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What  is logical positivism?

It has been a while since I added an installment in the “Nuts and Bolts” series, where I lay out some of the fundamental ideas and terms used in philosophy (and I’ll do some in theology as well). This time I’m briefly covering the perspective called logical positivism, a point of view with important consequences in science, epistemology, ethics, philosophy of religion and probably a whole lot more.

Logical positivism was primarily an earlier to mid twentieth century movement, arising among a group of philosophers now referred to as The Vienna Circle, but I won’t wade through the history of the movement here. Logical positivism is not a standpoint on what is true and what is not. Instead, it’s a standpoint on what kind of utterances count as real statements that have meaning.