Epistemology & Philosophy of Science

Volume 58, Issue 1, 2021

Ludwig Wittgenstein and Logical Positivism

The article examines the question of whether L. Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus had any influence on the formation and development of logical positivism. It is shown that the members of the Vienna Circle were familiar with the Tractatus, but practically did not accept anything from its content. Wittgenstein's reasoning about the world, about facts, about the structure of fact were rejected by them as a bad metaphysics, with which they fought. The denial of causality and the deprivation of the meaning of scientific laws could not be accepted by representatives of logical positivism, whose main task was the logical analysis of the language of science in order to cleanse it of metaphysical concepts and build a unified science on a solid empirical foundation. If the members of the Vienna Circle were even familiar with Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, then representatives of the Berlin Group, the Lvov-Warsaw School, the Uppsala School and supporters of logical positivism in other countries hardly heard of it. This leads to the conclusion that Wittgenstein's Tractatus did not have any impact on the logical positivism.