What is Logical Positivism - Leighton Park Philosophy



What is Logical Positivism?

Also known as logical empiricism and neo-positivism, this philosophical school was born in Austria and Germany. The school of thought emerged from a group known as the Vienna Circle, a group of mathematicians and philosophers who convened at the University of Vienna. Various philosophers have been identified as logical positivists (though not all were members of the circle itself. These include Moritz Schlick, the founder of the Vienna Circle, Rudolf Carnap, the leading exponent of logical positivism, Hans Reichenbach, the founder of the Berlin Circle, Alfred Jules Ayer, Herbert Feigl, Philipp Frank, Kurt Grelling, Hans Hahn, Carl Gustav Hempel, Victor Kraft, Otto Neurath, and Friedrich Waismann.

Logical positivists denied the soundness of metaphysics and traditional philosophy; they asserted that many philosophical problems are indeed meaningless.

During the 1930s, when Nazism gained power in Germany, the most prominent proponents of logical positivism immigrated to the United States, where they considerably influenced American philosophy. Until the 1950s, logical positivism was the leading school in the philosophy of science.

Nowadays, the influence of logical positivism persists especially in the way philosophy is practiced.

This influence is particularly noticeable in the attention philosophers give to the analysis of scientific thought and to the integration of results from technical research on formal logic and the theory of probability.

According to logical positivism, there are only two sources of knowledge: logical reasoning and empirical experience. The former is analytic a priori, while the latter is synthetic a posteriori.

Logical knowledge includes mathematics, which is claimed to be reducible to formal logic.

Empirical knowledge includes physics, biology, psychology, etc. Experience is the only judge of scientific theories; however, logical positivists were aware that scientific knowledge does not exclusively rise from the experience: scientific theories are genuine hypotheses that go beyond the experience.

This criterion of knowledge became known as the verification principle and formed the founding tenet of all logical positivist philosophy. It was greatly influenced by the early work of Ludwig Wittgenstein, specifically the Trtactatus Logico Philosophicus in which Wittgenstein proposes a model theory of language that claims meaningful statements are meaningful because of their logical relation why the state of the world.

Following the period of European expansion in Logical Positivism, the movement spread to England and America and took a strong hold in the Anglophone universities. The English philosopher Alfred Jules Ayer (1910-1989) played an important role in spreading logical positivism. His work Language, Truth and Logic, 1936, was an immediate success. In that book, Ayer completely accepted both the Verifiability Principle and the distinction between analytic and synthetic statements, and so he asserted that metaphysical sentences are meaningless. In a famous paper entitled ‘God talk is Evidently Nonsense’ Ayer applies the logical positivist approach to religion and rules that any religious statement, metaphysical or otherwise, is entirely devoid of meaning. This sparked a wide ranging and long running debate on the nature of religious language with philosophers arguing over whether religious language was cognitive and meaningful or not; a debate that spilled over in to many other associated areas of philosophy such as ethics and aesthetics.

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