Positivism

Positivism is a system of philosophy based on experience and experimental knowledge of natural sensation, in which metaphysics and theology are regarded as inadequate and imperfect systems of knowledge. (www.eb.com) The 19th-century French mathematician and philosopher Auguste Comte first called the doctrine positivism, but some of the positivist concepts may be traced to the British philosopher David Hume, the French philosopher Duc de Saint-Simon, and the German philosopher Immanuel Kant. Comte chose the …

…proved to be of decisive influence in the rejection of metaphysical doctrines for their meaninglessness and the acceptance of empiricism as a matter of logical necessity.(www.eb.com) The positivists today, who have rejected this so-called Vienna school of philosophy, prefer to call themselves logical empiricists in order to separate themselves from the stress of the earlier thinkers on scientific verification. They maintain that the verification principle itself is philosophically unverifiable.(World Book Encyclopedia)