Logical positivism

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.^[1]

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).^[2] 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.^[1]

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".^[3]

Origins

Logical positivism emerged in Germany and Austria amid a philosophical backdrop characterised by the dominance of Hegelian metaphysics, and the work of Hegelian successors such as F. H. Bradley, who portrayed reality by postulating metaphysical entities without empirical basis.^[4] The late 19th century also saw the emergence of neo-Kantianism as a philosophical movement, under the rationalist tradition.

The logical positivist program established its theoretical foundations in the empiricism of David Hume, Auguste Comte and Ernst Mach, along with the positivism of Comte and Mach, defining its exemplar of science in Einstein's general theory of relativity.^[5][6] Per Mach's phenomenalism (whereby the mind knows only actual or potential sensory experience) logical positivists took all scientific knowledge to be only sensory experience.^[7] Further influence came from Percy Bridgman's operationalism, whereby a physical theory is understood by the experimental methods performed to test its predictions, as well as Immanuel Kant's perspectives on aprioricity.^[6]

Ludwig Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus established the theoretical foundations for the verifiability principle.^[8][9] His work introduced the view of philosophy as "critique of language", discussing theoretical distinctions between intelligible and nonsensical discourse. Tractatus adhered to a correspondence theory of truth, as opposed to a coherence theory of truth. Logical positivists were also influenced by Wittgenstein's interpretation of probability though, according to Neurath, some objected to the metaphysics in Tractatus.^[10]

History

Vienna and Berlin Circles

Main article: Vienna Circle

The Vienna Circle, whose gatherings centered around the University of Vienna and at the Café Central, was led principally by Moritz Schlick. In Germany, Hans Reichenbach was pre-eminent in the Berlin Circle, whose members maintained closely cooperative ties with the Viennese.^[6] Schlick had held a neo-Kantian position, but later converted, via Carnap's 1928 book Der logische Aufbau der Welt (The Logical Structure of the World). A 1929 manifesto written by Otto Neurath, Hans Hahn and Rudolf Carnap summarised the Vienna Circle's positions. Another member among its ranks to later prove very influential was Carl Hempel. A friendly but tenacious critic of the movement was Karl Popper, whom Neurath nicknamed the "Official Opposition".^[11]

Early in their history, Carnap and other members, including Hahn and Neurath, noted that the verifiability criterion was too stringent. Notably, it excluded universal statements that are vital to scientific hypothesis.^[12] A radical left wing emerged from the Vienna Circle, led by Neurath and Carnap, who began a program they referred to as the "liberalisation of empiricism", proposing revisions to weaken the criterion. A conservative right wing, led by Schlick and Waismann, sought to reclassify universal statements as analytic truths, thereby to reconcile them with the existing criterion. Among other ideas espoused by the liberal wing, Carnap emphasised fallibilism and pragmatics, which he considered integral to empiricism.^[12] Though Neurath prescribed a move from Mach's phenomenalism to physicalism, this would be rejected by Carnap.^[12] As Neurath and Carnap sought to pose science toward social reform, the split in the Vienna Circle also reflected political differences.^[12]

Both Schlick and Carnap had been influenced by and sought to define logical positivism versus the neo-Kantianism of Ernst Cassirer, the contemporary leading figure of the Marburg school, and against Edmund Husserl's phenomenology. Logical positivists especially opposed Martin Heidegger's obscure metaphysics, the epitome of what they had rejected through their epistemological doctrines. In the early 1930s, Carnap debated Heidegger over "metaphysical pseudosentences".^[13]

Anglosphere

As the movement's first emissary to the New World, Moritz Schlick visited Stanford University in 1929, yet otherwise remained in Vienna and was murdered in 1936 at the University by a former student, Johann Nelböck, who was reportedly deranged.^[13] That year, A. J. Ayer, a British attendee at some Vienna Circle meetings since 1933, saw his Language, Truth and Logic import logical positivism to the English-speaking world. By that time, the Nazi Party's 1933 rise to power in Germany had triggered flight of intellectuals.^[13] Upon Germany's annexation of Austria in 1938, the remaining logical positivists, many of whom were also Jewish, were targeted and continued flight. Logical positivism thus became dominant in the English-speaking world.^[14]

By the late 1930s, many in the movement had replaced phenomenalism with Neurath's physicalism, whereby science's content is not actual or potential sensations, but instead consists of entities that are publicly observable. In exile in England, Neurath died in 1945.^[13] Carnap, Reichenbach and Hempel—Carnap's protégé who had studied in Berlin with Reichenbach—settled permanently in America.^[13]

Post-war period

Following the second world war, logical positivism, now referred to by some as logical empiricism, turned to less radical objectives, led largely by Carl Hempel, in America, who expounded the covering law model of scientific explanation. The movement became a major underpinning of analytic philosophy^[15] and dominated philosophy in the English-speaking world, notably in philosophy of science, while influencing sciences, but especially social sciences, into the 1960s. Yet the movement failed to resolve its central problems,^[16][17][18] and its doctrines were increasingly criticized, most trenchantly by Willard Van Orman Quine, Norwood Hanson, Karl Popper, Thomas Kuhn, and Carl Hempel.^{[citation needed]}

Principles

Logicism

Main article: Logicism

By reducing mathematics to logic, Bertrand Russell sought to convert the mathematical formulas of physics to symbolic logic. Gottlob Frege began this program of logicism, continuing it with Russell, but eventually lost interest. Russell then continued it with Alfred North Whitehead in their Principia Mathematica, inspiring some of the more mathematical logical positivists, such as Hans Hahn and Rudolf Carnap.^[19]

