Page "David Hume" Paragraph 30

Until recently, Hume was seen as a forerunner of the logical positivist movement ; a form of anti-metaphysical empiricism.

According to the logical positivists, unless a statement could be verified by experience, or else was true or false by definition ( i. e. either tautological or contradictory ), then it was meaningless ( this is a summary statement of their verification principle ).

Hume, on this view, was a proto-positivist, who, in his philosophical writings, attempted to demonstrate how ordinary propositions about objects, causal relations, the self, and so on, are semantically equivalent to propositions about one's experiences.