What is positivism?
Q: What is positivism?
A: Positivism is the belief that human knowledge is produced by the scientific interpretation of observational data.
Q: Who was the philosopher and founding sociologist who first used the term "positivism"?
A: The philosopher and founding sociologist who first used the term "positivism" was Auguste Comte.
Q: What did Auguste Comte believe about human knowledge?
A: Auguste 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.
Q: What should the positivistic method no longer aim at, according to Comte?
A: According to Comte, the positivistic method should no longer aim at revealing ultimate causes. It should rather focus on how data are linked together.
Q: How should scientists interpret correlations, according to Comte?
A: According to Comte, scientists should simply interpret these correlations.
Q: What did late 19th-century philosophers of the sciences discuss?
A: Late 19th-century philosophers of the sciences discussed specific requirements of operable scientific theories and physical laws such as the predictability of results in experiments and the functionality of laws in computations.
Q: What did Comte believe about human knowledge being relatively true?
A: Comte believed that all human knowledge could only be relatively true, so he looked at these interpretations.