Carnap's early anti-metaphysical works employed Russell's theory of types.^[20] Like Russell, Carnap envisioned a universal language that could reconstruct mathematics and thereby encode physics.^[19] Yet Kurt Gödel's incompleteness theorem showed this to be impossible, except in trivial cases, and Alfred Tarski's undefinability theorem finally undermined all hopes of reducing mathematics to logic.^[19] Thus, a universal language failed to stem from Carnap's 1934 work Logische Syntax der Sprache (Logical Syntax of Language).^[19] Still, some logical positivists, including Carl Hempel, continued support of logicism.^[19]

Analytic-synthetic distinction

Main article: Analytic-synthetic distinction

In the theory of knowledge, a priori statements are those that are knowable without, or prior to, observation, whereas a posteriori statements are knowable only through observation. Statements may further be categorised into the analytic and synthetic. Analytic statements are true by virtue of their own meaning or their own logical form, therefore are tautologies that are true by necessity but uninformative about the world. Synthetic statements, in contrast, refer to a state of facts concerning the world, therefore are contingencies.^[21][22]

David Hume categorised knowledge exclusively as either "relations of ideas" (which are a priori, analytic, necessary and abstract) or "matters of fact and real existence" (a posteriori, synthetic, contingent and concrete), a classification referred to as Hume's fork.^[23][24] Immanuel Kant identified a further category of knowledge—synthetic a priori statements—which affirm a state of facts concerning the world, but are knowable prior to experience. This was characterised in his Critique of Pure Reason per transcendental idealism, attributing the mind a constructive role in phenomena by arranging sense data into the very experience of space, time, and substance. His thesis would serve to rescue Newton's law of universal gravitation from Hume's problem of induction by finding uniformity of nature to be a priori knowledge.

Though logical positivists adopted the Kantian position of defining logic and mathematics as a priori knowledge,^[25] they would re-affirm Hume's fork and reject Kant's conception of synthetic a priori knowledge due to its conflict with verificationism. Building upon Gottlob Frege's work and Wittgenstein's Tractatus, they reformulated the analytic-synthetic distinction, reinterpreting truths of logic (and mathematics, now reduced to logic via logicism) as tautologies. This would be critical to the logical positivist program in rendering logic and mathematics—ordinarily considered synthetic truths—permissible under verificationism, as analytic truths.^[26]

Observation-theory distinction

Early in the movement, most logical positivists proposed that all knowledge is based on logical inference from simple "protocol sentences" grounded in observable facts. Theoretical terms would garner meaning from observational terms via correspondence rules, and thereby theoretical laws would be reduced to empirical laws.

In the 1936 and 1937 papers "Testability and Meaning", Carnap referred to Russell's logical atomism, the view that individual terms, representing discrete units of meaning, replace sentences in ordinary language.^[27] Rational reconstruction would thereby convert ordinary statements into standardised equivalents composed of subunits of meaning that are assembled via a logical syntax.^[12] Furthermore, theoretical terms no longer need to acquire meaning by explicit definition from observational terms: the connection may be indirect, through a system of implicit definitions.^[12] Carnap also provided an important, pioneering discussion of disposition predicates.^[12]

Verification and Confirmation

Main article: Verificationism

Verifiability Criterion of Meaning

According to the verifiability criterion of meaning, a statement is cognitively meaningful only if it is either verifiable by empirical observation or is an analytic truth (ie. true by virtue of its own meaning or its own logical form).^[28] Cognitive meaningfulness was defined variably: possessing truth value; or corresponding to a possible state of affairs; or intelligible or understandable as are scientific statements.^[29] Other types of meaning—for instance, emotive, expressive or figurative—were dismissed from further review.

Metaphysics, theology, as well as much of ethics and aesthetics failed this criterion, and so were found cognitively meaningless and only emotively meaningful (though, notably, Moritz Schlick did not view ethical or aesthetic statements as meaningless).^[30][31] Ethics and aesthetics were considered subjective preferences, while theology and metaphysics contained "pseudostatements" that were neither true nor false. Thus, logical positivism indirectly asserted Hume's law, the principle that factual statements cannot justify evaluative statements, and that the two are separated by an unbridgeable gap. A. J. Ayer's Language, Truth and Logic (1936) presented an extreme version of this principle—the boo/hooray doctrine—whereby all evaluative judgments are merely emotional reactions.^[32][33]

Revisions to the criterion

Logical positivists in the Vienna Circle recognised quickly that the verifiability criterion was too restrictive. Specifically, universal statements were noted to be empirically unverifiable, rendering vital domains of science and reason, such as scientific hypothesis, cognitively meaningless under verificationism. This would pose significant problems for the logical positivist program, absent revisions to its criterion of meaning.^[34][35][6]

In his 1936 and 1937 papers, Testability and Meaning, Carnap proposed confirmation in place of verification, determining that, though universal laws cannot be verified, they can be confirmed.^[12] Carnap employed abundant logical and mathematical tools to research an inductive logic that would account for probability according to degrees of confirmation. However, he was never able to formulate a model. In Carnap's inductive logic, a universal law's degree of confirmation was always zero.^[36] The formulation of what eventually came to be called the "criterion of cognitive significance", stemming from this research, took three decades (Hempel 1950, Carnap 1956, Carnap 1961).^[12] Carl Hempel, who became a prominent critic of the logical positivist movement, elucidated the paradox of confirmation.^[37]

In his 1936 book, Language, Truth and Logic, A. J. Ayer distinguished strong and weak verification. He stipulated that, "A proposition is said to be verifiable, in the strong sense of the term, if, and only if, its truth could be conclusively established by experience", but is verifiable in the weak sense "if it is possible for experience to render it probable".^[38] He would add that, "no proposition, other than a tautology, can possibly be anything more than a probable hypothesis".^[38] Thus, he would conclude that all are open to weak verification.^[32]

