The basic idea of the movement known as neopositivism, which combines logical positivism and logical empiricism, is the verification principle, which is often referred to as the verifiability requirement of meaning.(Source: )
According to this theory of knowledge, statements can only be considered meaningful in terms of communicating information, factual content, or truth value if they can be independently verified using reasoning or direct observation. Groups of mathematicians, physicists, and philosophers called the Vienna Circle and the Berlin Circle were founded in the late 1920s and early 1930s, respectively, with the goal of advancing logical positivism in these two cities.
The movement, which was active in various European cities throughout the 1930s, aimed to minimize misunderstandings caused by imprecise language and unsubstantiated assertions by transforming philosophy into “scientific philosophy,” which the logical positivists claimed.
Logical positivism, although aiming to reform philosophy by examining and imitating the current practices of empirical research, was mistakenly characterized as a movement to control and impose rigid guidelines on the scientific method.[/2]
The movement changed to a softer version after World War II, known as logical empiricism, and was primarily led by Carl Hempel, who had immigrated to the US during the advent of Nazism. Over the next few years, prominent philosophers—including Willard van Orman Quine and Karl Popper—as well as Hempel, a member of the movement, harshly criticized the movement’s basic, unresolved tenets.
The release of Thomas Kuhn’s seminal work The Structure of Scientific Revolutions in 1962 brought about a significant shift in the focus of academic philosophy. John Passmore, a philosopher, declared logical positivism “dead.
Origins of Logical Positivism
Logical positivists adopted the verifiability principle, sometimes known as the meaningfulness criteria, from Ludwig Wittgenstein’s early philosophy of language. The foundational assumption of verificationists was that all disciplines were limited to real or potential sensory experience, similar to Ernst Mach’s phenomenalism.
Percy Bridgman’s ideas, which some labeled as operationalism and according to which scientists understand a physical theory based on the experiments they conduct in the lab to verify its predictions, also had some influence. According to verificationism, the unverifiable were useless “pseudostatements” (only emotionally meaningful), whereas the verifiable were scientific and therefore significant (or intellectually meaningful). Philosophers are only concerned with organizing knowledge, not creating new knowledge, therefore unscientific discourse such as that found in ethics and metaphysics would not be appropriate for them to discuss.[Reference required]
Definitions Logical Positivism
Though it is overstated, logical positivism is sometimes stereotyped as prohibiting discussion of unobservables, such as microscopic creatures or concepts like causation and general principles[4].[Reference required] Rather, the majority of neopositivists saw discussions of unobservables as elliptical or metaphorical, that is, as direct observations expressed in an indirect or abstract way.
Thus, through correspondence rules, theoretical terms would acquire meaning from observational terms, reducing theoretical laws to empirical laws. The mathematical formulas of physics would be transformed into symbolic logic through Bertrand Russell’s logicism, which reduces mathematics to logic. Russell’s logical atomism would cause ordinary language to split into distinct meaning units. Hence, regular statements would be transformed into standardized counterparts by rational reconstruction, all of which would be connected and bound by a logical syntax.
Development
Logical positivists left Germany and Austria in the late 1930s and migrated to Britain and the US. By then, many had abandoned Mach’s phenomenalism in favor of Otto Neurath’s physicalism, which holds that the subjects of science are publicly observable substances rather than real or potential sensations.
Rudolf Carnap, the man who initiated logical positivism inside the Vienna Circle, aimed to substitute mere confirmation for verification. Following the end of World War II in 1945, logical positivism gave way to a more moderate form of logical empiricism in America. This movement was primarily led by Carl Hempel and developed the covering law model of scientific explanation.
Throughout the 1960s, logical positivism influenced the sciences, particularly the social sciences, and became a fundamental tenet of analytical philosophy. It also dominated philosophy in the English-speaking world, including philosophy of science.
Roots
Language
The young Ludwig Wittgenstein presented the idea of philosophy as a “critique of language” in Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, which offered the prospect of a theoretically grounded distinction between intelligible and nonsensical discourse. As opposed to a coherence theory of truth, Tractatus supported a correspondence theory of truth.
Certain iterations of the verifiability concept also bear the impact of Wittgenstein).In [9]10] Although some logical positivists, who were also affected by Wittgenstein’s understanding of probability, believed that Tractatus contained too much metaphysics, Neurath reports that tractarian theory holds that truths of logic are tautologies.11]
Logicism
The program of reducing mathematics to logic was started by Gottlob Frege, who later lost interest in it. Bertrand Russell then carried on the program with Alfred North Whitehead in their Principia Mathematica, which served as inspiration for some of the more rigorous positivists in mathematics, including Hans Hahn and Rudolf Carnap.
In [12] Russell’s theory of types was used by Carnap in his early anti-metaphysical writings.13] Carnap dreamed of a universal language that could encode physics by reconstructing mathematics.In [12] However, Alfred Tarski’s undefinability theorem dashed expectations of reducing mathematics to logic, and Kurt Gödel’s incompleteness theorem demonstrated that this was impossible save in basic instances.
In [12] Thus, Carnap’s 1934 work Logische Syntax der Sprache (Logical Syntax of Language) did not lead to the creation of a global language.In [12] Nevertheless, Carl Hempel and other logical positivists persisted in endorsing logicism.
