Positivism

Summary

Positivism is a philosophical school that holds that all genuine knowledge is either true by definition or positive—meaning a posteriori facts derived by reason and logic from sensory experience. Other ways of knowing, such as intuition, introspection, or religious faith, are rejected or considered meaningless. Although the positivist approach has been a recurrent theme in the history of western thought, modern positivism was first articulated in the early 19th century by Auguste Comte. His school of sociological positivism holds that society, like the physical world, operates according to general laws. After Comte, positivist schools arose in logic, psychology, economics, historiography, and other fields of thought. Generally, positivists attempted to introduce scientific methods to their respective fields. Since the turn of the 20th century, positivism has declined under criticism from antipositivists and critical theorists, among others, for its alleged scientism, reductionism, overgeneralizations, and methodological limitations. The English noun positivism was re-imported in the 19th century from the French word positivisme, derived from positif in its philosophical sense of 'imposed on the mind by experience'. The corresponding adjective (positīvus) has been used in a similar sense to discuss law (positive law compared to natural law) since the time of Chaucer. Kieran Egan argues that positivism can be traced to the philosophy side of what Plato described as the quarrel between philosophy and poetry, later reformulated by Wilhelm Dilthey as a quarrel between the natural sciences (Naturwissenschaften) and the humanities (Geisteswissenschaft). In the early nineteenth century, massive advances in the natural sciences encouraged philosophers to apply scientific methods to other fields. Thinkers such as Henri de Saint-Simon, Pierre-Simon Laplace and Auguste Comte believed the scientific method, the circular dependence of theory and observation, must replace metaphysics in the history of thought.