Philosophy of science

The neopositivists shed much of their revolutionary zeal following the defeat of Nazism and the decline of rival philosophies that sought radical reform, notably Marburg neo-Kantianism, Husserlian phenomenology and Heidegger's existential hermeneutics.^[1] Hosted in the climate of American pragmatism and commonsense empiricism, they no longer crusaded to revise traditional philosophy into a radical scientific philosophy, but became respectable members of a new philosophical subdiscipline, philosophy of science.^[1] Receiving support from Ernest Nagel, logical empiricists were especially influential in the social sciences.^[39]

Explanation

Comtean positivism had viewed science as description, whereas the logical positivists posed science as explanation, perhaps to better realize the envisioned unity of science by covering not only fundamental science—that is, fundamental physics—but the special sciences, too, for instance biology, anthropology, psychology, sociology, and economics.^[40] The most widely accepted concept of scientific explanation, held even by neopositivist critic Karl Popper, was the deductive-nomological model (DN model).^[41] Yet DN model received its greatest explication by Carl Hempel, first in his 1942 article "The function of general laws in history", and more explicitly with Paul Oppenheim in their 1948 article "Studies in the logic of explanation".^[41]

In the DN model, the stated phenomenon to be explained is the explanandum—which can be an event, law, or theory—whereas premises stated to explain it are the explanans.^[42] Explanans must be true or highly confirmed, contain at least one law, and entail the explanandum.^[42] Thus, given initial conditions C₁, C₂, ..., C_n plus general laws L₁, L₂, ..., L_m, event E is a deductive consequence and scientifically explained.^[42] In the DN model, a law is an unrestricted generalization by conditional proposition—If A, then B—and has empirical content testable.^[43] (Differing from a merely true regularity—for instance, George always carries only $1 bills in his wallet—a law suggests what must be true,^[44] and is consequent of a scientific theory's axiomatic structure.^[45])

By the Humean empiricist view that humans observe sequences of events, (not cause and effect, as causality and causal mechanisms are unobservable), the DN model neglects causality beyond mere constant conjunction, first event A and then always event B.^[40] Hempel's explication of the DN model held natural laws—empirically confirmed regularities—as satisfactory and, if formulated realistically, approximating causal explanation.^[42] In later articles, Hempel defended the DN model and proposed a probabilistic explanation, inductive-statistical model (IS model).^[42] the DN and IS models together form the covering law model,^[42] as named by a critic, William Dray.^[46] Derivation of statistical laws from other statistical laws goes to deductive-statistical model (DS model).^[47] Georg Henrik von Wright, another critic, named it subsumption theory,^[48] fitting the ambition of theory reduction.^{[citation needed]}

Unity of science

Logical positivists were generally committed to "Unified Science", and sought a common language or, in Neurath's phrase, a "universal slang" whereby all scientific propositions could be expressed.^[49] The adequacy of proposals or fragments of proposals for such a language was often asserted on the basis of various "reductions" or "explications" of the terms of one special science to the terms of another, putatively more fundamental. Sometimes these reductions consisted of set-theoretic manipulations of a few logically primitive concepts (as in Carnap's Logical Structure of the World, 1928).^[50] Sometimes, these reductions consisted of allegedly analytic or a priori deductive relationships (as in Carnap's "Testability and Meaning").^[51] A number of publications over a period of thirty years would attempt to elucidate this concept.

Theory reduction

As in Comtean positivism's envisioned unity of science, neopositivists aimed to network all special sciences through the covering law model of scientific explanation. And ultimately, by supplying boundary conditions and supplying bridge laws within the covering law model, all the special sciences' laws would reduce to fundamental physics, the fundamental science.^[52]

Criticism

In the post-war period, key tenets of logical positivism, including its atomistic philosophy of science, the verifiability criterion and analytic-synthetic distinction, drew escalated criticism. This would become sustained from various directions by the 1950s^[12] such that, even among fractious philosophers who disagreed on the general objectives of epistemology, most would concur that the logical positivist program had become untenable.^[53] Notable critics included Popper, W. V. O. Quine, Norwood Hanson, Kuhn, Putnam, J. L. Austin, Peter Strawson, Nelson Goodman, and Richard Rorty.^{[citation needed]} Hempel himself became a major critic within the logical positivism movement criticizing the positivist thesis that empirical knowledge is restricted to Basissätze/Beobachtungssätze/Protokollsätze (basic statements or observation statements or protocol statements).^[34]

Popper

An early, tenacious critic was Karl Popper whose 1934 book Logik der Forschung, arriving in English in 1959 as The Logic of Scientific Discovery, directly answered verificationism. Popper considered the problem of induction as rendering empirical verification logically impossible,^[54] and the deductive fallacy of affirming the consequent reveals any phenomenon's capacity to host more than one logically possible explanation. Accepting scientific method as hypotheticodeduction, whose inference form is denying the consequent, Popper finds scientific method unable to proceed without falsifiable predictions.^[55] Popper thus identifies falsifiability to demarcate not meaningful from meaningless but simply scientific from unscientific—a label not in itself unfavorable.^[55]

Popper finds virtue in metaphysics, required to develop new scientific theories. And an unfalsifiable—thus unscientific, perhaps metaphysical—concept in one era can later, through evolving knowledge or technology, become falsifiable, thus scientific. Popper also found science's quest for truth to rest on values. Popper disparages the pseudoscientific, which occurs when an unscientific theory is proclaimed true and coupled with seemingly scientific method by "testing" the unfalsifiable theory—whose predictions are confirmed by necessity—or when a scientific theory's falsifiable predictions are strongly falsified but the theory is persistently protected by "immunizing stratagems", such as the appendage of ad hoc clauses saving the theory or the recourse to increasingly speculative hypotheses shielding the theory.^[56]

