Positivism: The Philosophical Theory

Positivism, the philosophical theory that appeared as a product of the Enlightenment period in the early nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century which main aim is to use a scientific method to study social sciences by observation with objective standards, rather than biased mindset standard based on questioning. It started by August Comte who denied all the existence of theoretical entities and believed that causality was not reducible to observation and, every individual science has unique features, just like social process. His idea influenced many thinkers and the concept of positivism started to develop by the time. Herbert Spencer is one of the early philosophers of positivism who was interested in making the study of psychology

The metaphor with Spencer was more than another philosopher because he argued that the social body preserve itself, as a physical body would do, by appropriating from the earth what they need from clothes, food and so forth (McKinnon.2010) . Despite the fact that Spencer was influenced by comets work he also disagrees with him in many cases, for instance, Comte believed that the high priests of positivistic religion should lead the society and managed it, however Spencer had dissatisfaction about the centralized political control and believed that the government should give individuals ultimate freedom to go after their private needs. In another world, the main different between the both of them Spencer was a strong supporter of the freedom to the people in the society and he put knowledge over faith whereas comet was more supporter for the government and the religion role in the society ("The Relevance of Positivism in Social Science", 2008). Spencer was more interested in studying the progress of the external world or objectivity and he came up with his theory of revelation that According to Harold Barrington in Brian Holmes book Spencer’s evolutionary psychology broke new ground. In his lifetime, Herbert was known as one of the first philosophers who ‘shaped the start of sociology as a special scientific discipline’ and his novelty in that period lays in his formulation the laws of evolution to the scientific knowledge of psychology, sociology, biology, education and ethics (Holmes.1994). However, all that praise that he got in his life almost disappear, after he died his works became useless and many thinkers started to criticize his ideas and some of the sociologists describe his works as unworthy of reading and describe him as often seems very philosopher or inadequate in specialist knowledge (Pearce.