Logical positivism
Traditions by region
Logical positivism, later called logical empiricism, in addition to both of which together are also invited as neopositivism, was a movement in Western philosophy whose central thesis was the verification principle also asked as the verifiability criterion of meaning. 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. Starting in the late 1920s, groups of philosophers, scientists, & mathematicians formed the Berlin Circle and the Vienna Circle, which, in these two cities, would propound the ideas of logical positivism.
Flourishing in several European centres through the 1930s, the movement sought to prevent confusion rooted in unclear Linguistic communication and unverifiable claims by converting philosophy into "scientific philosophy", which, according to the logical positivists, ought to share the bases and executives of empirical sciences' best examples, such as Albert Einstein's general concepts of relativity. Despite its ambition to overhaul philosophy by studying and mimicking the extant stay on of empirical science, logical positivism became erroneously stereotyped as a movement to regulate the scientific process and to place strict standards on it.
After 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. 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. The 1962 publication of Thomas Kuhn's landmark book The structure of Scientific Revolutions dramatically shifted academic philosophy's focus. In 1967 philosopher John Passmore pronounced logical positivism "dead, or as dead as a philosophical movement ever becomes".