Michael’s Reviews > Inventing the Flat Earth: Columbus and Modern Historians > Status Update

‘[…] The view that science is approaching the truth by successive approximations I call positivism. In common usage in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the terms scientific realism and positivism are often exchanged and used loosely, and in fact some writers did not distinguish between them. […]

‘[…] Some maintain that science can and does express truth about the external world. And some (a decreasing number) maintain that science tells the truth, the only truth about the external world. The belief that science expresses the truth, or at least some truth, about the external world I call “scientific realism.” […]

‘[…] Some believe that there is no knowledge outside human constructs of it. Some maintain that science is only one of a number of roads to knowledge. some believe that external reality exists and that science is making successively more exact approximations to truth about that reality without ever (or at least probably ever) coming to truth itself. […]

‘Auguste Comte (1798–1857) laid the philosophical basis for positivism with the argument that the history of humanity shows an unsteady but definite progress from reliance on magic, then religion, then philosophy, then nature science. A few definitions are necessary for clarity and precision. There is a spectrum of beliefs held by those who adopt a generally “scientific worldview.” […]