A portrait of Auguste Comte, the founder of modern positivism
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.[1][2] 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.[3][4] His school of sociological positivism holds that society, like the physical world, operates according to general laws.[5] 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 although still popular, has declined under criticism in parts of social sciences from antipositivists and critical theorists, among others, for its alleged scientism, reductionism, overgeneralizations, and methodological limitations.
^John J. Macionis, Linda M. Gerber, Sociology, Seventh Canadian Edition, Pearson Canada
^Larrain, Jorge (1979). The Concept of Ideology. London: Hutchinson. p. 197. one of the features of positivism is precisely its postulate that scientific knowledge is the paradigm of valid knowledge, a postulate that indeed is never proved nor intended to be proved.
^Cohen, Louis; Maldonado, Antonio (2007). "Research Methods In Education". British Journal of Educational Studies. 55 (4): 9. doi:10.1111/j.1467-8527.2007.00388_4.x. S2CID 143761151..
^"Auguste Comte". Sociology Guide. Archived from the original on 7 September 2008. Retrieved 2 October 2008.
^Macionis, John J. (2012). Sociology 14th Edition. Boston: Pearson. p. 11. ISBN 978-0-205-11671-3.
Positivism is a philosophical school that holds that all genuine knowledge is either true by definition or positive—meaning a posteriori facts derived...
Logical positivism, later called logical empiricism, and both of which together are also known as neopositivism, is a movement whose central thesis is...
Legal positivism is a school of thought of philosophy of law and jurisprudence which holds that law is constructed from social facts, without regards to...
sociological positivism, an epistemological approach outlined in the Course in Positive Philosophy (1830–1842), later included in A General View of Positivism (1848)...
philosopher, mathematician and writer who formulated the doctrine of positivism. He is often regarded as the first philosopher of science in the modern...
postempiricism is a metatheoretical stance that critiques and amends positivism and has impacted theories and practices across philosophy, social sciences...
Strategic positivism is an approach that recognizes the limitations and potential of positivist methods, using them strategically for emancipatory goals...
Polish Positivism was a social, literary and philosophical movement that became dominant in late-19th-century partitioned Poland following Romanticism...
seeking to define. Interpretivism (anti-positivism) developed among researchers dissatisfied with post-positivism, the theories of which they considered...
legal systems. It encompasses such theories of jurisprudence as legal positivism, holds that there is no necessary connection between law and morality...
The positivism dispute (German: Positivismusstreit) was a political-philosophical dispute between the critical rationalists (Karl Popper, Hans Albert)...
(Idealism and Positivism, 1879–1884, 3 volumes), he drew a clear contrast between Platonism, from which he derived transcendentalism, and positivism, of which...
empiricism/positivism/realism with the falsifiability criterion—have agreed that positivism is a dead-end. Friedman, Reconsidering Logical Positivism (Cambridge...
Comte first described the epistemological perspective of positivism in The Course in Positive Philosophy, a series of texts published between 1830 and...
Jahrhunderts. Zur Geschichte des russischen Positivismus [The history of Russian positivism.]. Hildesheim, Germany: Georg Olms Verlag. 278 pp. Wikimedia Commons has...
philosophers, W. V. O. Quine, and Karl Popper. After the decline of logical positivism, Saul Kripke, David Lewis, and others led a revival in metaphysics. Analytic...
conceptual field in the nineteenth century. Social science was influenced by positivism, focusing on knowledge based on actual positive sense experience and avoiding...
and so on (also see the third man). Logical empiricism (also logical positivism or neopositivism) was an early 20th-century attempt to synthesize the...
has been influenced by a number of branches of philosophy, for example, positivism, postpositivism, critical theory, and constructivism. The historical transitions...
Harald Høffding, who later in his life moved on to join the movement of positivism. Another Danish philosopher of note is Grundtvig, whose philosophy gave...
Philosophy of Lifeless Reaction" in Leninist Dialectics and the Metaphysics of Positivism (1979). In 1902 Pavel Ivanovich Novgorodtsev edited the book Problems...
modern reworking of it. Legal positivism, which is the view that law depends primarily on social facts. Legal positivism has traditionally been associated...
frequently implies a critique of the more extreme expressions of logical positivism and has been used by social scientists such as Friedrich Hayek, philosophers...
semantically literal, which logical positivism and instrumentalism deny. Constructive empiricism, logical positivism and instrumentalism agree that theories...
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