the “positivism” of s.r.

Levi responding to the SUPPOSED POSITIVISM OF SPECULATIVE REALISM.

Whenever this issue comes up, I laugh and shake my head. Even to respond to it risks creating the impression of defensiveness about a charge that is too weird to earn a full-blown response. If someone criticized me for eating excessive amounts of meat (I haven’t eaten a bite of it since age 7) that would be about as accurate as calling me a positivist. They may as well say: “Harman, one of the new generation of analytic philosophers from Korea.” Why not? That’s about as accurate as calling me a positivist.

First of all, it’s a complete misuse of the word… Positivism is not realism, but almost the opposite. But let’s forget about that misuse of the word, because it’s not the main point, and we know what they mean.

What they mean by positivism is that “we” want to privilege scientific access to the world over all other kinds.

All they have to do is read any random 10 pages of my work, or possibly less, not only to refute the claim, but to see it as the sort of critique a shoddy artificial intelligence program would make. And it wouldn’t pass the Turing test.

What these people seem to mean, sadly, is that any philosophy that doesn’t place the human/world coupling at the center of everything must be positivism.

Yep, I’m just a mainstream scientific naturalist. Don’t all scientific naturalists agree that occasional causation needs to be revived, and that armies and Popeye have reality just as neutrons do?

Me and my slavish mainstream positivism.