The Tradition

Positivism is a philosophical strand of more than 150 years. It started immediately after the collapse of German classical philosophy. Its further development goes through 4 stages, the first of which is the 40s of the 19th century until the end of the century. The second stage, known as second positivism, occupies the period from the 70s of the 19th century to the 20s of the 20th century. The third stage - the neo-positivism from the early 20th to the early 1980s. The fourth stage - post-positivism - occupying the time from the 80s of the 20th century to the present day. Positivism as a whole is typically a scholastic philosophical doctrine and as such unconditionally accepts science as the only adequate form of knowledge, adopts it as a model for building and philosophy, and sees the role of philosophy as merely a science-serving intellectual activity.

• During the first (classical stage of positivism) the main issues are the problems of the public life, the knowledge of induction (ie the movement from the concrete to the common one).
• The second stage of positivism perceives gnosiology as the only true philosophical discipline. The second positivism brings to the extreme the idea that knowledge is carried out entirely with the help of the senses. The main thesis of this positivism is "there is nothing in reason that was not previously in the senses." The second positivism has made a huge contribution to separating psychology from philosophy. Representatives of this direction leave the psyche fully dependent on the activity of the senses. Psyche is an absolute result and a consequence of physiological dependencies in man. Psyche is a function of man. They did not allow any psychological impact on physiological functions of the body.

The specificity of the neo-positivism - the neo-positivism appears

Immediately after the First World War. Its emergence is necessary because the second positivism completely exhausts its importance for philosophy. From the 16th century until the beginning of the 20th century, a fierce theoretical and conceptual battle between rationalism and his cult of reason and empiricism took place, with the absolutisation of the meaning of the senses. Until the 20s of the 20th century when empiricism was spoken, it was precisely this supremacy of the senses, but in the first two decades of the 20th century, particularly in the course of the First World War, both psychology and the physiology of the higher Nervous activity such as the doctrine of the senses is moved from the competence of philosophy to the competence of medicine. It raises the question of empiricism beyond the absolutized role for the senses. The answer to the new generation of positivists is affirmative, provided that empiricism remains true to its main characteristic: it is a philosophical doctrine giving an advantage to the single before the general. This means that it remains the main method of research characteristic of empiricism - induction, that is, the extraction of truth from the paths of one thing to the common one.

Neo-positivism rationalizes the relationship between the single and the common as in the course of its development affects one of the key problems of philosophy - the problem of truth. The story of positivism itself is a story of correction of this notion. After rejecting the possibility of a unified, binding truth for all, neo-positivism perceives the notion of truth, and later in the course of its development it also replaces this concept with another: correctness of logical procedures. One of the greatest merits of neo-positivism is to place language as a fundamental problem for philosophy. The first in this direction is B. Roussel with his philosophical idea of the inextricable connection between logic and language.

The development and essence of Russell's philosophical ideas

In his long and creative life, Russell changed his philosophical views several times. However, one thing in his work is one thing - the interest in the problem of the relationship between philosophy and science. According to Russell, philosophy is a science, but its functional purpose is to be a methodology of all other sciences. The unity of science and philosophy Russell sees in the same for both the requirements of truthfulness of knowledge, accuracy, clarity, logical consistency. Russell's biggest contribution is the so-called “logical atomism”. According to Russell, we can’t extract our knowledge from reason, reason can also produce fantastic combinations of false images. At the same time, our surrounding reality can also not be the source of adequate information. This is because between the external world and our thought processes are the senses. We know what the senses tell us about the outside world, not what it is for ourselves.
In language-thinking, the language has a leading, determining role, such as language, and thinking, not the other way around. Not thinking determines the structure of language, and the structure and richness of language determine the thinking. Russell believes that the focus of philosophy should be exclusively geared to language analysis.
Russell develops his work at a time when fundamental discoveries have been made in the field of physics. The multiplicity of the atom is established. It turns out that the atom is a complex formation consisting of about 300 elementary particles. The elementary particles themselves are indistinguishable further. Russell accepts this new picture of the world, and by analogy with it, he examines the structure of the language. The role of elemental further indistinguishable particles plays the words. The meaningful combination of words resembles atoms, in fact these are the elemental judgments - the earth is a planet, the tree is a plant, and so on. From the various atoms there are combinations of various assumptions and conclusions that Russell calls molecular; so the construction of the tongue resembles matter. This rather elementary analogy reveals the path to the structural study of language, and hence the analogy. So Russell makes the ingenious discovery that logic as a science lies between language and mathematics. Thus both types of logic - both philosophical and mathematical - are legitimized. The consequences of these statements on newly differentiated psychology are expressed in the extraction of psychology from gross physiology and shifted to experiments where language is the main means of psychological impact. This part of Russell's philosophy, however, remains unfinished. Along with Russell's philosophy, neo-positivism evolved mainly in Austria, Vienna, as the expression of the so-called Vienna Circle, the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein and Carl Poppe. But these strands do not go further in their contribution to psychology than Russell's.

Image source: 1, 2