ABSTRACT
For Emile Durkheim, like many contemporary sociologists, a discipline that claims to be scientific must pursue a positivist programme. Auguste Comte's positivism envisaged science as a superior form of knowledge. The 'soft' positivism enables to give better account of the fact that a theory may be judged valid or invalid in the natural sciences, in the social sciences and in sociology in particular. 'Hard positivism' is therefore indefensible apropos the social and natural sciences. The first controversy on positivism divided sociologists into two camps: the dualists who asserted the absolute specificity of the social sciences, and the monists for whom the social sciences and sociology could be subjected to the same principles of verification as the natural sciences. The main contention of the dualists in the first controversy was that, while the natural sciences aim at explanation, the social sciences aim at interpretation.
