Abstract:

Logical positivism, which aims to establish the relationship between world, thought and language and to interpret knowledge in the context of language, is one of the remarkable intellectual paradigms of the 20th century. According to this understanding, several subjects and problems in various disciplines, especially in philosophy, should be analyzed in the context of the linguistic analysis that was developed based on the methods of the new logic. In this sense, the “criterion of meaning”, which distinguishes between meaningful sentences with informational value and meaningless sentences without information value, has become the main point of logical positivist thinkers. Accordingly, attempts have been made to eliminate the sentences of metaphysics from philosophy since they are believed to lack informational value and being meaningless. The main consideration in this study is to deal with the approaches of Frege, Russell, and Wittgenstein, the leading figures of this initiative, who primarily examined “meaning” within the framework of the new logic. Following the footsteps of these thinkers, the logical positivists strived to eliminate metaphysics from philosophy based on the problem of meaning. Therefore, the issue of how the criterion of “meaning” is grounded in the context of the methods of the new logic has a very important place in clarifying the origins of this attempt. This study also addresses the ideas of Carnap, one of the logical positivist thinkers, who emphasized the relationship between “verification and meaning” depending on the logical syntax of language, and the ideas of Ayer, who came to the forefront with the relationship established between the “criterion of meaning and the principle of verification”. 

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