ABSTRACT
Positivism has been understood to apply only to inquiries into issues that can be decided by appeal to experience, and the honorific title 'science' has been reserved for descriptions of what is experienced, expressed in concise and precise formulae or laws. Knowledge of laws is taken to be the aim of positive science because laws provide the basis of explanations and also enable us to anticipate phenomena, that is, predict their occurrence and thereby ultimately control them. Hume's inquiry into the notion of causation can be recast in terms of a logical positivist analysis of the language of science. In sociology, the view that causal laws describe real generative mechanisms is adopted by those who maintain that actions are to be explained by identifying the reasons of the actors who perform them and that these reasons are not Humean causes but describe powers of agency that produce actions as their observable effects.