Explicitly denying the positivist view of meaning and verification, Popper developed the epistemology of critical rationalism, which considers that human knowledge evolves by conjectures and refutations, and that no number, degree, and variety of empirical successes can either verify or confirm scientific theory. For Popper, science's aim is corroboration of scientific theory, which strives for scientific realism but accepts the maximal status of strongly corroborated verisimilitude ("truthlikeness"). Popper thus acknowledged the value of the positivist movement's emphasis on science but claimed that he had "killed positivism".^{[56][citation needed]}

Quine

Although an empiricist, American logician Willard Van Orman Quine published the 1951 paper "Two Dogmas of Empiricism",^[57] which challenged conventional empiricist presumptions. Quine attacked the analytic/synthetic division, which the verificationist program had been hinged upon in order to entail, by consequence of Hume's fork, both necessity and aprioricity. Quine's ontological relativity explained that every term in any statement has its meaning contingent on a vast network of knowledge and belief, the speaker's conception of the entire world. Quine later proposed naturalized epistemology.^[57]

Hanson

In 1958, Norwood Hanson's Patterns of Discovery undermined the division of observation versus theory,^[58] as one can predict, collect, prioritize, and assess data only via some horizon of expectation set by a theory. Thus, any dataset—the direct observations, the scientific facts—is laden with theory.^[59]

Kuhn

With his landmark The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), Thomas Kuhn critically destabilized the verificationist program, which was presumed to call for foundationalism.^[60] (But already in the 1930s, Otto Neurath had argued for nonfoundationalism via coherentism by likening science to a boat (Neurath's boat) that scientists must rebuild at sea.^[61]) Although Kuhn's thesis itself was attacked even by opponents of neopositivism, in the 1970 postscript to Structure, Kuhn asserted, at least, that there was no algorithm to science—and, on that, even most of Kuhn's critics agreed.^{[citation needed]}

Powerful and persuasive, Kuhn's book, unlike the vocabulary and symbols of logic's formal language, was written in natural language open to the layperson.^[62] Kuhn's book was first published in a volume of International Encyclopedia of Unified Science—a project begun by logical positivists but co-edited by Neurath whose view of science was already nonfoundationalist as mentioned above—and some sense unified science, indeed, but by bringing it into the realm of historical and social assessment, rather than fitting it to the model of physics.^[62] Kuhn's ideas were rapidly adopted by scholars in disciplines well outside natural sciences,^[62] and, as logical empiricists were extremely influential in the social sciences,^[39] ushered academia into postpositivism or postempiricism.^[62]

Putnam

The "received view" operates on the correspondence rule that states, "The observational terms are taken as referring to specified phenomena or phenomenal properties, and the only interpretation given to the theoretical terms is their explicit definition provided by the correspondence rules".^[4] According to Hilary Putnam, a former student of Reichenbach and of Carnap, the dichotomy of observational terms versus theoretical terms introduced a problem within scientific discussion that was nonexistent until this dichotomy was stated by logical positivists.^[63] Putnam's four objections:

• Something is referred to as "observational" if it is observable directly with our senses. Then an observational term cannot be applied to something unobservable. If this is the case, there are no observational terms.
• With Carnap's classification, some unobservable terms are not even theoretical and belong to neither observational terms nor theoretical terms. Some theoretical terms refer primarily to observational terms.
• Reports of observational terms frequently contain theoretical terms.
• A scientific theory may not contain any theoretical terms (an example of this is Darwin's original theory of evolution).

Putnam also alleged that positivism was actually a form of metaphysical idealism by its rejecting scientific theory's ability to garner knowledge about nature's unobservable aspects. With his "no miracles" argument, posed in 1974, Putnam asserted scientific realism, the stance that science achieves true—or approximately true—knowledge of the world as it exists independently of humans' sensory experience. In this, Putnam opposed not only the positivism but other instrumentalism—whereby scientific theory is but a human tool to predict human observations—filling the void left by positivism's decline.^[13]

Decline and legacy

By the late 1960s, logical positivism had become exhausted.^[64] In 1976, A. J. Ayer quipped that "the most important" defect of logical positivism "was that nearly all of it was false," though he maintained "it was true in spirit."^[65][66] Although logical positivism tends to be recalled as a pillar of scientism,^[67] Carl Hempel was key in establishing the subdiscipline of the philosophy of science,^[13] where Thomas Kuhn and Karl Popper brought in the era of postpositivism.^[62] John Passmore found logical positivism to be "dead, or as dead as a philosophical movement ever becomes".^[65]

Logical positivism's fall reopened the debate over the metaphysical merit of scientific theory, whether it can offer knowledge of the world beyond human experience (scientific realism) versus whether it is but a human tool to predict human experience (instrumentalism).^[68][69] Philosophers increasingly critiqued logical positivism, often misrepresenting it without thorough examination.^[70][71] It was generally reduced to oversimplifications and stereotypes, particularly associating it with foundationalism.^[71] The movement helped anchor analytic philosophy in the English-speaking world and reintroducing empiricism in Britain. Its influence extended beyond philosophy, particularly in psychology and social sciences.^[13]

See also

• Anti-realism – Truth of a statement rests on its demonstrability, not its correspondence to an external reality
• Definitions of philosophy – Proposed definitions of philosophy
• Empirio-criticism – Austrian physicist, philosopher and university educator (1838–1916)Pages displaying short descriptions of redirect targets
• Raven paradox – Paradox arising from the question of what constitutes evidence for a statement
• Sociological positivism – Empiricist philosophical theoryPages displaying short descriptions of redirect targets
• Strategic positivism
• Academic skepticism – Skeptical period of ancient Academy
• The Structure of Science
• Unobservable – Entity not directly observable by humans

