positivism

In philosophy, the position that all genuine knowledge is derived from and validated by science. Developed from the British empiricist tradition, it was first explicitly formulated in the 19th-c by Comte, and was taken up by the utilitarians (Bentham and Mill), Herbert Spencer, Mach, and others, who were optimistic about the benefits of scientific progress for humanity and who were hostile to theology and metaphysics.

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Positivism is a philosophy developed by Auguste Comte (widely regarded as the first true sociologist) in the middle of the 19th century that stated that the only authentic knowledge is scientific knowledge, and that such knowledge can only come from positive affirmation of theories through strict scientific method. 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. Positivism is the most evolved stage of society in anthropological Evolutionism, the point where science and rational explanation for scientific phenomena develops.

The key features of positivism as of the 1950s, as defined in the "received view", are:

A focus on science as a product, a linguistic or numerical set of statements; (Thus positivism rejects much of classical metaphysics.) The belief that science is markedly cumulative; The belief that science is predominantly transcultural; The belief that science rests on specific results that are dissociated from the personality and social position of the investigator; The belief that science contains theories or research traditions that are largely commensurable; The belief that science sometimes incorporates new ideas that are discontinuous from old ones; The belief that science involves the idea of the unity of science, that there is, underlying the various scientific disciplines, basically one science about one real world.

Positivism is also depicted as "the view that all true knowledge is scientific," and that all things are ultimately measurable. It also involves the contention that "processes are reducible to physiological, physical or chemical events," and even that "social processes are reducible to relationships between and actions of individuals," or that "biological organisms are reducible to physical systems."