LogicalPositivism
Logical positivism (also known as logical empiricism, scientific philosophy, and neo-positivism) is a philosophy that combines empiricism—the idea that observational evidence is indispensable for knowledge—with a version of rationalism incorporating mathematical and logico-linguistic constructs and deductions of epistemology. It may be considered as a type of analytic philosophy.
Logical positivism, in the formal sense, began from discussions of a group known as the "First Vienna Circle" which gathered during the earliest years of the 20th century in Vienna at the Café Central.
The doctrines included opposition to all metaphysics, especially ontology and synthetic a priori propositions; the rejection of metaphysics not as wrong but as having no meaning; a criterion of meaning based on Ludwig Wittgenstein's early work; the idea that all knowledge should be codifiable by a single standard language of science; and above all the project of "rational reconstruction," in which ordinary-language concepts were gradually to be replaced by more precise equivalents in that standard language.
During the early 1930s, the Vienna Circle dispersed, mainly because of political upheaval and the untimely deaths of Hahn and Schlick. The most prominent proponents of logical positivism emigrated to the United Kingdom and the United States, where they influenced American philosophy considerably. Until the 1950s, logical positivism was the leading school in the philosophy of science. During this period, Carnap proposed a replacement for the earlier doctrines in his "Logical Syntax of Language". This change of emphasis and the somewhat different opinions of Reichenbach and others resulted in a consensus that the English name for the shared doctrine, in its American exile from the late 1930s, should be "logical empiricism."
During the late 1920s, '30s, and '40s, Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein's formalism was developed by a group of philosophers in Vienna and Berlin, who formed the Vienna Circle and Berlin Circle into a doctrine known as logical positivism (or logical empiricism). Logical positivism used formal logic to underpin an empiricist account of our knowledge of the world.[2] Philosophers such as Rudolf Carnap and Hans Reichenbach, along with other members of the Vienna Circle, claimed that the truths of logic and mathematics were tautologies, and those of science were verifiable empirical claims. These two constituted the entire universe of meaningful judgements; anything else was nonsense.
Wittgenstein's influence is also evident in certain formulations of the verification principle.
The main influences on the early logical positivists were the positivist Ernst Mach, Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell and the young Ludwig Wittgenstein.
Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus was a text of great importance for the positivists. The Tractatus introduced many doctrines which later influenced logical positivism, including the concept of philosophy as a "critique of language," and the possibility of making a theoretically principled distinction between intelligible and nonsensical discourse.Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus was a text of great importance for the positivists. The Tractatus introduced many doctrines which later influenced logical positivism, including the concept of philosophy as a "critique of language," and the possibility of making a theoretically principled distinction between intelligible and nonsensical discourse.
