ABSTRACT
Logical Positivism was a philosophical movement that originated in Vienna in the 1920s and 1930s. Its key figures, who came to be known as the Vienna Circle, included Schlick, Waismann, Neurath, and Carnap; A. J. Ayer was a British proponent who popularized their views in his classic primer, Language, Truth and Logic. Because of the rise of Nazism in Germany and Austria, many of these intellectuals emigrated to England and the United States. Logical Positivism can be characterized by three central doctrines: a hardline empiricism about meaning, the elimination of metaphysics and scientism. Logical positivism provides a theory of meaning, an account of the conditions under which a sentence is meaningful. The distinctive thing about this theory, in contrast to the theories of Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell considered so far, is that it is an anti-realist account of meaning rather than a realist account.
