Logical Positivism and Karl Popper

The Logical Positivists: The logical positivist were a group of highly influential thinkers before the first world war and their philosophy combines empiricism with a form of rationalism. Logical positivism, began from discussions of a group called the Vienna Circle which gathered during the earliest years of the 20th century in Vienna. After World War I, Hans Hahn, a member of that early group, helped bring Schlick into the mix. The Vienna circle took it upon themselves to rid the world of Hegelian metaphysics and they tried to apply science to philosophy

The opposition to all metaphysics was a key aspect and stance of the Logical Positivists, especially ontology and synthetic a priori propositions; they rejected metaphysics however not as wrong but as having no meaning; and they came to this conclusion based on Wittgenstein's work; the idea that all knowledge should be codifiable.

The whole idea was demarcation- splitting the world into metaphysics and actual science to try and gain the absolute truth. They believed that any statement that could not be verified are just plain nonsense, for example the Hegelian idea of the Ziet Geist leading history. The main question was - can we prove this claim, if not it was deemed as untrue. The Cogito by Descartes is rejected, as it cannot really be proven - it contains a non-verifiable induction. The Cogito was re-written by Ayer as "there are ideas" this is verifiable unless solipsism applies.

Karl Popper: Popper was born to Jewish parents and fed the Nazis to the University of London - he lived in Vienna during the golden age of the city: the Vienna Circle. Popper didn't see himself as one of the logical positivists and many of the logical positivists saw him as a direct opposition to the positivists.

Popper's main addition to philosophy was his theory of falsification - which holds the principle that if something cannot be proven, then you must disprove it.

Popper's concern was with distinguishing scientific from metaphysical statements. Unlike the positivists, he did not claim that metaphysical statements must be meaningless. Popper profoundly said that a statement which was metaphysical and unfalsifiable in one century could, in another century, be falsified which in turn makes them scientific. Popper stated that people should not rely on induction when it comes to science however most scientists think that science does rely heavily on induction. This is known as the problem with induction.

Popper eventually realised that everything was potentially untrue as people such as Newton had been proven wrong by Einstein - he says you have to assume what knowledge we have is incomplete and we will strive to be exact as you possible can.