Positivism

Positivism is the belief that human knowledge is produced by the scientific interpretation of observational data.

The belief has been known since Ancient Greece. (The approach has been an ongoing "theme in the history of western thought from the Ancient Greeks to the present day".)^[1] The term was used in the early 19th century by the philosopher and founding sociologist, Auguste Comte.^[2]

Comte believed in a three part model of human knowledge. He claimed that it had gone through phases. There was a religious worldview, and a metaphysical worldview before the scientific interpretation was considered. The positivistic method should, said Comte, no longer aim at a revealing ultimate causes. It should focus on how data are linked together. Scientists would simply interpret these correlations. Late 19th-century philosophers of the sciences from Heinrich Hertz to Ernst Mach discussed specific requirements of scientific theories and physical laws such as the predictability of results in experiments and the functionality of laws in computations.^[3]

1. ↑ Cohen, Louis (2007), Research methods in education, Routledge, p. 9, doi:10.1111/j.1467-8527.2007.00388_4.x, S2CID 143761151
2. ↑ Sociology Guide. "Auguste Comte". Sociology Guide.
3. ↑ See Bruce Caldwell's article on positivism in The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics, Second Edition, 2008. pdf