Philosophy 1200 Lecture Notes - Lecture 41: Logical Positivism, Auguste Comte, Behaviorism
6 Aug 2020
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Progress seems to be a hallmark of science. Each generation builds on and improves the theories of the past getting us an ever clearer picture of reality. Note that philosophy is often criticized for its lack of progress. Many of the same issues that faced the. Progress only seems to be a feature of science. The challenge for materialists is to explain how minds fit into this worldview. The accepted explanation for the first half of the twentieth century was a view called logical positivism. Positivism referred to an approach to explain things in a positive way, built up out of what we observe. Meaningful language consisted of logical relations (hence logical positivism ) between terms that referred to something observable. Theoretical terms could be introduced as shorthand for complex relations of observable things but do not refer to unobservable entities. Belief really just refer to a complex set of behaviours a person will produce.
