RL: LOGICAL POSITIVISM Flashcards
What were the Vienna Circle interested in?
The questions Wittgenstein raised and developing their own approaches to them.
Who was the Vienna Circle led by?
Schlick.
What did Vienna Circle members generally believe about theological interpretations?
Belonged in the past, to an unenlightened age when ‘God’ was used as an explanation that anything that science had not yet completely mastered.
What did the Vienna Circle aim to develop?
More scientific ways of understanding questions raised.
What did Conte claim?
That people’s thinking had passed through various stages over time.
What was the ‘theological era’ according to Conte?
When people attributed all things they did not understand to God.
What was the ‘theological era’ replaced by according to Conte?
The ‘metaphysical’ era.
What was Conte’s final age?
The ‘positivist’ age, when the only useful form of evidence for investigation was that which was available to the senses.
What did the Vienna Circle conclude about empirical evidence?
The key to understanding what was meaningful and what was not.
What is logical positivism?
The idea that a claim was meaningful if it could be tested using sense experience, and meaningless if not.
What are the two categories that meaningful statements fall into?
- Analytic Statements.
2. Synthetic Statements.
What are analytic statements?
True by definition.
These statements are true or false depending on whether the words in the statement mean what is suggested.
What are synthetic statements?
Information that goes beyond just defining our use of language.
How do synthetic statements qualify as meaningful?
They have to be verifiable using empirical evidence.
What is the verifiable theory?
If a statement is neither analytic nor empirically verifiable, it says nothing about reality.
