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|Author=Thomas Uebel,
|Year=2016
|Abstract=The Vienna Circle was a group of early twentieth-century philosophers
who sought to reconceptualize empiricism by means of their interpretation
of then recent advances in the physical and formal sciences. Their
radically anti-metaphysical stance was supported by an empiricist criterion
of meaning and a broadly logicist conception of mathematics. They denied
that any principle or claim was synthetic a priori. Moreover, they sought
to account for the presuppositions of scientific theories by regimenting
such theories within a logical framework so that the important role played
by conventions, either in the form of definitions or of other analytical
framework principles, became evident. The Vienna Circle’s theories were
constantly changing. In spite (or perhaps because) of this, they helped to
provide the blueprint for analytical philosophy of science as meta-theory
—a “second-order” reflection of “first-order” sciences. While the Vienna
Circle’s early form of logical empiricism (or logical positivism or
neopositivism: these labels will be used interchangeably here) no longer
represents an active research program, recent history of philosophy of
science has unearthed much previously neglected variety and depth in the
doctrines of the Circle’s protagonists, some of whose positions retain
relevance for contemporary analytical philosophy.
|URL=http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2016/entries/vienna-circle/
|Collection=Zalta (Ed.) (2016)
}}
