The intellectual pursuits of a group of philosophers and scientists who came together in Vienna in 1920-1930 constitute the Vienna Circle movement. Schlick, Ayer and Carnap are representatives of logical positivism. Being against metaphysics, logical grounding of mathematics and verificationist understanding of meaning are the general characteristics of the Vienna Circle thought.
SCHLİCK (1882-1936)
Friedrich Schlick was a philosopher born in Germany. He was one of the founders of the Vienna Circle and contributed to the studies of this group on scientific thought and philosophy of logic.
The meaning of a proposition consists of presenting certain states of facts. Metaphysical theses are meaningless rather than false. Propositions for which the conditions of truth cannot be given are meaningless. No proposition can be considered meaningful that cannot be verified within the possibilities of sense experience, such as Plato's ideas, Descartes' mind as a substance, Kant's pure reason or noumenon, Hegel's spirit, Wittgenstein's mystical.
AYER (1910-1989)
Alfred Jules Ayer was a British philosopher and one of the important representatives of logical positivism. He says that moral concepts are false concepts and that there is no objective content to discuss in moral issues. According to the emotionalist moral theory, the moral philosophies put forward by philosophers are nothing more than the expression of what these philosophers feel.
CARNAP (1891-1970)
Rudolf Carnap was a philosopher and logician of German origin. In his well-known book The Logical Structure of the World, he tried to develop a formal system based on the concept of ‘similarity’, a binary predicate, in which he would define scientific terms in terms of phenomenal terms. In his book The So-Called Problems of Philosophy, he said that many philosophical problems were actually meaningless and that metaphysics stemmed from the incorrect use of language. According to the principle of tolerance he put forward in his book The Logical Syntax of Language, there is no such thing as a correct language or logic, and everyone is free to adopt a linguistic form that suits their purposes.
TARSKİ (1901-1983)
Alfred Tarski was a Polish philosopher and logician who made important contributions to the philosophy of language and mathematical logic. If the truth predicate is used within a language, it can cause paradoxes. The sentence ‘This sentence is not true’ means that if it is true, it is not true, and if it is false, it is true. To eliminate such problems, he makes a distinction between the object language and the metalanguage and defines the truth predicate in the metalanguage. For example; snow is white if and only if snow is white.