section_path: Analytic philosophy/Philosophy of science
section_name: Philosophy of science
paragraph_text: Philosophy of science
  
  The logical positivists of the Vienna Circle started as a study group of Russell and Whitehead. They argued that the arguments of metaphysics, ethics and theology were meaningless, as they were not logically or empirically verifiable. This was based on their division of meaningful statements into either the analytic (logical and mathematical statements) and the synthetic (scientific claims). Moritz Schlick and Rudolf Carnap argued that science rested at its roots on direct observation, but Otto Neurath noted that observation already requires theory in order to have meaning. Another participant in the Circle was Carnap's self-confessed disciple, Willard Van Orman Quine. In ' Two Dogmas of Empiricism ', Quine criticized the distinction between analytic and synthetic statements. Instead, he advocated for a 'web of belief' approach, whereby all beliefs come from contact with reality (including mathematical ones), but with some being further removed from this contact than others.
  
  Another former participant in the Circle was Karl Popper. He argued that verificationism was logically incoherent, promoting instead falsificationism as the basis for science. A further advancement in the philosophy of science was made by Imre Lakatos, who argued that negative findings in individual tests did not falsify theories, but rather entire research programmes would eventually fail explain phenomena. Thomas Kuhn further argued that science was composed of paradigms, which would eventually shift when evidence accumulated against them. Based on the idea that different paradigms had different meanings of expressions, Paul Feyerabend went further in arguing for relativism in science.