[From French positif: real, actual, practical, experiential.]
(epistemology) Specifically, the view of August Comte (1798-1857) that the pursuit of knowledge should limit itself to observable phenomena and the laws that determine how those phenomena interact, without any investigation of ultimate causes or metaphysics (another aspect of Comte's thought was a humanism that bordered on a religion of humanity, in which the object of worship was taken to be humanity as a whole). More generally, the view that knowledge is reliable only if based on what is immediately graspable or scientifically empirical; in recent usage, the term usually refers to logical positivism.