Societies pass from theological to metaphysical to positive modes of explaining the world.
Comte's 1830 stage theory. Treated now as historically important rather than descriptively accurate — the stages do not sequence as claimed, and the positive stage did not displace the others.
In practice
- A ministry describes its own past policy as superstition, its predecessors' reasoning as abstraction, and its current model as simply evidence.
- A field that has replaced one explanatory vocabulary with another usually describes the change as progress rather than as substitution.
- Standing
- A stage theory now treated as historically important rather than descriptively accurate.
- Subject
- Sociology & Culture
- Essay
- How societies hold together, sort people, and change