People

• Gustav Bergmann – Austrian-born American philosopher (1906-1987)
• Herbert Feigl – Austrian-American philosopher
• Kurt Grelling – German logician and philosopher (1886–1942)
• Friedrich Waismann – Austrian mathematician, physicist and philosopher (1896–1959)
• R. B. Braithwaite – English philosopher and ethicist (1900–1990)

Notes

1. Michael Friedman, Reconsidering Logical Positivism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. xiv.
2. Peter Godfrey-Smith. (2010). Theory and Reality: an Introduction to the Philosophy of Science. University of Chicago Press. ISBN 978-1-282-64630-8. OCLC 748357235.
3. Passmore, John. 'Logical Positivism', The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Paul Edwards (ed.). New York: Macmillan, 1967, 1st edition^[usurped]
4. Frederick Suppe, "The positivist model of scientific theories", in Scientific Inquiry, Robert Klee, ed, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 16–24.
5. Flew, Antony G (1984). "Science: Conjectures and refutations". In Andrew Bailey (ed.). A Dictionary of Philosophy. New York: St Martin's Press. p. 156.
6. Uebel, Thomas (2008). "Vienna Circle". In Edward N. Zalta (ed.). The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2008 ed.). Archived from the original on 2 December 2013. Retrieved 22 August 2012.^{[excessive quote]}
7. Ray, Christopher (September 2017), Newton-Smith, W. H. (ed.), "Logical Positivism", A Companion to the Philosophy of Science (1 ed.), Wiley, pp. 243–251, doi:10.1002/9781405164481.ch37, ISBN 978-0-631-23020-5, retrieved 19 October 2023
8. For example, compare "Proposition 4.024" of Tractatus, asserting that we understand a proposition when we know the outcome if it is true, with Schlick's asserting, "To state the circumstances under which a proposition is true is the same as stating its meaning".
9. "Positivismus und realismus", Erkenntnis 3:1–31, English trans in Sarkar, Sahotra, ed, Logical Empiricism at its Peak: Schlick, Carnap, and Neurath (New York: Garland Publishing, 1996), p. 38.
10. For summary of the effect of Tractatus on logical positivists, see the Entwicklung der Thesen des "Wiener Kreises" Archived 9 November 2006 at the Wayback Machine.
11. Bartley, W. W. (February 1982). "The Philosophy of Karl Popper Part III. Rationality, Criticism, and Logic". Philosophia. 11 (1–2): 121–221. doi:10.1007/bf02378809. ISSN 0048-3893.
12. Sarkar, S; Pfeifer, J (2005). The Philosophy of Science: An Encyclopedia. Vol. 1. Taylor & Francis. p. 83. ISBN 978-0415939270.
13. Friedman, Reconsidering Logical Positivism (Cambridge UP, 1999), p. xii.
14. "Logical Positivism The Vienna Circle", Beyond Positivism, Routledge, pp. 29–36, 20 July 2015, ISBN 978-0-429-23433-0, retrieved 19 September 2024
15. See "Vienna Circle" Archived 10 August 2015 at the Wayback Machine in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
16. Smith, L.D. (1986). Behaviorism and Logical Positivism: A Reassessment of the Alliance. Stanford University Press. p. 314. ISBN 978-0804713016. LCCN 85030366. Retrieved 27 January 2016. The secondary and historical literature on logical positivism affords substantial grounds for concluding that logical positivism failed to solve many of the central problems it generated for itself. Prominent among the unsolved problems was the failure to find an acceptable statement of the verifiability (later confirmability) criterion of meaningfulness. Until a competing tradition emerged (about the late 1950s), the problems of logical positivism continued to be attacked from within that tradition. But as the new tradition in the philosophy of science began to demonstrate its effectiveness—by dissolving and rephrasing old problems as well as by generating new ones—philosophers began to shift allegiances to the new tradition, even though that tradition has yet to receive a canonical formulation.
17. Bunge, M.A. (1996). Finding Philosophy in Social Science. Yale University Press. p. 317. ISBN 978-0300066067. LCCN lc96004399. Retrieved 27 January 2016. To conclude, logical positivism was progressive compared with the classical positivism of Ptolemy, Hume, d'Alembert, Comte, John Stuart Mill, and Ernst Mach. It was even more so by comparison with its contemporary rivals—neo-Thomism, neo-Kantianism, intuitionism, dialectical materialism, phenomenology, and existentialism. However, neo-positivism failed dismally to give a faithful account of science, whether natural or social. It failed because it remained anchored to sense-data and to a phenomenalist metaphysics, overrated the power of induction and underrated that of hypothesis, and denounced realism and materialism as metaphysical nonsense. Although it has never been practiced consistently in the advanced natural sciences and has been criticized by many philosophers, notably Popper (1959 [1935], 1963), logical positivism remains the tacit philosophy of many scientists. Regrettably, the anti-positivism fashionable in the metatheory of social science is often nothing but an excuse for sloppiness and wild speculation.
18. "Popper, Falsifiability, and the Failure of Positivism". 7 August 2000. Archived from the original on 7 January 2014. Retrieved 30 June 2012. The upshot is that the positivists seem caught between insisting on the V.C. [Verifiability Criterion]—but for no defensible reason—or admitting that the V.C. requires a background language, etc., which opens the door to relativism, etc. In light of this dilemma, many folk—especially following Popper's "last-ditch" effort to "save" empiricism/positivism/realism with the falsifiability criterion—have agreed that positivism is a dead-end.
19. Jaako Hintikka, "Logicism", in Andrew D Irvine, ed, Philosophy of Mathematics (Burlington MA: North Holland, 2009), pp. 283–84.
20. See Rudolf Carnap, "The elimination of metaphysics through logical analysis of language", Erkenntnis, 1932;2, reprinted in Logical Positivism, Alfred Jules Ayer, ed, (New York: Free Press, 1959), pp. 60–81.
21. Rey, Georges (2023), "The Analytic/Synthetic Distinction", in Zalta, Edward N.; Nodelman, Uri (eds.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2023 ed.), Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University, retrieved 10 July 2023
22. "Quine, Willard Van Orman: Analytic/Synthetic Distinction | Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy". Retrieved 10 July 2023.
23. Antony Flew (1984). A Dictionary of Philosophy: Revised Second Edition (2nd ed.). New York: St. Martin's Press. p. 156. ISBN 978-0-312-20923-0.
24. Helen Buss Mitchell (2010). Roots of Wisdom: A Tapestry of Philosophical Traditions. Cengage Learning. pp. 249–50. ISBN 978-0-495-80896-1.
25. Michael Friedman (1997). "Carnap and Wittgenstein's Tractatus". In William W. Tait; Leonard Linsky (eds.). Early Analytic Philosophy: Frege, Russell, Wittgenstein. Open Court Publishing. p. 29. ISBN 978-0812693447.
26. Jerrold J. Katz (2000). "The epistemic challenge to antirealism". Realistic Rationalism. MIT Press. p. 69. ISBN 978-0262263290.
27. Russell, Bertrand; Slater, John G. (3 July 2024), "The Philosophy of Logical Atomism [1918]", The Collected Papers of Bertrand Russell, Volume 8, London: Routledge, pp. 157–244, ISBN 978-1-003-55703-6, retrieved 19 September 2024
28. For a classic survey of other versions of verificationism, see Carl G Hempel, "Problems and changes in the empiricist criterion of meaning", Revue Internationale de Philosophie, 1950;41:41–63.
29. Examples of these different views can be found in Scheffler's Anatomy of Inquiry, Ayer's Language, Truth, and Logic, Schlick's "Positivism and realism" (reprinted in Sarkar 1996 and Ayer 1959), and Carnap's Philosophy and Logical Syntax.
30. Allen, Barry (May 2007). "Turning back the linguistic turn in the theory of knowledge". Thesis Eleven. 89 (1): 6–22 (7). doi:10.1177/0725513607076129. S2CID 145778455. In his famous novel Nineteen Eighty-Four George Orwell gave a nice (if for us ironical) explanation of the boon Carnap expects from the logical reform of grammar. Right-thinking Ingsoc party members are as offended as Carnap by the unruliness of language. It's a scandal that grammar allows such pseudo-statements as 'It is the right of the people to alter or abolish Government' (Jefferson), or 'Das Nichts nichtet' (Heidegger). Language as it is makes no objection to such statements, and to Carnap, as to the Party, that's a sore defect. Newspeak, a reformed grammar under development at the Ministry of Truth, will do what Carnap wants philosophical grammar to do
31. See Moritz Schlick, "The future Of philosophy", in The Linguistic Turn, Richard Rorty, ed, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), pp. 43–53.
32. Ayer, A.J (1936). Language, Truth, and Meaning. pp. 2 (Preface to the 1st edition) and 63-77 (Chapter 6).
33. "24.231 Ethics – Handout 3 Ayer's Emotivism" (PDF).
34. Fetzer, James (2012). "Carl Hempel". In Edward N. Zalta (ed.). The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2012 ed.). Archived from the original on 30 September 2012. Retrieved 31 August 2012.
35. John Vicker (2011). "The problem of induction". In Edward N Zalta (ed.). The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2011 ed.). Archived from the original on 2 December 2013. Retrieved 24 August 2012. This initial formulation of the criterion was soon seen to be too strong; it counted as meaningless not only metaphysical statements but also statements that are clearly empirically meaningful, such as that all copper conducts electricity and, indeed, any universally quantified statement of infinite scope, as well as statements that were at the time beyond the reach of experience for technical, and not conceptual, reasons, such as that there are mountains on the back side of the moon. These difficulties led to modification of the criterion: The latter to allow empirical verification if not in fact then at least in principle, the former to soften verification to empirical confirmation.
36. Mauro Murzi "Rudolf Carnap (1891–1970)" Archived 14 October 2013 at the Wayback Machine, Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 12 April 2001.
37. Crupi, Vincenzo (2021), "Confirmation", in Zalta, Edward N. (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2021 ed.), Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University, retrieved 10 July 2023
38. Ayer, Language, Truth and Logic, 1946, pp. 50–51.
39. Novick, That Noble Dream (Cambridge UP, 1988), p. 546.
40. James Woodward, "Scientific explanation" Archived 2 December 2013 at the Wayback Machine – sec 1 "Background and introduction", in Zalta EN, ed,The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Winter 2011 edn
41. James Woodward, "Scientific explanation" Archived 2 December 2013 at the Wayback Machine – Article overview, Zalta EN, ed, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Winter 2011 edn
42. Suppe, Structure of Scientific Theories (U Illinois P, 1977), pp. 619–21.
43. Eleonora Montuschi, Objects in Social Science (London & New York: Continuum, 2003), pp. 61–62.
44. Bechtel, Philosophy of Science (Lawrence Erlbaum, 1988), p. 25.
45. Bechtel, Philosophy of Science (Lawrence Erlbaum, 1988), pp. 27–28.
46. Georg Henrik von Wright, Explanation and Understanding (Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press, 1971), p. 11.
47. Stuart Glennan, p. 276, in Sarkar S & Pfeifer J, eds, The Philosophy of Science: An Encyclopedia, Volume 1: A–M (New York: Routledge, 2006).
48. Manfred Riedel, pp. 3–4, in Manninen J & Tuomela R, eds, Essays on Explanation and Understanding: Studies in the Foundation of Humanities and Social Sciences (Dordrecht: D Reidel Publishing, 1976).
49. For a review of "unity of science" to, see Gregory Frost-Arnold, "The large-scale structure of logical empiricism: Unity of science and the rejection of metaphysics" Archived 23 June 2007 at the Wayback Machine.
50. Hinst, Peter (2020), "Carnap, Rudolf: Der logische Aufbau der Welt", Kindlers Literatur Lexikon (KLL), Stuttgart: J.B. Metzler, pp. 1–2, ISBN 978-3-476-05728-0, retrieved 19 September 2024
51. Sarkar, Sahotra (12 November 2021), "Rudolf Carnap Testability and Meaning", Logical Empiricism at its Peak, New York: Routledge, pp. 200–265, ISBN 978-1-003-24957-3, retrieved 19 September 2024
52. Kuhn, Thomas S. (1996). The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. University of Chicago Press. ISBN 978-0-226-45808-3.
53. Hilary Putnam (1985). Philosophical Papers: Volume 3, Realism and Reason. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0521313940. LCCN lc82012903.
54. Popper then denies that science requires inductive inference or that it actually exists, although most philosophers believe it exists and that science requires it [Samir Okasha, The Philosophy of Science: A Very Short Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 23],
55. Popper, Karl (4 November 2005). "The Logic of Scientific Discovery". doi:10.4324/9780203994627. {{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
56. Popper, Karl (1 May 2014). "Conjectures and Refutations". doi:10.4324/9780203538074. {{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
57. W. V. O. Quine, "Two Dogmas of Empiricism", Philosophical Review 1951;60:20–43, collected in Quine, From a Logical Point of View (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1953).
58. Novick, That Noble Dream (Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 527.
59. Hanson, Norwood Russell (8 June 1967). "An Anatomy of Discovery". The Journal of Philosophy. 64 (11): 321. doi:10.2307/2024301. ISSN 0022-362X.
60. Daston, Lorraine (1 May 2020). "Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962)". Public Culture. 32 (2): 405–413. doi:10.1215/08992363-8090152. ISSN 0899-2363.
61. Cartwright, Nancy; Cat, Jordi; Fleck, Lola; Uebel, Thomas E. (2008). "On Neurath's Boat". Otto Neurath: Philosophy Between Science and Politics. Ideas in Context. Vol. 38. Cambridge UP. pp. 89–94. ISBN 978-0521041119.
62. Novick, That Noble Dream (Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 526–27 Archived 25 November 2016 at the Wayback Machine.
63. Hilary Putnam, "Problems with the observational/theoretical distinction", in Scientific Inquiry, Robert Klee, ed (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 25–29.
64. Nicholas G Fotion (1995). Ted Honderich (ed.). The Oxford Companion to Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. p. 508. ISBN 978-0-19-866132-0.
65. Hanfling, Oswald (2003). "Logical Positivism". Routledge History of Philosophy. Routledge. pp. 193f.
66. "Ayer on Logical Positivism: Section 4". YouTube. 6:30. Archived from the original on 9 November 2021.
67. William Stahl; Robert A. Campbell; Gary Diver; Yvonne Petry (2002). Webs of Reality: Social Perspectives on Science and Religion. Rutgers University Press. p. 180. ISBN 978-0-8135-3107-6.
68. Hilary Putnam, "What is realism?", in Jarrett Leplin, ed, Scientific Realism (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1984), p. 140.
69. Ruth Lane, "Positivism, scientific realism and political science: Recent developments in the philosophy of science", Journal of Theoretical Politics, 1996 Jul8(3):361–82, abstract.
70. Friedman, Reconsidering Logical Positivism (Cambridge, 1999), p. 1.
71. Friedman, Reconsidering Logical Positivism (Cambridge, 1999), p. 2.

