Concept

Logical positivism

Overview

Logical positivism, also known as logical empiricism or neo-positivism, was a philosophical movement, in the empiricist tradition, that sought to formulate a scientific philosophy in which philosophical discourse would be, in the perception of its proponents, as authoritative and meaningful as empirical science.

Logical positivism's central thesis was the verification principle, also known as the "verifiability criterion of meaning", according to which a statement is cognitively meaningful only if it can be verified through empirical observation or if it is a tautology (true by virtue of its own meaning or its own logical form). The verifiability criterion thus rejected statements of metaphysics, theology, ethics and aesthetics as cognitively meaningless in terms of truth value or factual content. Despite its ambition to overhaul philosophy by mimicking the structure and process of empirical science, logical positivism became erroneously stereotyped as an agenda to regulate the scientific process and to place strict standards on it.

The movement emerged in the late 1920s among philosophers, scientists and mathematicians congregated within the Vienna Circle and Berlin Circle and flourished in several European centres through the 1930s. By the end of World War II, many of its members had settled in the English-speaking world and the project shifted to less radical goals within the philosophy of science.

By the 1950s, problems identified within logical positivism's central tenets became seen as intractable, drawing escalating criticism among leading philosophers, notably from Willard Van Orman Quine and Karl Popper, and even from within the movement, from Carl Hempel. These problems would remain unresolved, precipitating the movement's eventual decline and abandonment by the 1960s. In 1967, philosopher John Passmore pronounced logical positivism "dead, or as dead as a philosophical movement ever becomes".

Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).

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Simplicity and objectivity do not have to be secured through elaborate and labored metaphysical construction. The data are simple and the hypothesis objective in so far as they accomplish the work where unto they are called--the removal of conflict, ambiguity, and inhibition in conduct and affection. In the experimental conception of inference it is clear that the principles of formal logic must play their role…
John Dewey, Creative Intelligence
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But all philosophy is either cognition on the basis of pure reason, or the cognition of reason on the basis of empirical principles. The former is termed pure, the latter empirical philosophy. The philosophy of pure reason is either propædeutic, that is, an inquiry into the powers of reason in regard to pure à priori cognition, and is termed critical philosophy; or it is, secondly, the system of pure reason—a…
Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason
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This—the relation of psychology to fundamental philosophy—is a question which also turns up in dealing with Ethics. There is on the part of those engaged in either of these inquiries a certain impatience against the intermeddling (which is held to be only muddling) of metaphysics with them. It is clear that in a very decided way both psychology and ethics can, up to some extent at least, be treated as what is called…
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Hegel's Philosophy of Mind
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