logical positivism

American  

noun

1. a philosophical movement that stresses the function of philosophy as a method of criticizing and analyzing science and that rejects all transcendental metaphysics, statements of fact being held to be meaningful only if they have verifiable consequences in experience and in statements of logic, mathematics, or philosophy itself, and with such statements of fact deriving their validity from the rules of language.

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logical positivism British  

noun

1. a philosophical theory that holds to be meaningful only those propositions that can be analysed by the tools of logic into elementary propositions that are either tautological or are empirically verifiable. It therefore rejects metaphysics, theology, and sometimes ethics as meaningless

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Other Word Forms

• logical positivist noun

Etymology

Origin of logical positivism

First recorded in 1930–35

Example Sentences

When your congregation zealously overestimates the epistemological functionality of empiricism in the work of logical positivism, you trap the conversation of science and consciousness in your lethally boring Vienna wagon-Circling.

From Salon

At a crucial moment in “Time of the Magicians,” Eilenberger explains that an entire school of philosophy known as logical positivism was born of this exact misunderstanding of Wittgenstein.

From New York Times

Then there was Musil the philosophical scientist, interested in probability theory and logical positivism, as well as in the workings of the mind and the soul.

From New York Times

They arise from the background of logical positivism, corrected by Popper and Kuhn.

From Scientific American

They read Tractatus as an extreme, idiosyncratic expression of logical positivism, a philosophical school, popular in the early 20th century, that imposes strict constraints on what is knowable.

From Scientific American