Ryan Reece

What happened to logical positivism?

February 15, 2021

Introduction

Logical positivism (also called “logical empiricism” or just “positivism”) is a philosophical movement that began in the late nineteenth century, was further developed by the Vienna Circle and the Berlin Circle in the early twentieth century, and has come to have immense influence on analytic philosophy ever since.

• empiricism
• Auguste Comte (1798-1857) coined “positivism”
• Vienna Circle
• Wissenschaftliche Weltauffassung: Der Wiener Kreis - Scientific Worldview: The Vienna Circle (1929)
  • The Vienna Circle’s manifesto
• In 1930 the Vienna Circle and the Berlin Circle took over the journal Annalen der Philosophie and made it the main journal of logical empiricism under the title Erkenntnis, edited by Carnap and Reichenbach.
• Carnap

Theses

1. Hume’s fork, the analytic/synthetic distinction
2. Verification theory of meaning: the meaning of a proposition is the means to verify it. All statements that cannot be empirically verified in principle are meaningless.
   • Scheinproblem = Pseudo-problem
3. Carnap’s principle of tolerance
   • Principle of tolerance
4. Unity of science

Postpositivism

• Quine
• Popper
• Kuhn

The “death” of positivism

• Hempel (1950)
• Symposium on March 26, 1969
• Hempel (1974)
• Suppe (2000)

Much ado is made about positivism being “dead”, but its influence is still promenent over philosophy and the structure of societies.

Friedman:

Carnap’s influence, in particular, also extended much further: to the widespread application of logical and mathematical methods to philosophical problems more generally, especially in semantics and the philosophy of language. Indeed, as is well known, the ideas of the logical positivists exerted a very substantial influence well beyond the boundaries of professional philosophy, particularly in psychology and the social sciences. It is not too much to say, therefore, that twentieth-century intellectual life would be simply uncrecognizable without the deep and pervasive current of logical positivist thought. ¹

Neopositivism

• Ladyman & Ross (2007)

1. @Friedman_1999_Reconsidering_Logical_Positivism\, p. xii. ↩