Logical Positivism

In the literature on evaluation, logical positivism usually refers to some version of a scientific philosophy developed by members of the Vienna Circle in the 1920s and 1930s (largely as a reaction to then dominant Continental philosophies of phenomenology and idealism). The philosophy rests on three key ideas: (a) the verifiability principle, or criterion of meaning: To be considered genuine, legitimate, and meaningful, a knowledge claim about the world must be capable of verification; (b) the doctrine of meaningful statements: The only statements capable of verification, and hence of meaning, are those that can be verified through observation or those that are demonstrable logically; (c) all justified knowledge ultimately rests on noninferential self-evident observations (i.e., foundationalism).