Logical positivism

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Logical positivism (also known as logical empiricism or neo-positivism) was a philosophical movement rooted in the empiricist tradition, seeking to formulate a scientific philosophy in which philosophical discourse proves as authoritative and meaningful as empirical science. Richard Creath notes that A. J. Ayer was the only philosopher who would unhesitatingly have described himself as a logical positivist. A central thesis endorsed by some logical positivists (e.g. Schlick) and rejected by others (e.g. Carnap and Neurath) was the verification principle, also known as the "verifiability criterion of meaning", according to which a statement is cognitively meaningful only if it can be verified through empirical observation or if it is a tautology (true by virtue of its own meaning or its own logical form). The verifiability criterion thus rejected statements of metaphysics, theology, ethics and aesthetics as cognitively meaningless in terms of truth value or factual content. Despite its ambition...

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