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Logical positivism (also known as rational empiricism) is a school of philosophy that originated in the Vienna Circle in the 1920s. It combines positivism—which states that the only authentic knowledge is scientific knowledge—with a version of apriorism—the notion that some propositional knowledge can be had without, or "prior to", experience.
Logical positivism denied the soundness of metaphysics and large swathes of traditional philosophy, and affirmed that statements about metaphysics, religion and ethics are devoid of cognitive meaning and are nothing but the expression of feelings or desires; only statements about mathematics, logic and natural sciences have definite meaning. Logical positivism holds that philosophy should aspire to the rigor of science. Philosophy should provide strict criteria for judging sentences true, false, and meaningless.
Logical positivism is perhaps best known for the verifiability criterion of meaning, which asserts that a statement is meaningful if and only if it is empirically verifiable. One intended consequence of the verification criterion is...
