Logical Positivism: Philosophical movement arising out of the Vienna Circle of philosophers in Austria after World War I. Logical positivism combined the commitment to empiricism found in nineteenth-century positivism (Comte) with the type of logical analysis found in the work of Bertrand Russell. It affirmed a verifiability theory of meaning, in which nonanalytic propositions have cognitive meaning only if they are empirically verifiable. On the basis of this theory, logical positivists asserted metaphysical and theological propositions to be meaningless, and they analyzed ethical propositions as merely having expressive meaning.1