References

• Bechtel, William, Philosophy of Science: An Overview for Cognitive Science (Hillsdale NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Assoc, 1988).
• Friedman, Michael, Reconsidering Logical Positivism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
• Novick, Peter, That Noble Dream: The 'Objectivity Question' and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, 1988).
• Stahl, William A & Robert A Campbell, Yvonne Petry, Gary Diver, Webs of Reality: Social Perspectives on Science and Religion (Piscataway NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002).
• Suppe, Frederick, ed, The Structure of Scientific Theories, 2nd edn (Urbana IL: University of Illinois Press, 1977).

Further reading

• Achinstein, Peter and Barker, Stephen F. The Legacy of Logical Positivism: Studies in the Philosophy of Science. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1969.
• Ayer, Alfred Jules. Logical Positivism. Glencoe, Ill: Free Press, 1959.
• Barone, Francesco. Il neopositivismo logico. Roma Bari: Laterza, 1986.
• Bergmann, Gustav. The Metaphysics of Logical Positivism. New York: Longmans Green, 1954.
• Cirera, Ramon. Carnap and the Vienna Circle: Empiricism and Logical Syntax. Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 1994.
• Edmonds, David & Eidinow, John; Wittgenstein's Poker, ISBN 0-06-621244-8
• Friedman, Michael. Reconsidering Logical Positivism. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999
• Gadol, Eugene T. Rationality and Science: A Memorial Volume for Moritz Schlick in Celebration of the Centennial of his Birth. Wien: Springer, 1982.
• Geymonat, Ludovico. La nuova filosofia della natura in Germania. Torino, 1934.
• Giere, Ronald N. and Richardson, Alan W. Origins of Logical Empiricism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997.
• Hanfling, Oswald. Logical Positivism. Oxford: B. Blackwell, 1981.
• Holt, Jim, "Positive Thinking" (review of Karl Sigmund, Exact Thinking in Demented Times: The Vienna Circle and the Epic Quest for the Foundations of Science, Basic Books, 449 pp.), The New York Review of Books, vol. LXIV, no. 20 (21 December 2017), pp. 74–76.
• Jangam, R. T. Logical Positivism and Politics. Delhi: Sterling Publishers, 1970.
• Janik, Allan and Toulmin, Stephen. Wittgenstein's Vienna. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1973.
• Kraft, Victor. The Vienna Circle: The Origin of Neo-positivism, a Chapter in the History of Recent Philosophy. New York: Greenwood Press, 1953.
• McGuinness, Brian. Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle: Conversations Recorded by Friedrich Waismann. Trans. by Joachim Schulte and Brian McGuinness. New York: Barnes & Noble Books, 1979.
• Milkov, Nikolay (ed.). Die Berliner Gruppe. Texte zum Logischen Empirismus von Walter Dubislav, Kurt Grelling, Carl G. Hempel, Alexander Herzberg, Kurt Lewin, Paul Oppenheim und Hans Reichenbach. Hamburg: Meiner 2015. (German)
• Mises von, Richard. Positivism: A Study in Human Understanding. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1951.
• Parrini, Paolo. Empirismo logico e convenzionalismo: saggio di storia della filosofia della scienza. Milano: F. Angeli, 1983.
• Parrini, Paolo; Salmon, Wesley C.; Salmon, Merrilee H. (ed.) Logical Empiricism – Historical and Contemporary Perspectives, Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2003.
• Reisch, George. How the Cold War Transformed Philosophy of Science : To the Icy Slopes of Logic. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
• Rescher, Nicholas. The Heritage of Logical Positivism. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1985.
• Richardson, Alan and Thomas Uebel (eds.) The Cambridge Companion to Logical Positivism. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007.
• Salmon, Wesley and Wolters, Gereon (ed.) Logic, Language, and the Structure of Scientific Theories: Proceedings of the Carnap-Reichenbach Centennial, University of Konstanz, 21–24 May 1991, Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1994.
• Sarkar, Sahotra (ed.) The Emergence of Logical Empiricism: From 1900 to the Vienna Circle. New York: Garland Publishing, 1996.
• Sarkar, Sahotra (ed.) Logical Empiricism at its Peak: Schlick, Carnap, and Neurath. New York: Garland Pub., 1996.
• Sarkar, Sahotra (ed.) Logical Empiricism and the Special Sciences: Reichenbach, Feigl, and Nagel. New York: Garland Pub., 1996.
• Sarkar, Sahotra (ed.) Decline and Obsolescence of Logical Empiricism: Carnap vs. Quine and the Critics. New York: Garland Pub., 1996.
• Sarkar, Sahotra (ed.) The Legacy of the Vienna Circle: Modern Reappraisals. New York: Garland Pub., 1996.
• Spohn, Wolfgang (ed.) Erkenntnis Orientated: A Centennial Volume for Rudolf Carnap and Hans Reichenbach, Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1991.
• Stadler, Friedrich. The Vienna Circle. Studies in the Origins, Development, and Influence of Logical Empiricism. New York: Springer, 2001. – 2nd Edition: Dordrecht: Springer, 2015.
• Stadler, Friedrich (ed.). The Vienna Circle and Logical Empiricism. Re-evaluation and Future Perspectives. Dordrecht – Boston – London, Kluwer 2003.
• Werkmeister, William (May 1937). "Seven Theses of Logical Positivism Critically Examined". The Philosophical Review. 46 (3): 276–297. doi:10.2307/2181086. JSTOR 2181086.

External links

• Media related to Logical positivism at Wikimedia Commons

Articles by logical positivists

• The Scientific Conception of the World: The Vienna Circle
• Carnap, Rudolf. 'The Elimination of Metaphysics Through Logical Analysis of Language'
• Carnap, Rudolf. 'Empiricism, Semantics, and Ontology.'
• Excerpt from Carnap, Rudolf. Philosophy and Logical Syntax.
• Feigl, Herbert. 'Positivism in the Twentieth Century (Logical Empiricism)', Dictionary of the History of Ideas, 1974, Gale Group (Electronic Edition)
• Hempel, Carl. 'Problems and Changes in the Empiricist Criterion of Meaning.'

Articles on logical positivism

• Creath, Richard. "Logical Empiricism". In Zalta, Edward N. (ed.). Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
• Kemerling, Garth. 'Logical Positivism', Philosophy Pages
• Murzi, Mauro. 'Logical Positivism', The New Encyclopedia of Unbelief, Tom Flynn (ed.). Prometheus Books, 2007 (PDF version)
• Murzi, Mauro. 'The Philosophy of Logical Positivism.'
• Passmore, John. 'Logical Positivism', The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Paul Edwards (ed.). New York: Macmillan, 1967, first edition^[usurped]

Articles on related philosophical topics

• Hájek, Alan. 'Interpretations of Probability', The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2003 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.)
• Rey, Georges. 'The Analytic/Synthetic Distinction', The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2003 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.)
• Ryckman, Thomas A., 'Early Philosophical Interpretations of General Relativity', The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2001 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.)
• Woleński, Jan. 'Lvov-Warsaw School', The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2003 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.)
• Woodward, James. 'Scientific Explanation', The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2003 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.)