ABSTRACT
Most philosophers today, and indeed for some time past, would endorse this statement. In one sense it is absolutely dead, for it lost its cohesive membership with the break-up of the group of philosophers known as the ‘Vienna Circle’, due to political pressures in the 1930s. The logical empiricists recognized two, and only two, kinds of meaningful statements. They are, first and mainly, empirical statements, verifiable by observation. Second, there are statements, such as those of logic and mathematics, whose truth can be known a priori; but these were regarded as not presenting ‘new’ knowledge, but merely an analysis of what was known already. According to Waismann, ordinary empirical statements were to be analysed into ‘elementary propositions’, whose whole meaning would consist in corresponding verificatory experiences. One of the main objectives of logical empiricism was to provide a way of demarcating the meaningful statements of science and ordinary life from the ‘pseudo-statements’ of metaphysics.
