Twentieth Century Views: Positivism

The twentieth century begins with the emergence of a school of thought called positivism. Positivism is an extremely well-known and till recently very influential theory of science and its method. The acknowledged founder of positivism or ‘the positive philosophy' was the French philosopher and social scientist Auguste Comte (1798-1857). Comte also invented the term ‘sociology' to describe his proposed positive science of society.

Positivism is, above all, a philosophy of science. As such, it stands squarely within the empiricist tradition. Metaphysical speculation is rejected in favour of ‘positive' knowledge based on systematic observation and experiment. The methods of science can give us knowledge of the laws of coexistence and succession of phenomena, but can never penetrate to the inner ‘essences' or ‘natures' of things. It is a closely knit set of tenets formulated with an admirable amount of clarity and consistency. Some of these tenets are:

•  Science is distinct from other areas of human creativity because it possesses a method which is unique to it (methodological).

•  There is only one method common to all sciences irrespective of their subject matter (methodological monism).

•  The method of science is the method of induction (inductivism).

•  The hallmark of science consists in the fact that its statements are systematically verifiable.

•  Scientific observations are or can be shown to be “pure” in the sense that they are theory-independent.

•  Theories are winnowed from facts or observations such that a theory is nothing more than a condensed version of and therefore reducible to a set of statements describing observations.