Hossein Jorjani
First publication: 2026 – 07 – 18
The term “positivism” is today employed more often by its critics than as a self-description by its proponents or alleged proponents. Consequently, discussions of positivism frequently proceed without an explicit definition of the position under criticism. In the present work, the term is therefore used in a conceptual sense, referring to the philosophical view that the methodological standards of the empirical sciences constitute the general criterion of legitimate knowledge.
This conceptual clarification is particularly important because several twentieth-century philosophers—notably Karl Popper—explicitly rejected the label “positivist,” while nevertheless being so described by some of their critics.
The concept of positivism has undergone significant transformation since its introduction by Auguste Comte in the nineteenth century. Nonetheless, it may be understood as the philosophical position that all genuine knowledge should be grounded in observable phenomena or empirical evidence; that claims not grounded in empirical evidence should avoid metaphysical speculation or be regarded as lacking cognitive significance; that all disciplines aspiring to produce genuine knowledge, to the greatest extent possible, emulate the methods of the natural sciences; that concepts should be operationalizable and claims empirically testable whenever they are to count as genuine knowledge; and that causal regularities or law-like relations constitute the preferred form of explanation.¹
Understood in this way, positivism is not itself a scientific doctrine but a philosophical, more precisely epistemological, doctrine. It does not describe how scientists actually conduct scientific inquiry, but rather advances a general claim about what should count as legitimate knowledge in all fields of academic inquiry.
This distinction is fundamental. The requirement that scientific claims be grounded in systematic observation and, where possible, experiment is a defining methodological principle of the empirical sciences. Acceptance of this methodological principle is a condition for doing empirical science, not a commitment to positivism. A scientist becomes a positivist only by embracing the additional philosophical claim that the standards appropriate to the empirical sciences should determine the legitimacy of every academic discipline.
Such a position is difficult to sustain because universities comprise many legitimate disciplines that are not scientific in the empirical sense. Philosophy, mathematics, law, history, literary studies, linguistics, the arts, and many other fields pursue different kinds of questions by methods appropriate to their respective subject matters. They are academic disciplines, but not empirical sciences, and their legitimacy does not depend upon conformity to scientific methodology.
Accordingly, neither science nor scientists should be regarded as the proper target of either advocacy or criticism of positivism. Positivism is a philosophical thesis about the scope of scientific methodology, not a consequence of science itself. Its proponents defend a particular conception of knowledge; its opponents reject that conception. The disagreement is therefore philosophical rather than scientific, and it should be debated on philosophical rather than scientific grounds.
The term “positivism” has frequently been used as an attribution by critics rather than as a self-description by those to whom it is applied. The present characterization is therefore intended as a conceptual rather than a historical definition. It identifies the central features of philosophical positions commonly described as positivist rather than reconstructing the doctrines of any particular school, such as Comtean positivism or the logical positivism of the Vienna Circle.
¹ See Excursus 65 – On the Ripley Principle: The Evolution of Ideas.
Hossein Jorjani 