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Positivism is a Philosophy developed by Auguste Comte in the beginning of the 19th century, which stated that the only authentic knowledge is scientific knowledge. This view is sometimes referred to as Scientism . As an approach to the Philosophy Of Science deriving from Enlightenment thinkers like Pierre-Simon Laplace (and many others), positivism was first systematically theorized by Auguste Comte , who saw the Scientific Method as replacing Metaphysics in the history of thought, and who observed the circular dependence of theory and observation in science. Brazil 's national Motto , ''Ordem e Progresso'' ("Order and Progress") was taken from Comte's positivism, also influential in Poland .

The key features of positivism as of the 1950 s, as defined in the "received view", are (Hacking, 1981):
#A focus on science as a product, a linguistic or numerical set of statements;
#A concern with Axiomatization , that is, with demonstrating the logical structure and coherence of these statements;
#An insistence on at least some of these statements being testable, that is amenable to being verified, confirmed, or falsified by the empirical observation of reality; statements that would, by their nature, be regarded as untestable included the Teleological ; (Thus positivism rejects much of classical metaphysics.)
#The belief that science is markedly cumulative;
#The belief that science is predominantly transcultural;
#The belief that science rests on specific results that are dissociated from the personality and social position of the investigator;
#The belief that science contains theories or research traditions that are largely commensurable;
#The belief that science sometimes incorporates new ideas that are discontinuous from old ones;
#The belief that science involves the idea of the unity of science, that there is, underlying the various scientific disciplines, basically one science about one real world.


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REFERENCE

  • ''Foundations of Futures Studies'', Wendell Bell