Page "Logical positivism" Paragraph 2

Logical positivism, in the formal sense, began from discussions of a group known as the First Vienna Circle which gathered during the earliest years of the 20th century in Vienna at the Café Central.

After World War I, Hans Hahn, a member of that early group, helped bring Moritz Schlick to Vienna.

Schlick's Vienna Circle, along with Hans Reichenbach's Berlin Circle, propagated the new doctrines more widely during the 1920s and early 1930s.

It was Otto Neurath's advocacy that made the movement self-conscious and more widely known.

A 1929 pamphlet written by Neurath, Hahn, and Rudolf Carnap summarized the doctrines of the Vienna Circle at that time.

The doctrines included the opposition to all metaphysics, especially ontology and synthetic a priori propositions ; the rejection of metaphysics not as wrong but as having no meaning ; a criterion of meaning based on Ludwig Wittgenstein's early work ; the idea that all knowledge should be codifiable by a single standard language of science ; and above all the project of rational reconstruction, in which ordinary-language concepts were gradually to be replaced by more precise equivalents in that standard language.