ABSTRACT
The revolutionary significance of the physical theories of Copernicus, Newton and Einstein, or of the biological theory of Darwin is sometimes expressed by saying that they imposed a new definition on their respective disciplines. First, to adopt the terminology revived by Peter Winch in his important book The Idea of a Social Science, are the 'under-labourer' and 'master-scientist' conceptions of the relationship of philosophy to scientific knowledge. The under-labourer conception of the relationship between philosophy and science proposes the awe-inspiring enterprise of constructing or, rather, reconstructing, the whole of human knowledge into one massive logically connected and internally consistent system of propositions. The master-scientist conception is no longer widely held among philosophers and seems unlikely to be revived. Positivism is a variant of the philosophical theory of knowledge empiricism in which the chapter attributed to John Locke. For sociologists, positivism is generally associated with the name of Auguste Comte and his philosophical descendants in sociology.
