How can you know something that cannot be seen, heard, tasted, touched or smelled? The question applies most obviously to things like rights, justice or freedom because they do not seem be as easy to locate or describe as things that can be known by the senses. Part of the point of positivism was that under certain conditions they can. To Auguste Comte (1798–1857), the movement's founder, it was possible to have as positive a knowledge of rights, justice or freedom as whatever was needed to know a cat or a mat. Positivism could, therefore, have as much to do with morality as with epistemology and as strong a concern with values and beliefs as with facts and certainty. The resulting capacity to move seamlessly between the external and the internal and from the physical to the moral was one reason why, together with the word “sociology,” the other word that came to be associated most widely and durably with positivism was another of Comte's coinages, “altruism.” Positivism, in short, was the science—or knowledge—of altruism.

你怎么能知道看不见、听不见、尝不到、摸不着、闻不到的东西呢？这个问题最明显地适用于权利、正义或自由等事物，因为它们似乎不像可以通过感官知道的事物那样容易定位或描述。实证主义的部分观点是，在某些条件下他们可以。对于该运动的创始人奥古斯特·孔德（Auguste Comte，1798-1857）来说，拥有关于权利、正义或自由的积极知识，就像了解一只猫或一张垫子所需要的一样。因此，实证主义与道德和认识论的关系一样，对价值观和信仰的关注与对事实和确定性的关注一样多。由此产生的在外部和内部之间以及从物质到道德之间无缝移动的能力是为什么与“社会学”一词一起，”另一个与实证主义联系最广泛和最持久的词是孔德的另一个词，“利他主义”。简而言之，实证主义是利他主义的科学或知识。