Logical Positivism

Logical positivism, sometimes also called logical empiricism, is an approach to philosophy that developed in the 1920s and remained very influential until the 1950s. It was inspired by rapid and dramatic developments that had taken place in physical science and mathematics. For logical positivists, the main task was to analyze the structure of scientific reasoning and knowledge. This was important because they took science to be the model for intellectual and social progress.

Logical positivism combined empiricism with the new mathematical logic pioneered by Russell, Frege, and others. Its central doctrine was that all meaningful statements are either empirical or logical in character. This was initially interpreted to mean that they are either open to test by observational evidence or are matters of definition and therefore tautological—a principle that was referred to as the verifiability principle. It ruled out, and was designed to rule out, a great amount of philosophical and theological discussion as literally meaningless. By applying this principle, it was hoped to identify those problems that are genuine ones, as opposed to those that are simply generated by the misuse of language. Not only statements about God or the Absolute but also those about a “real” world beyond experience were often dismissed.

One of the key ideas of logical positivism was a distinction between the context of discovery and the context of justification, between how scientists develop their ideas and what is involved in demonstrating the validity of scientific conclusions. The logical positivists concentrated exclusively on the latter. Moreover, they assumed the unity of science in methodological terms: They denied that there are any fundamental differences between the natural and the social sciences. Indeed, they saw philosophy as itself part of science.

Logical positivist ideas were developed by the Vienna and Berlin Circles, which were small groupings of philosophers, mathematicians, and scientists [Page 586]meeting together in the 1920s and 1930s. The Vienna Circle was the more influential of the two, producing a manifesto and running its own journal. Despite the focus on natural science, several members also had a close interest in social and political issues. Indeed one, Otto Neurath, was a sociologist and became a socialist politician for a short period. The logical positivists regarded their philosophy as capable of playing an important role in undercutting the influence of religion and other sources of irrational ideas. Two other important 20th-century philosophers, Wittgenstein and Popper, had close associations with the Vienna Circle—indeed, Wittgenstein’s Tractatus was a significant early influence on it—although both were also critics of logical positivism, albeit for different reasons. In the 1930s, key figures in the Vienna Circle began to emigrate to Britain and the United States as a result of the rise of fascism in continental Europe, and this facilitated the spread of logical positivism across the Anglo-American world, as did A. J. Ayer’s (1936) best-selling book Language, Truth and Logic.

Logical positivism was never a unified body of ideas, and its influence on the development of social science methodology was probably less than is often supposed; although the related doctrine of operationism certainly did have a strong influence on psychology and, to a lesser extent, on sociology in the first half of the 20th century. In social science, these ideas came into conflict with older views about the nature of science, as well as with the notion that the study of physical and of social reality must necessarily take different forms.

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