The Tractatus also adhered to a correspondence theory of truth which the positivists adopted, although some, like Otto Neurath, preferred a form of coherentism.

The group considered themselves logical positivists because they believed all knowledge is either derived through experience or arrived at through analytic statements, and they adopted the predicate logic of Frege, as well as the early work of Ludwig Wittgenstein ( 1889 – 1951 ) as foundations to their work.

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 ).

During the 19th century, it was recognised by legal positivists that a sovereign could limit its authority to act by consenting to an agreement according to the principle pacta sunt servanda.

Perhaps the view for which the logical positivists are best known is the verifiability criterion of meaning, or verificationism.

( These include the strong rationalism of the Enlightenment, the verificationism of the logical positivists, or approaches to science based on induction, a supposed form of logical inference which critical rationalists reject, in line with David Hume.

Unlike the positivists, he did not claim that metaphysical statements must be meaningless ; he also claimed that a statement which was " metaphysical " and unfalsifiable in one century ( like the ancient Greek philosophy about atoms ) could, in another century, be developed into falsifiable theories that have the metaphysical views as a consequence, and thus become scientific.

But even this criticism was not unknown to the logical positivists: Otto Neurath compared science to a boat which we must rebuild on the open sea.

He suggested that there had been a division into two primary schools of study of generations until that time: positivists, such as Comte who measured social change in fifteen to thirty year life spans, which he argued reduced history to “ a chronological table .” The other school, the “ romantic-historical ” was represented by Dilthey and Martin Heidegger.

For instance, Thomists make statements about undetectable essences of things, which by definition can never be sensed or perceived ; positivists regard such statements as without meaning.

However, positivism is not essential to emotivism itself, perhaps not even in Ayer's form, and some positivists in the Vienna Circle, which had great influence on Ayer, held non-emotivist views.

They assume, just like many other logical positivists, that values cannot be rational and assert, therefore, that the definition of poverty threshold, a task charged with values, is an arbitrary action of researchers, an assumption which implies a narrow view of poverty.

An intended consequence of this opinion, for most logical positivists, is that metaphysical, theological, and ethical statements fail this criterion, and so are not cognitively meaningful.

This is the course the positivists took.

This way of escape is theoretically possible, but since it has grave difficulties of its own and has not, so far as I know, been urged by positivists, it is perhaps best not to spend time over it.

* Legal positivism, by contrast to natural law, holds that there is no necessary connection between law and morality and that the force of law comes from some basic social facts although positivists differ on what those facts are.

But modern natural lawyers, such as John Finnis claim to be positivists, while still arguing that law is a basically moral creature.

Some philosophers used to contend that positivism was the theory that there is " no necessary connection " between law and morality ; but influential contemporary positivists, including Joseph Raz, John Gardner, and Leslie Green, reject that view.

It is consistent with Dworkin's view — in contrast with the views of legal positivists or legal realists — that * no one * in a society may know what its laws are ( because no one may know the best justification for its practices.

Early, most logical positivists proposed that all knowledge is based on logical inference from simple " protocol sentences " grounded in observable facts.

Mach's influence is most apparent in the logical positivists ' persistent concern with metaphysics, the unity of science, and the interpretation of the theoretical terms of science, as well as the doctrines of reductionism and phenomenalism, later abandoned by many positivists.

It is consistent with Dworkin's view -- in contrast with the views of legal positivists or legal realists -- that * no one * in a society may know what its laws are ( because no one may know the best justification its practices.

Some philosophers used to contend that positivism was the theory that there is " no necessary connection " between law and morality ; but influential contemporary positivists, including Joseph Raz, John Gardner, and Leslie Green, reject that view.

The logical positivists thought of scientific theories as deductive theories-that a theory's content is based on some formal system of logic and on basic axioms.

In the philosophy of science, it is used by opponents to describe the position, associated with some logical positivists, that " knowledge can be clearly learnt through evaluation of the natural world and its substances, and, through empirical means, learn truths ".

Despite the central claim of legal positivism that legal validity depends on sources, legal positivism does not claim that the laws so identified should be followed or obeyed or that there is value in having clear, identifiable rules ( although some positivists may also make these claims ).

Legal positivists believe that intellectual clarity is best achieved by leaving these questions to a separate investigation.

As for as the moral validity of law, both positivists and realists maintain that this is a matter of moral principles.

While Jeremy Bentham's legal positivism can be seen as appertaining to the legislature, legal formalism appertains to the Judge ; that is, formalism does not ( as positivists do ) suggest that the substantive justice of a law is irrelevant, but rather, that in a democracy, that is a question for the legislature to address, not the Judge.

Logical positivists divided knowledge into analytic and synthetic categories.

As with the study of ethics, early analytic philosophy tended to avoid the study of philosophy of religion, largely dismissing ( as per the logical positivists view ) the subject as part of metaphysics and therefore meaningless.

" While pragmatic concerns are important for Carnap and other logical positivists when choosing linguistic framework, their pragmatism " leaves off at the imagined boundary between the analytic and the synthetic ".

Logical positivists in response wanted to stop such metaphysical entities from being used as an explanation.

Despite being greatly influenced by the logical positivists and critical of unempirical speculation, an aspect common to all of Kaila's work was in strive for a holistic, almost pantheistic understanding of things.

Negatively, Kant was often scorned by the positivists in their early debates, and Kant's doctrine of synthetic a priori truths was the doctrine they most wished to discredit.

However, Kant's opinions about the nature of physical objects pervaded the protocol sentence debate, and Kantian opinions of the relationship between philosophy and science were shared by the positivists to some degree.

In it he argued that the positivists ' criterion of verifiability was too strong a criterion for science, and should be replaced by a criterion of falsifiability.

; Articles by logical positivists

Although the existence of molecules has been accepted by many chemists since the early 19th century as a result of Dalton's laws of Definite and Multiple Proportions ( 1803 – 1808 ) and Avogadro's law ( 1811 ), there was some resistance among positivists and physicists such as Mach, Boltzmann, Maxwell, and Gibbs, who saw molecules merely as convenient mathematical constructs.

One of the early positivists was Jeremy Bentham, whose views were popularized by his student, John Austin.

Early attempts by the logical positivists grounded science in observation while non-science was non-observational and hence meaningless.

In the late 19th century, an even more extreme form of phenomenalism was formulated by Ernst Mach, later developed and refined by Russell, Ayer and the logical positivists.

With the advent of the positivists by the early 20th century, however, most western philosophers had rejected the notion of an objective esthetic standard for any form of art, including landscaping.

However, like positivists, postpositivists pursue objectivity by recognizing the possible effects of biases.

As well, the movement known as pragmatism is known for forcefully rejecting this distinction by contending that our senses are impregnated with prior conceptualizations, making it impossible to have any observation that is totally value independent, as the positivists implied.

On the other hand, analytical philosophers and logical positivists were " outraged by Existentialism's willingness to abandon rational categories and rely on nonmental processes of consciousness.