I don’t usually get stumped but these three definitions have had me going around in circles.  Not that I don’t understand them.  Each one makes sense and I can easily see how two of them influence my daily life as a teacher.  The one that gets me is Positivism.  I just don’t get it.  Or maybe I do.  I don’t know.  As I understand it, positivism denies the metaphysical so maybe I shouldn’t even try to apply it.

            Rationalism has been around from Descartes to James March.   Rationalists believe that certain fundamental concepts are known intuitively through reason.   Reason alone is the source of knowledge and it is independent of experience.   Rationalists  believe that we can deduce truths from these innate ideas. Descartes set up a system of deduction which can be seen clearly in geometry, and then generalized it to metaphysical issues, giving us the Cartesian method for scientific inquiry.   Through  James March  we look at decisions using the logic of consequences as we reason through alternatives and consequences to maximize anticipated returns.  When I decide what I am going to teach, I look at where I want my students to be at the end of the week, month, school year and plan how I am going to get them there.  I plan my objectives to make sure that the path is slow and direct, not leaving out any important point of information as we get closer to the goal.  As I analyze language structures which are needed I make sure that we progress slowly from one logical point to the next.  Under my plan the students progress methodically from not being able to understand spoken or written English to being able to speak and read.  It’s a process based on logic and rational decision making.

            From dictionaries, encyclopedias, internet sources and philosophy texts I can define empiricism as  a movement of thought which emphasized the role of the senses and minimized the place of reason in reaching truth.   Starting with Francis Bacon, empiricists believed that  in order to know that something is true it has to be experienced through the senses.   Empiricists denied that we were born with certain knowledge but rather promoted the idea of the tabula rasa and that all knowledge is built from the outside.  The ideas which we have can be traced to either experiences or sense perceptions. We learn through our senses.   In my teaching, if I want to know if a student has grasped an idea I observe whether the child used the new structure in either speech or writing.  I would listen and watch to get the sensory information.  When presenting information I make sure that there is a sensory component.  For example, when teaching verb tenses we make pizza and describe what we are doing and what we have done.  This leads to vocabulary building as we add sensory adjectives like gooey, sticky, delicious, yummy and yucky.

           Now that brings us to Positivism.  That has me going around in circles. Positivism was an “offshoot of utopian socialism which placed emphasis on physical laws to answer questions of society and thus solve social problems.” (library.thinkquest.org).  A number of  other definitions dealt with positivism as a social system.  I traced it from France and Auguste Comte to England and John Stuart Mill and Herbert Spencer.  Then to Germany where it evolved into Dialectical Materialism  and on to Italy where it was not well received by the Catholic Church.  It took me a while to realize that it is also a movement of thought like rationalism and empiricism.  In fact, it is very close to empiricism since it depends on sensory information to confirm or deny truth.  I feel I’m getting closer to what I am looking for when I find that positivism is a “philosophical system concerned with positive facts and phenomena, and excluding speculation upon ultimate causes or origins.(Webster’s Encyclopedic Unabridged Dictionary of the English Language).  Through positivism, we formulate statements which can be tested scientifically.  The validity of a statement has to be grounded on observation; it must be repeatable and experiments must be carried out using the scientific method agreed upon by the entire scientific community (I don’t remember where I got this information.)  Positivism leaves no room for speculation.

          Positivism essentially holds that things we can’t ascertain from experience are meaningless.  For example the question whether angels exist in our world is meaningless because we can’t verify it.  To me it means that when I’m looking for a concept or a hypothesis to be verified I am using positivism.  I am not looking for a value judgment.  I want to know if it is true or false.  So I formulate a hypothesis and then set about to prove it.  The manner in which I find the proof would be the rationalist part of the process and the actual proof would be the empiricist part.

          This is the procedure which we as doctoral students would use when deciding on a dissertation topic.  First we find a topic which needs to be verified.  And, we make sure that it is a topic which is verifiable.  Then we apply the scientific method using Descartes’ list.   Then we complete the research and analyze the data to see whether we have proved it or disproved it empirically.  So, in writing dissertations, all three methods of scientific inquiry are used.

           Now the terms seem to mesh.   They are difficult to separate because to discover the truth of a statement or to plan daily lessons, we need to be thinking, probing, questioning, testing, observing, rationalizing and  evaluation so that we can arrive at the truth.