ORGANIZATION
The Vienna Circle
The 1920s–1930s philosophical movement that defined logical positivism — the intellectual environment in which Popper formed his philosophy, initially as an adjacent interlocutor and eventually as its most effective critic.
The Vienna Circle was a group of philosophers, scientists, and mathematicians who met regularly in Vienna in the 1920s and early 1930s to develop what became known as logical positivism — the view that philosophical problems should be solved by the logical analysis of language, and that meaningful propositions were those verifiable by observation. Central members included Moritz Schlick, Rudolf Carnap, Otto Neurath, Hans Hahn, and Philipp Frank. The Circle's manifesto, The Scientific World-Conception (1929), articulated the verificationist program that would dominate philosophy of science for decades. Popper participated in the Circle's intellectual environment without ever being a full member. His Logik der Forschung (1934) was both shaped by and decisively opposed to the Circle's program — using logical precision as its weapon while rejecting verification in favor of falsification as the criterion of scientific meaning.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The Circle's program rested on the verifiability principle: a proposition is meaningful if and only if it can be verified