Auguste comte is credited with coining the term "sociology," largely through the development of a theory of human thinking called positivism. what does positivism attempt to do?

It attempts to identify laws that describe the behavior of reality. The word positive in the epistemological sense specifies a "value-free" or objective method to the study of humanity that shares much in shared with approaches employed in the natural sciences, as contrasted with "normative", which is revealing of how things should.