---
title: "Positivism"
chunk: 1/8
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positivism"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T03:58:26.231974+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

Positivism is a philosophical school that holds that all genuine knowledge is either true by definition or positive – the latter meaning a posteriori facts derived by reason and logic from sensory experience. 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. His school of sociological positivism holds that society, like the physical world, operates according to scientific laws. 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 within the social sciences by antipositivists and critical theorists, among others, for its alleged scientism, reductionism, overgeneralizations, and methodological limitations. Positivism also exerted an unusual influence on Kardecism.

== Etymology ==
The English noun positivism in this meaning was imported in the 19th century from the French word positivisme, derived from positif in its philosophical sense of 'imposed on the mind by experience'. The corresponding adjective (Latin: positivus) has been used in a similar sense to discuss law (positive law compared to natural law) since the time of Chaucer.

== Background ==
Kieran Egan argues that positivism can be traced to the philosophy side of what Plato described as the quarrel between philosophy and poetry, later reformulated by Wilhelm Dilthey as a quarrel between the natural sciences (German: Naturwissenschaften) and the human sciences (Geisteswissenschaften).
In the early nineteenth century, massive advances in the natural sciences encouraged philosophers to apply scientific methods to other fields. Thinkers such as Henri de Saint-Simon, Pierre-Simon Laplace and Auguste Comte believed that the scientific method, the circular dependence of theory and observation, must replace metaphysics in the history of thought.

== Positivism in the social sciences ==

=== Comte's positivism ===

Auguste Comte (1798–1857) first described the epistemological perspective of positivism in The Course in Positive Philosophy, a series of texts published between 1830 and 1842. These texts were followed in 1844 by A General View of Positivism (published in French 1848, English in 1865). The first three volumes of the Course dealt chiefly with the physical sciences already in existence (mathematics, astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology), whereas the latter two emphasized the inevitable coming of social science. Observing the circular dependence of theory and observation in science, and classifying the sciences in this way, Comte may be regarded as the first philosopher of science in the modern sense of the term. For him, the physical sciences had necessarily to arrive first, before humanity could adequately channel its efforts into the most challenging and complex "Queen science" of human society itself. His View of Positivism therefore set out to define the empirical goals of sociological method: