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 • Apr. 1, 2024

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 • Dec. 5, 2019

Atwood enrolled in the philosophy department, but after discovering that logical positivism was its mainstay, rather than ethics and aesthetics, she switched to literature.

From The New Yorker • Apr. 10, 2017

The Mayhemites differ from their many peers who descend from the antimetaphysical tradition of logical positivism.

From Slate • Feb. 10, 2012

He became the patron saint of logical positivism, that dry, scrupulous wing of modern philosophy most concerned with linguistics, most scornful of the broad, uplifting phrases of the old philosophers.

From Time Magazine Archive