Naturalism ≠ Positivism

In the combox of an old thread, I have been chatting a bit with Blair Hodges and Alan Goff about the relationship between naturalism and positivism. Goff treats the two as basically identical, but I think the distinction between them is substantive and important.

Naturalism is the rejection of extrasensory perception and spiritual phenomena. Positivism is the principle that a theory must be empirically proven before we can accept it as true. It is fully possible to be a naturalist, but not a positivist, or to be a positivist, but not a naturalist.

Imagine that we have two naturalists. Naturalist # 1 says, "I don't believe in visionary experiences because they are not empirically verifiable, and thus don't meet my standard of evidence." Naturalist # 2 says, "I don't believe in visionary experiences because so many of them have been falsified that I cannot consider them a reliable way of knowing." Naturalist # 1 has given a positivistic explanation of his naturalism. Naturalist # 2 has not.

Other positivistic claims include the claims that historians must try to be value-free, and that historians can "let the facts do the talking" without offering any interpretation of them. But again, while there may be some naturalists who make these claims, there are also many who don't.

So, in many cases naturalism and positivism may have overlapping constituencies. But in other cases they do not. There is nothing about the former that necessarily entails the latter.