Positivism is also called positivism, and its central argument is that to understand the objective environment and external things in which everyone lives, we must observe or experience the facts. Positivists believe that although everyone's education level is different, there is not much difference in the principles they use to verify sensory experience. The purpose of positivism is to establish the objectivity of knowledge.
Comte believes that human beings are not born omniscient and must acquire knowledge from different situations through the learning process. Through direct or indirect feeling, reasoning or cognition of experience, and in the process of learning, further reasoning has not been experienced knowledge. Knowledge that can be observed beyond experience is not real knowledge.
vital functions
Second, from today's point of view, behind the apparent opposition between so-called rationalism and empiricism gradually formed after18th century, there is actually a profound agreement, that is, the accidental knowledge about the world and the inevitable knowledge about eternal things are strictly distinguished: for Descartes and Leibniz, only analytical knowledge is inevitable, but this knowledge is not about the world, but some tautological propositions, which are manifested as certain inevitable occurrences. Moreover, they can't be obtained through experience, but only from innate things, which leaves a reasonable proof for the existence of God. Similarly, Barclays clearly distinguishes between what appears in our perception and what cannot be effectively introduced into perception, such as the existence of matter. The purpose of Barclays' distinction is to prove that "existence is perceived", but he also shows his attitude towards the material world, that is, to exclude atheistic explanations about the existence of the world from empirical perception. From the opposition between rationalism and empiricism, we can see that they actually have completely different attitudes towards the distinction between these two kinds of knowledge: rationalism obviously opposes accidental knowledge about the world and emphasizes the grasp of inevitable knowledge of eternal things; Empiricism, on the other hand, believes that even the propositions of mathematics and geometry are derived from experience and are also a summary of empirical materials.
Hume played an important role in the formation of western modern positivism. Although he is usually regarded as the main representative of empiricism, he is very different from Locke's and Barclays' empiricism in dealing with the relationship between the two kinds of knowledge, and it is this difference that makes contemporary philosophers put Hume in the camp of positivism. Logical positivists regard Hume as one of the pioneers of his thought, while Minsky of colac directly calls him "the real originator of positivism philosophy".
Hume distinguishes between "impression" and "idea", but thinks that knowledge about the relationship between ideas does not need empirical observation outside the idea: they are only composed of similar, opposite and different degrees of nature and quantitative relations. The study of these relations is the content of mathematics, and has nothing to do with the outside world. The truth value of mathematical propositions depends on the concepts used in these propositions and the self-evident reasoning relationship between them. Hume believes that although the judgments about facts tell us about the content of existence, they do not contain the knowledge of inevitability. Therefore, human experience knowledge about fact judgment is limited, and we can't get knowledge about inevitability from such knowledge. The essence of Hume's skepticism is to deny that the so-called "law" proposition reflects the inevitability of things themselves, but think that inevitability can only exist in our hearts and in our thinking habits produced by association. Hume's criticism of the concepts of causality and noumenon led later positivists to completely abandon the metaphysics of realism, deny the existence of any innate object of knowledge, give up the pursuit of inevitable causality in science and advocate the position of probability theory on knowledge. It can be said that the whole positivist philosophical trend of thought revived from the beginning of 19 century developed along Hume's skeptical and critical thinking.