Horkheimer read logical positivism as a regressive nominalism that abandoned reason’s constructive power.

Evidence

Horkheimer’s critique was not a mild one. He described the logical positivists as the modern representatives of the nominalist tendency, whose function had now become regressive instead of progressive. The transformation of the specialist sciences, with their ideals of objectivity and exactitude, had betrayed the progressive elements within liberalism by abandoning both the relation to a perceiving subject and the constructive power of reason, which aimed at the complete domination of nature and society. It implied silence in the face of the horrors which the totalitarian inheritors of the reactionary elements of liberalism had brought upon the world. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 204

Categorization

• DEFINE: Pins down Horkheimer’s specific charge: positivism as nominalism turned regressive, not merely ‘empiricism bad’.
• XREF: Connects to the earlier chapter material on the same nominalism/realism opposition, where the category was applied generously to empiricist and sceptical positions.