logical positivism, a philosophical movement that arose in Vienna in the 1920s and was characterized by the view that scientific knowledge is the only kind of factual knowledge and that all traditional metaphysical doctrines are to be rejected as meaningless. A brief treatment of logical positivism follows. For full treatment, see positivism: Logical positivism and logical empiricism.

Logical positivism differs from earlier forms of empiricism and positivism (e.g., that of David Hume and Ernst Mach) in holding that the ultimate basis of knowledge rests upon public experimental verification or confirmation rather than upon personal experience. It differs from the philosophies of Auguste Comte and John Stuart Mill in holding that metaphysical doctrines are not false but meaningless—that the “great unanswerable questions” about substance, causality, freedom, and God are unanswerable just because they are not genuine questions at all. This last is a thesis about language, not about nature, and is based upon a general account of meaning and of meaninglessness. All genuine philosophy (according to the group that came to be called the Vienna Circle) is a critique of language, and (according to some of its leading members) its result is to show the unity of science—that all genuine knowledge about nature can be expressed in a single language common to all the sciences.

The Vienna Circle, which produced its first manifesto in 1929, had its origin in discussions among physicists and mathematicians before World War I. The general conclusion was reached that the empiricism of Mill and Mach was inadequate, because it failed to explain mathematical and logical truths and because it did not account satisfactorily for the apparently a priori element in natural science. In 1922 Hans Hahn, one of the leaders of the Vienna Circle, laid before his students at the University of Vienna the Logisch-philosophische Abhandlung (1921; Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 1922) of Ludwig Wittgenstein. This work introduced a new general theory of meaning—derived in part from the logical inquiries of Giuseppe Peano, Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell, and Alfred North Whitehead—and gave the Vienna group its logical foundation. Most of the group’s members moved to the United States at the outset of World War II. In the meantime, disciples had arisen in many other countries: in Poland, among the mathematical logicians; and in England, where A.J. Ayer’s Language, Truth, and Logic (1936) provided an excellent introduction to the views of the group. Interest in logical positivism began to wane in the 1950s, and by 1970 it had ceased to exist as a distinct philosophical movement.

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positivism: Logical positivism and logical empiricism