given as “said of himself”, in Eyal Diskin, 'Abraham Kaplan' in Michael Berenbaum and Fred Skolnik (eds.), Encyclopaedia Judaica (2007).
In the Vienna of the late 1920s and 1930s there throve an internationally famous philosophical bunch called the logical positivists. … They said that a key ingredient of knowledge was “sense data,” and proclaimed emphatically, in the words of … J.S.L. Gilmour, that sense data are “objective and unalterable.” …Good guess, but no cigar!
In 'A Trip Through the Perception Factory', Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century (2000), 64.
Scientists [still] refuse to consider man as an object of scientific scrutiny except through his body. The time has come to realise that an interpretation of the universe—even a positivist one—remains unsatisfying unless it covers the interior as well as the exterior of things; mind as well as matter. The true physics is that which will, one day, achieve the inclusion of man in his wholeness in a coherent picture of the world.
In Teilhard de Chardin and Bernard Wall (trans.), The Phenomenon of Man (1959, 2008), 36. Originally published in French as Le Phénomene Humain (1955).
There was an ape in the days that were earlier,
Centuries passed and his hair became curlier;
Centuries more gave a thumb to his wrist—
Then he was a man and a Positivist.
Centuries passed and his hair became curlier;
Centuries more gave a thumb to his wrist—
Then he was a man and a Positivist.
In The British Birds: A Communication From the Ghost of Aristophanes (1872), 48-49. [Note: A positivist holds that experimental investigation and observation are the only sources of substantial knowledge. —Webmaster]
In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion.
(1987) -- 
