Positivism
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Positivism is a philosophical school that holds that all genuine knowledge is either true by definition or positive—the latter meaning a posteriori facts derived by reason and logic from sensory exper
Auguste Comte, the founder of modern positivism
Comte first laid out his theory of positivism in The Course in Positive Philosophy.
Positivist temple in Porto Alegre, Brazil
Émile Durkheim
Verificationism
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Verificationism, also known as the verification principle or the verifiability criterion of meaning, is a doctrine in philosophy which asserts that a statement is cognitively meaningful only if it is
Positivism
…facts derived by reason and logic from sensory experience. Other ways of knowing, such as intuition, introspection, or religious faith, are rejected or considered meaningless. Although the positivist approach has been a recurrent theme in the history of Western thought, modern positivism was first articulated in the early…
Ludwig Wittgenstein, whose Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus was influential on the logical positivists and on the verificationist doctrine
Moritz Schlick, the central figure of the Vienna Circle, the group whose logical positivism was the context in which the verificationist criterion was first systematized
Martin Heidegger, whose metaphysical sentences were targeted by the logical positivists as insignificant
Otto Neurath, who led the turn toward physicalist bases from earlier Machian phenomenalist bases