Logical Positivism

Logical positivism, which is also sometimes referred to as logical empiricism, was a school of thought in the early 20th century (early 1900’s) that arose from the rise of symbolic logic and the work of a group of philosophers called the Vienna Circle. Firstly, positivism in general is a philosophical attitude that states that all knowledge can be known (and is true or false) based on ‘positive’ experiential data (i.e. the presence of some physical verification). For example, if you are holding a phone in your hand, then the empirical fact of the phone in your hand verifies the proposition ‘There is a phone in my hand’. On the other hand, if there is no phone, then that proposition would be false. Now, the ‘logical’ part came from the development of symbolic logic - which saw a rise in the significance of logic and how it may stand to be the basis of all other things. Indeed, it was a basis for mathematics, and the logical positivists thought it could be a basis for philosophy in general. Logical positivism is the position that states that all meaningful propositions or statements (which are either true or false) can be known or verified or confirmed through a logical and empirical analysis. What are meaningful propositions? Those that can be verified. Thus the metaphysical statement: “The world is composed of one substance that is God”, which is a form of monism put forth by Spinoza, is meaningless since no logical analysis of the statement can be made, and it cannot be empirically known. This reason is why the logical positivists generally disregard metaphysics as a meaningful field of study. What can be known through logical and empirical analysis? The latter is obvious (sense-perception, observable facts, etc.). And logical analysis is made through the use of symbolic logic which created a system that could ‘translate’ a proposition into logical and mathematical terms. Logical positivism is no longer considered an ‘alive’ field within philosophy; however, one underlying thesis is still present in modern science: we can make sense of, and know of, the world through scientific and empirical means.