Positivism

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 nineteenth century by Auguste Comte, whose 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 and historiography, and this entry is the broad tradition, of which Logical Positivism, recorded separately, is one development.