Positivism

He never set out to work in the computer field or in business, and he certainly had no notions of becoming massively wealthy. He’s a multi-billionaire, for the record. No, what Reid Hoffman planned on becoming was a professor of philosophy. He’s still happy to expound upon the differences between analytic philosophers and continental philosophers. He knows his empiricism from his logical positivism, and as you’ll hear, computers found a way into his philosophy.

The goal of positivism is to construct an objective, empirical and systematic foundation for knowledge. Given the above five tenets, it follows that positivists would hold that the world is composed of ‘facts’, or ‘sense data’ (or ‘atoms’).

History, and its literary expression, narrative, were not scientific, and so did not deserve the attention that true sciences did. Only science could yield positive knowledge—hence the passion for positivism, and the origin of the term.