Okay, I'll toss in my two cents (the going price of a philosophical opinion these days, I suppose).
Halbert is right, there seem to be a number of attempts out there to define Positivism, this one being perhaps as good as any:
"... its goal is to formulate abstract and universal laws on the operative dynamics of the social universe. A law is a statement about relationships among forces in the universe."From:
https://www.sciencedirect.comBut if there is Positivism, is there not likely to be Negativism as well?
And an attempt to define Negativism could be done as (and I offer this version of the ones I found because it strikes me as perhaps getting close to what Logo was aiming at):
"Negativism is the philosophy that no knowledge is secure; hence we know nothing. It was developed in the mid-1800’s by the French sociologist Count Juillet. In the 1930’s, following the publication of Gödel’s incompleteness theorem, the Viennese philosopher Sir Karl (Pop) Korn identified psychoanalysis as a dangerous pseudoscience that relied on ad-hoc hypotheses to prop up its failed theories. Building on his work with psychoanalysis, Korn recognized that any scientific theory whatsoever could be propped up with ad-hoc hypotheses and concluded that all of science is a dangerous pseudoscience. In one fell swoop, Korn solved the demarcation problem, saying, “If we know nothing, then it doesn’t matter whether we call it science or not.”From:
https://pandasthumb.org/archives/2008/04/logical-negativ.htmlBut if this is the case, that we know nothing because we know nothing, then what is one to do?
In trying to formulate an answer to that, I was reminded of the story about
Samuel Johnson:
"... Johnson claimed to disprove Bishop Berkeley's immaterialist philosophy (that there are no material objects, only minds and ideas in those minds) by kicking a large stone and asserting, "I refute it thus." Well, maybe that's enough. Maybe if we just stub our toes on things, whether science says we are really stubbing our toes or not, maybe that will do. After all, when I took Lupron, and then my PSA dropped (well, actually science did say that would happen), then maybe it didn't matter, as long as my PSA dropped.
So even if we really are living in the "dark age of Positivism" (presumably not to be confused with the Positivism of the Dark Ages), maybe it shouldn't really matter, as long as the PSA continues to drop.