10 Facts About Logical positivism

Logical positivism, later called logical empiricism, and both of which together are known as neopositivism, was a movement in Western philosophy whose central thesis was the verification principle .

Logical positivism positivists picked from Ludwig Wittgenstein's early philosophy of language the verifiability principle or criterion of meaningfulness.

Logical positivism is sometimes stereotyped as forbidding talk of unobservables, such as microscopic entities or such notions as causality and general principles, but that is an exaggeration.

Logical positivism became a major underpinning of analytic philosophy, and dominated philosophy in the English-speaking world, including philosophy of science, while influencing sciences, but especially social sciences, into the 1960s.

Logical positivism positivists rejected Kant's synthetic a priori, and adopted Hume's fork, whereby a statement is either analytic and a priori or synthetic and a posteriori .

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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.

Logical positivism 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.

Putnam alleged that Logical positivism was actually a form of metaphysical idealism by its rejecting scientific theory's ability to garner knowledge about nature's unobservable aspects.

John Passmore found logical positivism to be "dead, or as dead as a philosophical movement ever becomes".

Logical positivism's fall reopened debate over the metaphysical merit of scientific theory, whether it can offer knowledge of the world beyond human experience versus whether it is but a human tool to predict human experience .