Positivism and scientism
A tradition that takes science as the model for all reliable knowledge and wants to apply scientific method to society too.
Do you think in the way of Positivism and scientism? Answer 44 to 132 statements and see your affinity with every school and every thinker.
What it is
Positivism holds that we truly know only what can be observed, tested and organized into laws, as science does. Metaphysical speculation about ultimate causes would be useless. Its core question is: how can we gain secure knowledge and use it to improve human life? Scientism, in a broad sense, extends this confidence: philosophy should work alongside the sciences, using their results and their standards of rigor, instead of competing with them.
Auguste Comte created positivism in 19th-century France. He proposed the law of three stages, according to which thought moves from the religious to the metaphysical and finally to the scientific, and he helped found sociology. His ideas left a strong mark on Brazil: the motto Order and Progress on its flag comes from him. In the 20th century, the Argentine Mario Bunge criticized classical positivism but defended a scientific, realist and materialist philosophy, and fought what he considered pseudoscience.
Core ideas
- Reliable knowledge comes from observation and the scientific method.
- Society, like nature, can be studied in terms of laws.
- Philosophy should work alongside the sciences, not against them.
Where to start reading
Each thinker's starter book, picked for beginners.
The thinkers
Where Positivism and scientism stands on the 11 themes
Average position of the school's thinkers. Each theme runs from the first pole (−1) to the second (+1).
Neighboring schools
- Social contract theoryA tradition that explains society and government as the result of an agreement, or contract, among free and equal people.
- Political realismA tradition that studies power as it actually works rather than as it should be, setting politics apart from idealized morality.
- Mind and human natureThinkers who ask what the mind is and what is distinctive about human nature, from the body to inner life.