Positivism is a philosophy of science based on the view that in the social as well as natural sciences, data derived from sensory experience, and logical and mathematical treatments of such data, are together the exclusive source of all authentic knowledge. Obtaining and "verifying" data that can be received from the senses is known as empirical evidence. This view holds that society operates according to laws like the physical world^{[citation needed]}. Introspective and intuitional attempts to gain knowledge are rejected. Though the positivist approach has been a recurrent theme in the history of Western thought, the concept was developed in the modern sense in the early 19th century by the philosopher and founding sociologist, Auguste Comte. Comte argued that society operates according to its own laws, much as the physical world operates according to gravity and other laws of nature.

Re-imported in the 19th century from the French word positivisme, derived from positif in its philosophical sense of 'imposed on the mind by experience'. The adjective, however, as applied to law (natural law, positive law) occurs in this, its fundamental sense (lat. positīvus 'arbitrarily imposed', from pono 'put in place'), as early as Chaucer. The classical Latin usage goes back to the Greek distinction between φῦσις from φύω 'grow' and 'put in place' (cf. thesis, synthetic), very broadly speaking 'heredity' and 'environment'.