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What is Positivism and How Does it Shape Our Vision of Reality?
Can our understanding of facts be separated from our relationship with them?
Envisage a wooden chair standing alone in a room. One could say the chair exists as an object in and of itself. It has an identity in time and space. It has physical integrity and appears solid. If you picked up and moved the chair to another location it would still be appraised as the same chair. An individually oriented analysis such as this identifies the chair as a unique and isolated unit existing apart from the relations that constitute it. If one follows in the positivist tradition (the concept to be introduced in this essay), a detached observer can derive supreme truth and knowledge from the scrutiny of the chairs outward and inner appearance.
But what of the time before the chair was constituted as such, and what of the time after? If we were to conceive of the entity before us as matter organised in a particular way for a particular duration, then our knowledge of the chair must be expanded to include other relations. The limbs and core of the chair were once those of a tree. The rivets and nails binding the wood together were first extracted from the earth as minerals. Through human labour and exertion, these components were brought together, synthesised, and turned into…
