Logical Positivism

Classification

Period

c. 1924-1960 CE

Regions

Europe (origin)

Domains

Epistemology, Philosophy of Language, Philosophy of Science

Overview

Logical Positivism (the Vienna Circle) held that a statement is meaningful only if it is either analytically true (true by definition) or empirically verifiable. By this criterion, metaphysics, theology, and ethics are literally meaningless — not false, but devoid of cognitive content. Though the movement's strict verificationism was eventually abandoned, its emphasis on rigor profoundly shaped analytic philosophy.

Key figures

Moritz Schlick · Rudolf Carnap · A. J. Ayer · Otto Neurath

Methods used

• Formalization · Open in Methods

Positions held

• Confirmability Criterion

  This is the view of the Circle's left wing — Carnap, Hahn, Frank and Neurath — which from about 1931 set itself apart from the more conservative wing around Schlick over how far the criterion should be loosened.

  Question scope: Meaningful and Meaningless Statements

• Verificationism

  Question scope: Meaningful and Meaningless Statements

Influenced by

• Analytic Philosophy

  Frege's logic, Russell's logicism, and Wittgenstein's Tractatus were foundational for the Vienna Circle's programme of logical analysis.

• British Empiricism
• Neo-Kantianism

  Carnap, who studied Kant with Bruno Bauch and heard Rickert lecture, took over the question of how objective knowledge is possible: his dissertation Der Raum (1922) kept a Kantian 'necessary form' of space, and the Aufbau (1928) sought a basis for scientific objectivity despite knowledge's subjective starting point in perception.

• Positivism

  The Circle formed around Ernst Mach's legacy — Schlick was appointed to the Vienna chair Mach had held, and the group's public society was named for him — and took over both his demand that scientific claims answer to observation and Comte's verdict that questions about first causes and essences lie outside knowledge.

Later connections

• Critical Rationalism Reacted to this tradition

  Where the positivists demarcated science by verifiability, Popper argued verification is impossible and that falsifiability is the mark of science, rejecting inductivism as a myth of method.

• Ordinary Language Philosophy Reacted to this tradition

  Against the positivists' project of an ideal formal language, Austin and Ryle argued that ordinary language works well and that forcing it into a logical calculus creates the very problems it claims to solve.

References

• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, The Vienna Circle
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Vienna Circle, §1 — Formation: the Circle met under Schlick in Vienna from 1924.
• Rudolf Carnap, 'Testability and Meaning', Philosophy of Science 3 (1936) §1 and 4 (1937): complete verifiability is too strong, so confirmability replaces it
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, The Vienna Circle, §3.1 'Verificationism and the Critique of Metaphysics' (the 'liberalization of empiricism' and the split between the left wing and Schlick's wing)
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, The Vienna Circle, §3.1 'Verificationism and the Critique of Metaphysics'
• Michael Friedman, A Parting of the Ways: Carnap, Cassirer, and Heidegger (Open Court, 2000)
• Michael Friedman, Reconsidering Logical Positivism (Cambridge University Press, 1999)
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Rudolf Carnap, §2.1 'Beginnings' (Carnap studied with the neo-Kantians Bauch and Rickert), §2.2 'Der Raum' (Carnap's residual Kantianism) and §3.3 'Later Discussion of the Aufbau' (Friedman's reading of the Aufbau in the context of its neo-Kantian origins)
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, The Vienna Circle, §§2.3 and 3.1
• Language, Truth and Logic — A. J. Ayer
• The Logical Structure of the World — Rudolf Carnap