Thursday, May 19, 201612:00 PM - 1:30 PM
10383 Bunche Hall
We are all “anti-positivists” now, but do we really know what we mean when we proclaim it? In recent years, intellectual historians and philosophers have revised our understanding of positivism and challenged the long-compelling polemical attacks from its famous detractors of the twentieth century. At the same time, the contemporary turn to practices and actor networks in post-positivist science studies appears, upon closer inspection, to have unexpected precedents within the traditions of its supposed adversary. This talk reconsiders the legacies of Central European positivism through the career of the Viennese émigré sociologist, self-labeled positivist, and quantitative methodologist Paul F. Lazarsfeld (1901-1976). Lazarsfeld’s methodology first gained influence on American soil through his appointment at Columbia University during the social science boom in the mid-twentieth century. In this context, he worked out problems and insights inherited from Ernst Mach, the Vienna Circle and logical empiricism, the “Unity of Science” movement, and Central European scientific culture more broadly. A historicized and more accurate picture of Central European positivism encourages a new appreciation of its legacy and, perhaps, a renewed and more precise critique.
Eric Hounshell studies the history of knowledge in modern Europe and the United States with a focus on the history of the social sciences in the twentieth century. His dissertation at UC Los Angeles (PhD 2016), “A Feel for the Data: Paul F. Lazarsfeld and the Columbia University Bureau of Applied Social Research,” reconstructs the development of empirical, quantitative social science from interwar Central Europe to postwar America. In the course of his dissertation research and writing, Hounshell worked in Kulturwissenschaft (cultural studies) research settings at the IFK Vienna and the University of Konstanz, Germany and centers for the history of science at the Max Planck Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte, Berlin and the University of Vienna. His forthcoming publications concern the production and application of social knowledge for the Ford Motor Company in the 1950s and the politics and rhetoric of method in 1960s economics. In 2016-17, he will begin a new project on the social sciences of kinship and the nuclear family after 1945 as a postdoctoral researcher in the “Kinship and Politics” research group at the Zentrum für Interdisziplinäre Forschung in Bielefeld, Germany.
Cost : Free and open to the public.
Sponsor(s): Center for European and Russian Studies