1/4/2024 0 Comments Logical position![]() A scientific theory would be stated with its method of verification, whereby a logical calculus or empirical operation could verify its falsity or truth. Rational reconstruction, then, would convert ordinary statements into standardized equivalents, all networked and united by a logical syntax. ![]() Via Russell's logical atomism, ordinary language would break into discrete units of meaning. Via Bertrand Russell's logicism, reducing mathematics to logic, physics' mathematical formulas would be converted to symbolic logic. So theoretical terms would garner meaning from observational terms via correspondence rules, and thereby theoretical laws would be reduced to empirical laws. Rather, most neopositivists viewed talk of unobservables as metaphorical or elliptical: direct observations phrased abstractly or indirectly. 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. ![]() Unscientific discourse, as in ethics and metaphysics, would be unfit for discourse by philosophers, newly tasked to organize knowledge, not develop new knowledge. In verificationism, only the verifiable was scientific, and thus meaningful (or cognitively meaningful), whereas the unverifiable, being unscientific, were meaningless "pseudostatements" (just emotively meaningful). And some influence came from Percy Bridgman's musings that others proclaimed as operationalism, whereby a physical theory is understood by what laboratory procedures scientists perform to test its predictions. As in Ernst Mach's phenomenalism, whereby the mind knows only actual or potential sensory experience, verificationists took all sciences' basic content to be only sensory experience. Logical positivists picked from Ludwig Wittgenstein's early philosophy of language the verifiability principle or criterion of meaningfulness. In 1967 philosopher John Passmore pronounced logical positivism "dead, or as dead as a philosophical movement ever becomes". The 1962 publication of Thomas Kuhn's landmark book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions dramatically shifted academic philosophy's focus. In the ensuing years, the movement's central premises, still unresolved, were heavily criticised by leading philosophers, particularly Willard van Orman Quine and Karl Popper, and even, within the movement itself, by Hempel. Īfter World War II, the movement shifted to a milder variant, logical empiricism, led mainly by Carl Hempel, who, during the rise of Nazism, had immigrated to the United States. Despite its ambition to overhaul philosophy by studying and mimicking the extant conduct of empirical science, logical positivism became erroneously stereotyped as a movement to regulate the scientific process and to place strict standards on it. ![]() Starting in the late 1920s, groups of philosophers, scientists, and mathematicians formed the Berlin Circle and the Vienna Circle, which, in these two cities, would propound the ideas of logical positivism.įlourishing in several European centres through the 1930s, the movement sought to prevent confusion rooted in unclear language and unverifiable claims by converting philosophy into "scientific philosophy", which, according to the logical positivists, ought to share the bases and structures of empirical sciences' best examples, such as Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity. This theory of knowledge asserted that only statements verifiable through direct observation or logical proof are meaningful in terms of conveying truth value, information or factual content. Logical positivism, later called logical empiricism, and both of which together are also known as neopositivism, was a movement in Western philosophy whose central thesis was the verification principle (also known as the verifiability criterion of meaning).
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