Confidence and Its Loss
Positivism states the strong claim
- Positivism, or the philosophy that science alone provides knowledge, emphasised the rational and scientific analysis of nature and human affairs.
- Science alone is the strong version — not that science is one route to knowledge but that it is the only one.
- And note the reach: nature and human affairs, so society becomes an object of scientific study.
Positivism's claim is that science...
The strong version, reaching to nature and human affairs.
Then confidence is lost
- In the later 19th century, a new relativism in values and the loss of confidence in the objectivity of knowledge led to modernism in intellectual and cultural life.
- Two shifts produce one result: relativism in values and loss of confidence in the objectivity of knowledge.
- So modernism is described here as a consequence of a philosophical change, not as a style choice.
Select both shifts the CED says produced modernism.
Two shifts, one result.
The see-saw in one subtopic
- 7.1's tension is visible here in miniature: positivism at the objectivity pole, modernism at the subjectivity pole.
- And they are not separated by a century — the confident claim and its collapse are decades apart.
- That compression is why the CED calls it a tension rather than a sequence.
Positivism, the loss of confidence, or the result?
Sort each element of the intellectual shift.
The CED describes modernism as...
It follows the loss of confidence, in the CED's own sentence.
Two different doubts, and the CED distinguishes them. A new relativism in values is a doubt about what is good; the loss of confidence in the objectivity of knowledge is a doubt about what can be known. Keeping them apart makes an answer precise at no extra cost.
Match each doubt to what it doubts.
The CED itself distinguishes them.
Why the confidence broke
- The CED does not itemise causes here, so an answer should stay with what it does say: relativism in values, and doubt about objectivity.
- Those are two different doubts — one about what is good, one about what can be known.
- Distinguishing them is a cheap way to make an answer look precise, because the CED itself distinguishes them.
The confident claim and its collapse are only decades apart.
That compression is why the CED calls it a tension rather than a sequence.
Development and change
- The objective is how science and other intellectual disciplines developed and changed across the period.
- Developed: science extended its methods to human affairs and claimed exclusive authority over knowledge.
- Changed: that claim lost its grip, and modernism followed in intellectual and cultural life.
A discipline that claims to be the only source of knowledge has staked everything on one method holding. When the method's own practitioners begin asking whether their instruments describe the world or only their own way of looking, the claim has nowhere to retreat to.
Positivism, or the philosophy that science alone provides knowledge, emphasised the rational and scientific analysis of nature and human affairs. Then, in the later 19th century, a new relativism in values and the loss of confidence in the objectivity of knowledge led to modernism in intellectual and cultural life — 7.1's tension in miniature, with the confident claim and its collapse only decades apart.