---
title: "Logical positivism"
chunk: 1/5
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logical_positivism"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T03:11:36.284431+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

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.
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). 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.
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".

== Origins ==
Logical positivism emerged in Germany and Austria amid a cultural background characterised by the dominance of Hegelian metaphysics and the work of Hegelian successors such as F. H. Bradley, whose metaphysics portrayed the world without reference to empirical observation. The late 19th century also saw the emergence of neo-Kantianism as a philosophical movement, in 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. In accordance with Mach's phenomenalism, whereby material objects exist only as sensory stimuli rather than as observable entities in the real world, logical positivists took all scientific knowledge to be only sensory experience. Further influence came from Percy Bridgman's operationalism—whereby a concept is not knowable unless it can be measured experimentally—as well as Immanuel Kant's perspectives on aprioricity.
Ludwig Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus established the theoretical foundations for the verifiability principle. 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.

== History ==

=== Vienna and Berlin Circles ===

The Vienna Circle was led principally by Moritz Schlick, congregating around the University of Vienna and at the Café Central. A manifesto written by Otto Neurath, Hans Hahn and Rudolf Carnap in 1929 summarised the Vienna Circle's positions. Schlick had originally held a neo-Kantian position, but later converted, via Carnap's 1928 book Der logische Aufbau der Welt (The Logical Structure of the World). The Viennese maintained closely cooperative ties with the Berlin Circle, among whom Hans Reichenbach was pre-eminent. Carl Hempel, who studied under Reichenbach in Germany, was also to prove influential in the movement's later history. A friendly but tenacious critic of the movement was Karl Popper, whom Neurath nicknamed the "Official Opposition".
Early in the movement, Carnap, Hahn, Neurath and others recognised that the verifiability criterion was too stringent in that it rejected universal statements, which are vital to scientific hypothesis. A radical left wing emerged from the Vienna Circle, led by Neurath and Carnap, who proposed revisions to weaken the criterion, a program they referred to as the "liberalisation of empiricism". A conservative right wing, led by Schlick and Waismann, instead sought to classify universal statements as analytic truths, thereby to reconcile them with the existing criterion. Within the liberal wing Carnap emphasised fallibilism, as well as pragmatics, which he considered integral to empiricism. Neurath prescribed a move from Mach's phenomenalism to physicalism, though this would be opposed by Schlick. As Neurath and Carnap sought to pose science toward social reform, the split in the Vienna Circle also reflected political differences.
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".