system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Why is logical positivism so unpopular these days?

I read about it and I think the ideas of logical positivism (verificationism especially) are quite sensible. Could somebody please explain to me why is it so unpopular these days?
gpt
> are quite sensible

As you know, it's not really sufficient to suggest a bunch of phrases that sound plausible, you're supposed to substantiate a thesis, refine it and revise it if necessary, explain how it works, and so on. Logical positivism can be thought of as an attempt to do this, some sort of loosely defined, informal research program. Even though this is clearly not a binary distinction, in most disciplines we'd say that such a program is either successful or not (not binary given that a "failed" program can be very valuable etc). But that's not usually a question of this one big KO ARGUMENT, and there probably is none. It's more an overall evaluation - where do we stand, what have we accomplished, how strong are our theories compared to the competition, what parts are unsolved or refuted? At some point, this evaluation simply didn't look too good for LoPo.

Overall, many people would simply say the program of logical positivism wasn't successful. It proved fairly difficult to provide a precise version of the verification principle that was accepted even by fellow positivists, related research programs that would have been convenient for positivism (such as logicism, the attempt to account for all truths of mathematics in terms of truths of logic) were seen as a failure or not concluded, attacks on underlying commitments and promotion of alternatives (such as Quine in 2 Dogmas and On What There Is) gained popularity, specific work of individual positivists that was carried out in the spirit of LoPo (Carnap's tolerance in the philosophy of logic, Reichenbach's quantum logic and work on probability) was seen unfavorably or alternatives were preferred by their relevant peers, the core tenets in the philosophy of science moved away from the rather simplistic picture of LoPo, and so on, and so forth. 

It just didn't look good overall. At some point, even most logical positivists didn't seem to really be logical positivists in the original sense. They either moved on and largely stopped defending it, or were stuck trying to answer to critics instead of advancing their research program and finding solutions, then moved one as well. Whether something seems prima facie plausible or intriguing seems like a good reason to start a research program, not to ignore how this research program went, with history as a judge.