a doctrine associated with logical positivism and holding that every meaningful statement, other than the necessary statements of logic and mathematics, must refer directly or indirectly to observable properties of spatiotemporal things or events.
Origin of physicalism
From the German word Physikalismus, dating back to 1930–35. See physical, -ism
philosophythe doctrine that all phenomena can be described in terms of space and time and that all meaningful statements are either analytic, as in logic and mathematics, or can be reduced to empirically verifiable assertionsSee also logical positivism, identity theory
