Everyone knows there are no longer any positivists. The pinched epistemology that makes everything from moral principles to Shakespeare's sonnets “cognitively meaningless” is a relic of the past— as are the emotivist ethics, the hopelessly formalist conceptions of “unified” science, the strict behaviorism in social research, and the scientistic hostility toward history and the humanities that went with it. Thanks especially to Quine and Kuhn, the epistemological dogmas and factual misperceptions of scientific practice endemic to positivism— and especially to its logical empiricist version— have been exposed and put behind us. Today we are all post- positivists; perhaps most of us were never really positivists in the first place.

Yet like most of what everyone knows, this popular narrative is wrong. Old traditions are not like worn- out clothes, specific and fully accessible items to be taken off at the end of the day. Shedding a philosophical orientation by renouncing its explicit doctrines is as ineffective as “deciding” not to be prejudiced. The fact is, we still live with positivism, and our long and problematic relation to it runs deeper than the level where theories and methods come and go. To see how much positivism we still inherit, one must look past the self- congratulatory post- positivist renunciations of twentieth- century logical empiricism and focus more carefully on the actual transition from logical empiricism to the various species of post- positivism as they were made— something, in fact, that a number of historians of analytic philosophy have begun to do.

From this better- informed perspective, it is obvious both that logical empiricists themselves should be given credit for taking at least some theoretically transformative steps against their own initial claims, and also that Quine and Kuhn were never as “post- “ positivist as they might have seemed at first. Yet if recent studies are a welcome corrective to the textbook narratives, they remain concerned primarily with the hidden continuities and internal transformations that took place regarding theories and methods, and even more specifically in connection with the reformation of the philosophy of science.