Rudolf Carnap (1891–1970) and Hans
Reichenbach (1891–1953), but there were
also American adherents, of whom perhaps
the best known was Ernest Nagel (1901–85).
David Harvey (1969) drew heavily on Nagel’s
logical empiricist justification of the scientific
method in presenting his own argument
for the importance ofexplanationin geog-
raphy. tb
Suggested reading
Giere and Richardson (1996).
logical positivism A particular version of
thephilosophyofpositivismassociated with
the work of a group of primarily Austrian sci-
entists and philosophers in the 1920s and
1930s known as theVienna Circle. The con-
venor of the discussions at the University of
Vienna in 1922 was the physicist Moritz
Schlick, who invited figures such as the math-
ematician Kurt Go ̈del, philosophers Rudolf
Carnap and Herbert Feigl, economist Otto
Neurath and physicist Phillip Frank. On the
edge of the circle but not strictly members
were the philosophers Karl Popper (seecrit-
ical rationalism), A.J. Ayer (who later popu-
larized the movement for an English-language
audience) and Ludwig Wittgenstein.
Wittgenstein was behind the defining pro-
posal of the group, ‘the verifiability principle’.
It asserted that scientifically meaningful
propositions are those that (1) can be verified
empirically by the five senses; or (2) are true
tautologically – that is, their truth arises from
the very meaning of the terms in which they
are expressed such as in logic or mathematics.
Propositions incapable of satisfying the prin-
ciple, and which included most issues that
made up the history of Western philosophy
until that point concerning aesthetics, moral-
ity and religion, were judged senseless if not
nonsense. Carnap declared that the Circle
‘reject[s] all philosophical questions, whether
Metaphysics, Ethics or Epistemology’. Mean-
ingful propositions would be found in philoso-
phy only when it modelled itself on the natural
sciences, and particularly physics.
An immediate criticism was that the verifia-
bility principle could not itself be verified: it
was neither an empirical proposition, nor a
logical or mathematical tautology. The Vienna
Circle’s criterion of meaning was thus, dis-
turbingly, meaningless. Additionally, Popper
argued early on that even those in the Circle’s
Pantheon, the physicists, did not engage in
empirical verification but onlyfalsification:
that is, they sought to disprove, not prove,
their theoretical claims. As a result of these
objections, as well as the physical dispersal of
the group (many were Jewish and left-wing
and fled Vienna with the rise of Nazism),
logical positivism quickly unravelled. By the
1950s, the movement was dead. Its extreme
positions were discarded, and any useful ideas
were absorbed within the larger movement of
analytic and empiricist philosophy that came
to define the post-Second World War Anglo-
American field (Reisch, 2005).
In human geography, however, Guelke
(1978, p. 46) suggests that ‘from Hartshorne
to Harvey geographical writing on method-
ology and philosophy has to a greater or lesser
degree shown the influence of logical positivist
ideas’. But Hartshorne’s (1939) panegyric
tome on regional description as the core of
the geographical project makes no reference
to logical positivism or, indeed, to a single
logical positivist. It was in fact Hartshorne’s
methodological arch enemy, Frederick Schae-
fer (1953), who came under the spell of logical
positivism. He was influenced at the Univer-
sity of Iowa in the late 1940s and early 1950s
by Gustav Bergmann, one of the Vienna Circle
refugees, and became the first geographer to
apply formal principles of logical positivism to
geography through his work on morphological
lawsthat were to take the form: ‘Ifspatial
pattern A,thenspatial pattern B.’ Watered-
down versions of logical positivism were sub-
sequently proffered by an intellectual disciple
of Schaefer, William Bunge (1966), and in the
form of a textbook by two former graduate
students at the University of Iowa, who took
the mandatory Bergmann course (Amedeo
and Golledge, 1975). All three contributions
were part of thequantitative revoluton, the
movement towards modelling the study of
geography on the natural sciences in general,
and physics in particular, as part of the project
ofspatial science. That said, many quan-
titative revolutionaries were ignorant of
logical positivism, and not interested anyway.
Harvey’s (1969) prospectus for scientific
explanationin geography bears only traces
of logical positivism. Its central preoccupation
was the scientific method, not philosophy as
such, and certainly not the philosophy of
logical positivism: Harvey’s understanding of
the scientific method was indebted, rather,
tological empiricism. Furthermore, both
Harvey and the discipline at large were subse-
quently to move away from this version of
the scientific method, rendering discussions
of the usefulness of logical positivism of only
historical value. tbGregory / The Dictionary of Human Geography 9781405132879_4_L Final Proof page 430 31.3.2009 2:44pmLOGICAL POSITIVISM