ABSTRACT
Comte turns strategically to the questions concerning the role of the subjective method: is it outside scientific sociology, or is it in some sense always required in sociological construction?
The crucial issue concerns the way in which the terms are posed and defined. In the way the sociological theses are presented, we are confronted with a problem of analysing the production and organisation of knowledge. In fact these are two linked but different activities. In Comte’s theory it is a characteristic of the subjective method that final and absolute causal explanations dominate. Comte is radically relativist. It enables him to pose the problem of the relative consistency of scientific knowledge and to identify a role for philosophy in harmonising knowledge into a single system. The fact that in this order of thinking there is no appeal to an inaccessible level of ultimate causation, means that objective knowledge is produced within a frame of verifiable and falsifiable propositions. The practice of organising already produced objective knowledge from the point of view of Humanity can be seen to be a possible function for a subjectively based mode of synthesis and synergy. This is a basic function of a new kind of philosophy: organising knowledge. Absolute and relative modes of thought are brought together from now on in form which aims to neutralise their radical heterogeneity.
