[See logicism and positivism.]
(epistemology) A movement of 20th-century epistemology that developed as a reaction against 19th-century idealism by combining logicism and empiricism. The logical positivists tended to argue that only carefully-constructed propositions (preferably formulated in terms of symbolic logic) about strictly-limited factual domains could be true or false, and that any less precise proposition or more wide-ranging theory was metaphysical transcendentalism or sentimental emotionalism. In addition to their somewhat hardline epistemological doctrine, the logical positivists tended to ignore the value-branches of philosophy or even to espouse emotivism.