Origins
Vienna
Moritz Schlick was the main leader of the Vienna Circle, which gathered around the University of Vienna and Café Central. After reading Carnap’s 1928 work Der logische Aufbau der Welt, or The Logical Structure of the World, Schlick abandoned his neo-Kantian viewpoint.
A 1929 pamphlet collecting the positions of the Vienna Circle was produced by Otto Neurath, Hans Hahn, and Rudolf Carnap. Carl Hempel was another Vienna Circle member who would go on to have a significant impact. Karl Popper was a cordial but relentless opponent of the Circle, which Neurath dubbed the “Official Opposition”.[Reference required]
Carnap needed a lesser meaningfulness requirement than verifiability, as did Hahn and Neurath, as well as other members of the Vienna Circle.In [15] Under the direction of Neurath and Carnap, a radical “left” side launched the “liberalization of empiricism” initiative.
Rivals
Both Moritz Schlick and Rudolf Carnap were impacted by Ernst Cassirer’s neo-Kantianism, which was then the dominant figure in the Marburg school, and they attempted to define logical positivism in opposition to Husserl’s phenomenology. The essence of what logical positivism rejected was Martin Heidegger’s cryptic metaphysics, which logical positivists particularly criticized.
Carnap argued with Heidegger over “metaphysical pseudosentences” at the beginning of the 1930s.In [16] Logical positivism was one opinion among many contending in Europe, despite its revolutionary goals, and logical positivists initially spoke their language.In [16]
Export
Moritz Schlick, the movement’s first representative in the New World, came to Stanford University in 1929 but stayed in Vienna the rest of the time. He was killed there in 1936 by a mentally ill former student named Johann Nelböck.In [16] A. J. Ayer, a British attendee of Vienna Circle meetings since 1933, saw logical positivism spread beyond the English-speaking world that year when he published Language, Truth, and Logic in English.
By then, intellectual flight had been sparked by the Nazi Party’s 1933 ascent to power in Germany.In [16] Otto Neurath passed away in exile in England in 1945.[16] Rudolf Carnap, Hans Reichenbach, and Carl Hempel—Carnap’s apprentice who had trained under Reichenbach in Berlin—made America their permanent home.In [16] Following Germany’s 1938 takeover of Austria, many of the logical positivists.
Principles
Analytic/synthetic gap
In terms of reality, the contingent depends on how the specific world is, but the necessary is a state that is true in all potential worlds—simply logical validity. When it comes to knowledge, the a posteriori can only be known through or after relevant experience, but the a priori can be known before or without.
In terms of statements, the synthetic adds reference to a condition of facts, a contingency, whereas the analytic is true by the arrangement and meanings of terms, resulting in a tautology—true by logical necessity but uninformative about the world.(17)18]
David Hume sharply distinguished between “matters of fact and real existence” and “relations of ideas” in 1739, asserting that all truths are of one kind or another.19]20] Truths through relationships between ideas (abstract) all line up on one side by Hume’s fork .
Immanuel Kant was therefore shaken from his “dogmatic slumber” and asked to respond to Hume’s challenge, although by elaborating on how metaphysics is feasible. By arranging sense data into the very experience space, time, and substance, Kant eventually crossed the tines of Hume’s fork in his 1781 work to identify another range of truths by necessity—synthetic a priori, statements claiming states of facts but known true before experience.
This led to transcendental idealism, which attributes a constructive role to the mind in phenomena. Thus, by considering the uniformity of nature to be an a priori knowledge, Kant protected Newton’s rule of universal gravitation from Hume’s issue of induction. Hume’s fork, according to which a proposition is either analytic and a priori (therefore necessary and verifiable logically) or synthetic and a priori, was accepted by logical positivists in place of Kant’s synthetic a priori.
Cognitive meaningfulness
Verification
The original position of the logical positivists was that a claim may only be considered “cognitively meaningful” in terms of communicating information, truth value, or factual content if it can be proven true beyond a reasonable doubt by a finite technique.21] According to this verifiability criterion, the only assertions that had cognitive meaning were those that could be verified empirically or analytically.
Metaphysics, ontology, and a large portion of ethics were deemed cognitively useless since they did not meet this condition. However, Moritz Schlick did not consider judgments about aesthetics or ethics to be cognitively worthless.21] Different definitions of cognitive meaningfulness have been proposed, including: having a truth value; relating to a feasible situation; and understandable or comprehensible, much like scientific assertions.23]
While theology and other metaphysics comprised “pseudostatements” that were neither true nor untrue, ethics and aesthetics were subjective preferences.
Confirmation
Carnap replaced verification with confirmation in a seminal pair of papers titled “Testability and meaning” (1936 and 1937). He argued that while universal rules cannot be tested, they can be confirmed.In [15] Later, Carnap attempted to explain probability as a “degree of confirmation” by using a variety of logical and mathematical techniques to study inductive reasoning, but he was never able to develop a model.(26]
Every universal law has a degree of confirmation of zero in Carnap’s inductive logic.(26] Either way, it took thirty years to precisely formulate what became known as the “criterion of cognitive significance” (Hempel 1950, Carnap 1956, Carnap 1961).In [15]
Carl Hempel rose to prominence as a logical positivist movement critic.In [27] Hempel disagreed with the positivist claim.