Word: positivistic
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...with my exegetical indoctrinators. I, too, had to take the same smattering of anthropology, economics, political science, and history courses, as well as an introductory statistics course which I yawned my way through in the same clever-clever conviction that learning to think statistically was a positivist vulgarity...
...United States, there is a pronounced tendency, due perhaps to the high level of our technology and the positivist outlook which thrives in a technological environment, to regard man and society as conditioned by the tools they use. It is, for instance, widely believed in this country that there exists such a thing as an "industrial society" with its particular system of values and code of behavior: this despite the fact the record of history indicates quite convincingly that the introduction of advanced methods of mechanical production, in one country (e.g. England) led to the reduction of the power...
...surprising, therefore, that the sudden appearance in 1945 of nuclear weapons should have been received in the United States in a manner consistent with the positivist outlook. American intellectuals who addressed themselves to the question of their implications, assumed from the beginning that there inheres in these monstrous tools of destruction a logic obligatory on all who possessed them. That logic, in their view, rested on several related propositions: (1) that nuclear weapons were so destructive in their immediate application as well as after effects that they threatened not only the victim of aggression but all humanity, the aggressor included...
...trouble is the decline of our belief in reason as an instrument. Increasingly, we have substituted emotion for reason. Psychology has told us that seemingly rational arguments are determined by hidden and irrational forces inside ourselves, difficult if not impossible to reach. Positivist philosophy has told us that ethics is merely a game of words and that moral judgments are only opinions. In an odd and coincidental alliance, pop culture and recent radical theory gave us a kind of debased romanticism, glorifying feeling over thought, will or desire over reflection, violence over politics, and instant satisfaction over anything else...
...those of us who are not gentlemen, the paradox of football delights and intrigues. Albert Camus played goal. Sir Frederick Ayer, the philosopher, is a fan, and there is a sense in which soccer is a fair subject for a logical positivist. It is, after all, a precise and yet various system of semeiotics...