Positivism

From Geography

This page is in progress by Thijs Koolhof.

Positivism is a set of philosophical approaches that seeks to apply scientific principles and methods, drawn from the natural and hard sciences, to social phenomena in order to explain them. ^[1]

The term positivism designates the thought of the French philosopher Auguste Comte (1798–1857). Comte argued that social research, until the nineteenth century, was speculative, emotive and romantic and that as a result it lacked rigour and analytical reasoning. Therefore Comte rejected metaphysical and normative questions as they could not be answered scientifically. Instead he posited to concentrate on facts and truths in order to explain and predict human behaviour.

There are various forms of positivism. The two most discussed are logical positivism and critical rationalism.