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Positivism is a philosophical school that holds that all genuine knowledge is either true by definition or positive – meaning a posteriori facts derived by reason and logic from sensory experience. [ 1 ] [ 2 ] Other ways of knowing , such as intuition , introspection , or religious faith , are rejected or considered meaningless .
The post-processualists' approach to archaeology is diametrically opposed to that of the processualists. The processualists, as positivists, believed that the scientific method should and could apply to archaeological investigation, therefore allowing archaeologists to present objective statements about past societies based upon the evidence.
Bioarchaeology was largely born from the practices of New Archaeology, which developed in the United States in the 1970s as a reaction to a mainly cultural-historical approach to understanding the past. Proponents of New Archaeology advocate testing hypotheses about the interaction between culture and biology, or a biocultural approach.
Archaeological theory functions as the application of philosophy of science to archaeology, and is occasionally referred to as philosophy of archaeology. There is no one singular theory of archaeology, but many, with different archaeologists believing that information should be interpreted in different ways.
It was difficult for biology to use this approach. [9] Standard philosophy of science seemed to leave out a lot of what characterised living organisms - namely, a historical component in the form of an inherited genotype. Philosophers of biology have also examined the notion of teleology in biology. Some have argued that scientists have had no ...
Whereas Comtean positivism posed science as description, logical positivism emerged in the late 1920s and posed science as explanation, perhaps to better unify empirical sciences by covering not only fundamental science—that is, fundamental physics—but special sciences, too, such as biology, psychology, economics, and anthropology. [23]
During the late 1960s and into the 1970s, archaeologist Kent Flannery began championing the idea that systems theory could be used in archaeology to approach questions of culture from an unbiased perspective, as the study focuses on the symbiotic whole of a culture rather than its parts, or artifacts. Systems theory however, proved to have ...
Constructive empiricism, logical positivism and instrumentalism agree that theories do not aim for truth about unobservables, which scientific realism denies. Constructive empiricism has been used to analyze various scientific fields, from physics to psychology (especially computational psychology ).