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 PREFACE

The ideas of this book have grown from the soil of a philosophic movement which, though confined to small groups, is spread over the whole world. American pragmatists and behaviorists, English logistic epistemologists, Austrian positivists, German representatives of the analysis of science, and Polish logisticians are the main groups to which is due the origin of that philosophic movement which we now call “logistic empiricism.” The movement is no longer restricted to its first centers, and its representatives are to be found today in many other countries as well —in France, Italy, Spain, Turkey, Finland, Denmark, and elsewhere. Though there is no philosophic system which unites these groups, there is a common property of ideas, principles, criticisms, and working methods—all characterized by their common descent from a strict disavowal of the metaphor language of metaphysics and from a submission to the postulates of intellectual discipline. It is the intention of uniting both the empiricist conception of modern science and the formalistic conception of logic, such as expressed in logistic, which marks the working program of this philosophic movement.

Since this book is written with the same intentions, it may be asked how such a new attempt at a foundation of logistic empiricism can be justified. Many things indeed will be found in this book which have been said before by others, such as the physicalistic conception of language and the importance attributed to linguistic analysis, the connection of meaning and verifiability, and the behavioristic conception of psychology. This fact may in part be justi-