Positivism's a philosophy that holds that the only authentic knowledge's that based on actual sense experience. Metaphysical speculation's avoided. Though the positivist approach has been a 'recurrent theme in the history of western thought from the Ancient Greeks to the present day' and appears in Ibn al-Haytham's 11th Century text Book of Optics, the concept was first coined by Auguste Comte, widely considered the first modern sociologist, in the middle of the 19th century. In the early 20th c… (More on Positivist)