History of psychology. Positivism (most important)

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History of psychology. Positivism (most important)

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28. POSITIVISM

Positivism (from the Latin positivus - “positive”) is a paradigmatic epistemological-methodological position, according to which positive knowledge can be acquired as a result of purely scientific (not philosophical) knowledge; The program-scientist pathos of positivism consists in the renunciation of philosophy as a cognitive activity, which has integrating and predictive capabilities in the context of the formation of concrete scientific knowledge.

In the first half of the XIX century. systems are being born, designed to neutralize the stubborn tendency of natural scientists to materialistically comprehend the discoveries of natural science. The most significant among them was the philosophy of positivism, which declared the fundamental unknowability of the essence and causes of phenomena, called on scientific thinking to confine itself to only observable facts and their stable dependencies.

The first program of positivism was formulated by O. Comte (1718-1857) in the "Course of Positive Philosophy" in six volumes.

O. Comte created a new classification of sciences, in which there was no psychology at all. Mental phenomena as a subject of positive study were divided into two disciplines - physiology and sociology. O. Comte criticized the individual, introspective method.

O. Comte's idea of the spiritual world will be the object of scientific analysis only when the fruitless soil of introspective study is forgotten. Formulating the true need of psychology to overcome subjectivism, he saw the concrete realization of his idea in observing the operations of consciousness on the realities of social life accessible to objective depiction. Consciousness appears in such interaction. The social organism forms the objective core of the facts of consciousness.

Depicting society as an organism, and the family as its smallest cell, O. Comte transferred a model borrowed from biology to the field of social science. In the 1830s, when his “positive philosophy” was being formed, biology had not yet become evolutionary. Therefore, in order to interpret the evolution of society, he was forced, in search of the driving force of this formation, to go beyond the boundaries of biological correspondences and head towards the main explanatory category of idealism - reason. The mind goes through three stages of development: theological, metaphysical and positive. These stages are natural both for each individual and for humanity as a whole.

Taking the process of communication as a starting point, he analyzed the dynamics of the individual's consciousness as a derivative of the objective forms of his interaction with other people. O. Comte did not see that human relations are formed in the process of labor, but in itself the allocation of communication to the characteristic determinant of the mental was his essential merit.

Later, under the influence of O. Comte, social psychology was created.

Author: Anokhina Z.V.

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