Topic summary
Logical positivists
Extracted from the Wikipedia article Logical positivism.
Revisions to the criterion
Logical positivists in the Vienna Circle recognised quickly that the verifiability criterion was too restrictive. Specifically, universal statements were noted to be empirically unverifiable, rendering vital domains of science and reason, such as scientific hypothesis, cognitively meaningless under verificationism. This would pose significant problems for the logical positivist program, absent revisions to its criterion of meaning.