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Starting in the late 1920s, groups of philosophers, scientists, and mathematicians formed the Berlin Circle and the Vienna Circle, which, in these two cities, would propound the ideas of logical positivism.
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Logical positivism, a philosophical movement that arose in Vienna in the 1920s and was characterized by the view that scientific knowledge is the only kind of factual knowledge and that all traditional metaphysical doctrines are to be rejected as meaningless.
- The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
- Historical Background
- Critique of Traditional Philosophy
- Problems of Positivism
- The Influence of Positivism
- Bibliography
The logical positivists thought of themselves as continuing a nineteenth-century Viennese empirical tradition, closely linked with British empiricism and culminating in the antimetaphysical, scientifically oriented teachings of Ernst Mach. In 1907 the mathematician Hans Hahn, the economist Otto Neurath, and the physicist Philipp Frank, all of whom ...
Mach denied that he was a philosopher. He was trying, he said, to unify science and, in the process, to rid it of all metaphysical elements; he was not constructing a philosophy. The general attitude of the Vienna circle was very similar. Schlick was the exception. With logical positivism, he argued, philosophy had taken a new turn, but logical pos...
verifiability
The course taken by the subsequent history of logical positivism was determined by its attempts to solve a set of problems set for it, for the most part, by its reliance on the verifiability principle. The status of that principle was by no means clear, for "The meaning of a proposition is the method of its verification" is not a scientific proposition. Should it therefore be rejected as meaningless? Faced with this difficulty, the logical positivists argued that it ought to be read not as a...
unification of science
A further set of problems hinges on the question of what sort of things act as "verifiers" or "confirmers." One of Mach's main concerns, which the logical positivists shared, had been to unify science, especially by rejecting the view that psychology is about an "inner world" that is different from the "outer world" that physical science investigates. The doctrine that both physics and psychology describe "experiences" made such a unification possible. In his earlier writings Carnap tried to...
physicalist theories
Profoundly dissatisfied with the conclusion that the ultimate content of scientific truths is private, Neurath was led to reject the view—which logical positivists had so far taken for granted—that it is "experiences" which verify propositions. Only a proposition, he argued, can verify a proposition. Carnap accepted this conclusion and developed the conception of a "protocol statement," the ultimate resting point of verifications, a statement of such a nature that to understand its meaning an...
Logical positivism, considered as the doctrine of a sect, has disintegrated. In various ways it has been absorbed into the international movement of contemporary empiricism, within which the disputes that divided it are still being fought out. Originally, it set up a series of sharp contrasts: between metaphysics and science, logical and factual tr...
The essays by leading logical positivists included along with an introduction by Ayer and an extensive bibliography in Alfred J. Ayer, ed., Logical Positivism (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1959), are the best introduction to the movement as a whole. Other representative writings by members of the Vienna circle and its associates include the following: ...
– Logical Positivism, also known as Logical Empiricism, is a philosophy developed in the early 20th Century, notably by Moritz Schlick. It was also, amongst others, influenced by the work of Bertrand Russell (1872 – 1970) and Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889 – 1951).
Logical positivism was constructed in the discussions and publications of the Vienna Circle between 1907 and 1938. Although membership changed over that period, Schlick, Neurath, and Carnap were central. Many of the Circle were Jewish, Marxist, or both.
Jul 5, 2024 · The confluence of ideas from these sources and the impressions that they made upon the Vienna and Berlin groups in the 1920s gave rise to the philosophical outlook of logical positivism—a label supplied in 1931 by A.E. Blumberg and the American philosopher of science Herbert Feigl.
Logical positivism fundamentally altered the landscape of the philosophy of science. It raised questions about the structure and language of scientific theories, the demarcation between science and non-science, and the role of observation and theory in scientific knowledge.
