ABSTRACT
Positivism gives laws a central place in scientific explanation but it is noticeable that many sociological explanations do not explicitly refer to laws. The logical positivists, wishing to avoid the traditional metaphysical debates involved in attempting to decide whether the ultimate existents are ideas, material objects, or elements of sensations or whatever, turned instead to the question of the most appropriate descriptive language in which to unify the sciences, since they believed that language use entailed no ontological commitment. The hypothetico-deductive account of scientific method is well known among sociologists and is sometimes described by them as the positivist method. It provides another conception of positivism: positivism is a theory of scientific method according to which science progresses by conjecturing hypotheses and attempting to refute them. Logical positivists were saved from having to solve this dilemma by the failure of the eliminative strategy: not all extra-logical theoretical terms used by scientists are explicitly definable in observational terms.
