• What is positivism?
• Characteristics of positivism
• Fundamental principles of positivism
• Representatives of positivism
• Logical positivism

We explain what positivism is in philosophy, its characteristics and fundamental principles. In addition, its main representatives.

August Comte was the founder of positivist thought.

What is positivism?

Positivism or positive philosophy is a philosophical current born in the mid-nineteenth century and established, particularly, in the thought of the French Henri Saint-Simon (1760-1825) and Auguste Comte (1798-1857). He held that the only knowledge authentic to which the humanity is the one that arises from the application of scientific method, whose model to follow would be that of the physical or natural sciences.

Positivism arose as heir to the empiricism and the epistemology. In addition to Saint-Simon and Comte, the work of the British John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) was very influential in its development.

It was a very successful model of thought between the late nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries. It originated numerous schools of positivist thought, some more rigid than others, whose main common features were the appreciation of the scientific thought above any other, and the rejection of any form of metaphysics, considered as a pseudoscience.

One of the greatest aspirations of positivism was to apply the scientific method to the study of human being, both individually and socially. This led to a perspective that viewed human beings as objects, completely understandable through the math and the experimentation. That is why in Comte's work was the origin of the sociology, which aspired to be the science that studies human society.

However, the limitations of these points of view engendered a whole philosophical movement against it, known as antipositivism or negativism, which rejected the use of the scientific method in the social Sciences. Ultimately, this rejection allowed the emergence of research approaches qualitative and not exclusively quantitative, as was more common in positivism.

On the other hand, positivism gave rise to many different currents in different fields of knowledge, such as, among others:

• Iuspositivism, a current of legal thought that proposes a conceptual separation of the right and of the moral, rejecting any link between the two, and that the exclusive object of study of the law must be the positive law.
• The behaviorism, current of psychological thought that proposed the objective and experimental study of the conduct. It served as a channel for more than ten variants of behaviorism that emerged between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, which more or less moved away from concepts such as "mind", "soul" and "awareness”To focus on the relationship between subjects and their environment.
• Empirio-criticism, a philosophical trend created by the German philosopher Richard Avenarius (1843-1896), who proposed the study of experience in itself, without attending to any other form of metaphysical thought, that is, aspiring to a "pure experience" of the world.

Characteristics of positivism

Positivism, broadly speaking, was characterized by the following:

• He defended the scientific method as the only one possible to obtain valid knowledge, regardless of the type of science in question, and taking the natural sciences as a model to follow.
• He criticized and moved away from any form of metaphysics, subjectivism or considerations that were not objective in empirical terms.
• Its central purpose was to causally explain the phenomena of the universe through the formulation of general and universal laws, which is why it considered human reason as a means to other ends (an instrumental reason).
• He argued that inductive methods were the only useful for obtaining knowledge. That is why he valued documentary evidence, and instead despised any form of general interpretations.
• Positivist works tended, therefore, to abound in documentary support and to sin from a lack of interpretive synthesis.

Fundamental principles of positivism

The very principles of positivism understood knowledge as something that can only be acquired from what is given, from what is "positive", and therefore it denies that philosophy can provide real information about the world. According to this, beyond the realm of facts, there are only the logic and the math.

For Auguste Comte, for example, history Human could be explained through transit by:

• The theological: The human being in his intellectual childhood explained the universe through gods and magic.
• The metaphysical: With his maturation, the human supplanted those deities by metaphysical and absolute ideas, but at least asking himself the question of the why of things.
• The positive: Upon reaching his intellectual maturity as a civilization, he began to apply the Sciences and to study the physical laws behind the phenomena.

This consideration of science as the definitive and absolute perspective on things is precisely the positivist gaze. According to her, everything that does not conform to these precepts has to be considered as pseudoscience.

Representatives of positivism

In addition to being a positivist, John Stuart Mill was one of the founders of utilitarianism.

The main representatives of positivism were:

• Henri de Saint-Simon, philosopher, economist and socialist theorist of French origin, whose work (known as “Saint-Simonism”) was influential both in the fields of politics, sociology, economy and philosophy of science. He was one of the most influential thinkers of the 18th century.
• Auguste Comte, founding father of sociology and positivist thought, this French philosopher was initially secretary to Count Henri Saint-Simon, with whom he later fell out due to conceptual and personal differences. His work is considered heir to that of Francis Bacon, and was one of the most dedicated to exalting science and reason as the only instruments of the human being to really know the reality.
• John Stuart Mill, British-born philosopher, economist and politician, is a representative of the classical school of economics and one of the theorists of utilitarianism, along with Jeremy Betham. A distinguished member of the liberal party, he was a great critic of state intervention and a defender of the female vote.

Logical positivism

Positivism should not be confused with plogical ositivism or logical empiricism, also sometimes called neopositivism or rational empiricism. The latter arose during the first third of the 20th century, among the scientists and philosophers who made up the so-called Vienna Circle.

Logical positivism is part of the currents of the philosophy of science that limit the validity of the scientific method to that which is empirical and verifiable, that is, that which has its own verification method or which in any case is analytical. This was known as verificationism.

Thus, logical positivism was much stricter in its defense of the sciences as the only viable route to knowledge than positivism itself, and it was one of the strongest movements within analytic philosophy. His fields of study also included logic and language.