Positivism is a
philosophy that holds that the only authentic knowledge is that which is based on actual sense experience.
Metaphysical speculation is avoided. Though the positivist approach has been a 'recurrent theme in the history of western thought from the Ancient Greeks to the present day'
[1] and appears in
Ibn al-Haytham's 11th Century text
Book of Optics,
[2] the concept was first coined by
Auguste Comte, widely considered the first modern
sociologist,
[3] in the middle of the 19th century. In the early 20th century,
logical positivism—a stricter and more formal version of Comte's basic thesis—sprang up in
Vienna and grew to become one of the dominant movements in American and British philosophy. The positivist view is sometimes referred to as a
scientistic ideology, and is often shared by
technocrats[4] who believe in the necessity of
progress through
scientific progress, and by naturalists, who argue that any method for gaining knowledge should be limited to natural, physical, and material approaches. In
psychology, a positivistic approach is favoured by
behaviourism and dominated the field during the rise of behaviourism.
As an approach to the philosophy of science deriving from Enlightenment thinkers like Pierre-Simon Laplace (and many others), positivism was first systematically theorized by Comte, who saw the scientific method as replacing metaphysics in the history of thought, and who observed the circular dependence of theory and observation in science. Comte was thus one of the leading thinkers of the social evolutionism school of thought.
Comte was highly influential in some countries. Brazilian thinkers turned to his ideas about training a scientific elite in order to flourish in the industrialization process. Brazil's national motto, Ordem e Progresso ("Order and Progress") was taken from Comte's positivism, and was also influential in Poland. Positivism is the most evolved stage of society in anthropological evolutionism, the point where science and rational explanation for scientific phenomena develop.
According to Auguste Comte (1798-1857), society undergoes three phases in its quest for the truth according to the Law of three stages. These are the theological, the metaphysical, and the positive phases.[5]
