The article discusses the allegedly decontextualized and ahistorical traits in positivist educational research and curriculum by examining its emergence in early twentieth-century empirical education. Edward Lee Thorndike’s educational psychology is analyzed as a case in point. It will be shown that Thorndike’s positivist educational psychology stressed the need to account for the reality of schooling and to produce knowledge of the actual contexts of education. Furthermore, a historical analysis informed by Michel Foucault’s history of the human sciences reveals that there (...) are multiple historical temporalities involved in Thorndike’s educational psychology. This allows a new critical angle to be taken on positivist educational research. The question concerning the contexts of empirical education turns to examining the way the conditions of possibility for scientific knowledge in education involve practices of contextualization as well as paradoxical and self-defeating elements. (shrink)

B. F. Skinner's "The Behavior of Organisms" (1938/1966) and "Walden Two" (1948) are both positivistic. Skinner explicitly stated his approach was positivistic in "The Behavior of Organisms" although he did not make an explicit statement about "Walden Two". Three features of positivism are elaborated—its concern with indisputable certitude, unified reality, and ever-onward progress, each of which entailed overly simplifying assumptions. These features are brought out in the positivistic sources for "Walden Two" and in the changes from the positivistic views of (...) Frazier, the protagonist in "Walden Two", to Skinner's later pragmatic-selectionist views. (shrink)

Much speculation on the sources of Duhem's historical interests fails to account for the major shifts in these interests: neither his belief in the continuous development of physics nor his Catholicism, when his Church was encouraging the study of generally Aristotelian scholastic thought, led to any interest in mediaeval science before 1904. Equally, his own claim that he was merely testing his views on the nature of physical theory is easily squared only with earlier work with no trace of mediaeval (...) science. Behind this discontinuity lies a major crisis. Though not a positivist, Duhem had based all his work on assumptions acceptable to positivists. One of these, the sterility of the Middle Ages, was refuted by his chance discovery of evidence of genuine mediaeval science in the autumn of 1903, but that left the doctrine of scholastic sterility intact. (shrink)