Positivism
Monday, 24 March 2014 , 0 Comment
What
is positivism? Positivism is a way of thinking
based on view that information derived from logical and mathematical
treatments and reports of sensory experience is the exclusive source of all
authoritative knowledge and that there is valid knowledge (truth) only in scientific knowledge.Positivism also argues that sociology should concern itself
only with what can be observed with the senses and that theories of social life
should be built in a rigid, linear, and methodical way on a base of verifiable
fact. Positivism as a term was introduced into the
social sciences by Auguste Comte(1798-1857), who held that sociology should be scientific,
thus it should deal only with hypotheses which were directly . Positivists
believed it was possible to classify the social world in an objective way.
Using these classifications it was then possible to count sets of observable
social facts and so produce statistics. For example,Durkheim collected data on
social facts such as the suicide rate and the membership of different
religions. There are logical positivism and postpositivism and sociological positivism. Examples of sociological positivism :
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