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Judged by almost any criteria, Auguste Comte's theory of positivism was an influential doctrine in the history of the philosophy of science. His contemporaries took it very seriously indeed, whether they were his followers, like (the early) Mill¹ and Littré,² or his opponents, like Whewe11. His 20th-century successors, too, evidently attached some importance to Comte, since the phrase "logical positivism" cannot have been an entirely capricious choice of label by the philosophers of the Vienna Circle.⁴ But in spite of the frequency with which the term "positivism" is used and notwithstanding the fact that Comte is invariably cited as one of the important precursors of the Vienna Circle, remarkably little has been written about the details of Comte's theory of scientific method and his philosophy of science.⁵ Apart from his celebrated theory of the three stages of intellectual history, which has been discussed at length, there exists as yet nothing like a detailed exegesis of Comte's views on issues like induction, prediction, hypotheses, and explanation. The tacit assumption appears to be that although Comte's general approach was interesting, influential and provocative, it would probably be both unrewarding and tedious (when one recalls the prolixity of Comte's prose) to push very far into an exploration of his views. However, it seems to me that such an inquiry is worth undertaking, not only because in its absence any claims about Comte's importance and influence are hollow, but also because his views on certain questions are both original and perceptive.

DOI: 10.1007/978-94-015-7288-0_9

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