* 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.

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.

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

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.

" The tractarian doctrine that the truths of logic are tautologies was widely believed among the logical 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.

Although the Vienna Circle's logical positivists appreciated the Tractatus, they argued that the last few passages, including Proposition 7, are confused.

Needless to say, this is not a view that most professional philosophers are particularly fond of or comfortable with, but it does seem to have been the consensus of the Vienna Circle positivists towards more or less all traditional philosophical inquiry, although not necessarily to the use of philosophical method to get clear on the logical structure of empirical questions.

It is, perhaps, much more popular with professional scientists ( as some of the Vienna positivists were themselves ), who are inclined to think of philosophy as airy speculation at best, sophistry at worst, that interferes with and retards the serious work of empirical science.

" 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 ".

While positivists believe that the researcher and the researched person are independent of each other, postpositivists accept that theories, background, knowledge and values of the researcher can influence what is observed.

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.

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

Contemporary developments in logic and the foundations of mathematics, especially Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead's monumental Principia Mathematica, impressed the more mathematically minded logical positivists such as Hans Hahn and Rudolf Carnap.

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

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.

Tractatus was influential chiefly amongst the logical positivists of the Vienna Circle, such as Rudolf Carnap and Friedrich Waismann.

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.

The processualists were positivists, and as such had believed that the scientific method should and could be applied to archaeological investigation, therefore allowing archaeologists to present objective statements about past societies based upon the evidence.

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.

The idea of the logical positivists, such as A. J.

Logical positivists, such as Rudolf Carnap and A. J. Ayer viewed any talk of gods as literal nonsense.

Though philosophically conservative, Declarationists such as Jaffa have been outspoken critics of originalist construction jurists including Robert Bork, Antonin Scalia, and William Rehnquist, likening them to legal positivists.

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.

" 310 He also maintained that the categories we impose upon the world, " alter what we call reality … they do not establish timeless truths as the positivists maintained ", 302 and to " confuse our own constructions with eternal laws or divine decrees is one of the most fatal delusions of men.

Postpositivists believe that a reality exists, like positivists do, though they hold that it can be known only imperfectly and probabilistically.

Different logical positivists construed this doctrine in several different ways, e. g. as a reductionist thesis, that the objects investigated by the special sciences reduce to the objects of a common, putatively more basic domain of science, usually thought to be physics ; as the thesis that all of the theories and results of the various sciences can or ought to be expressed in a common language or " universal slang "; or as the thesis that all the special sciences share a common method.

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.

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 ).

It located connective learning at the physical and neurological levels, rejecting the " sense data " associationism of the empiricists and logical positivists.

Modern legal positivists consider international law as a unified system of rules that emanates from the states ' will.

One of the earliest legal positivists was Jeremy Bentham.

Contemporary legal positivists have long abandoned this view, and have criticised its oversimplification, H. L. A. Hart particularly.

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.

In his book Law's Empire Dworkin attacked Hart and the positivists for their refusal to treat law as a moral issue.

Karl Popper's insistence upon the role of falsification in the philosophy of science was a reaction to the logical positivists.

Logical positivists typically considered philosophy as having a very limited function.

The positivists adopted the principle of verificationism, according to which every meaningful statement is either analytic or is capable of being verified by experience.

This caused the logical positivists to reject many traditional problems of philosophy, especially those of metaphysics or ontology, as meaningless.

The logical positivists held a wide range of views on many matters.

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

Many logical positivists endorsed forms of materialism, metaphysical naturalism, and empiricism.