MEANING & VERIFICATION
Roots: Empiricism and scienticism in philosophy
Representatives: Earlier: Charles Sanders Peirce; Main representatives:
The logical positivists of the
Vienna circle (Moore, Carnap, Ryle)
The philosophical movement that defends this position: Logical positivism
Main Points:
- An utterance should make a difference for the future in a detectable
way.
If you cannot say how an utterance affects the thought or action in a
detectable way, you cannot say it is meaningful.
- Verificationism is an epistemic account of meaning (based on knowledge)
- Positivists (verificationists) acknowledge that analytic statements are
true by definition.
They don't have an empirical content, but nevertheless, they are
meaningful.
e.g. All bachelors are unmarried. / If it is raining then it is
raining. / The morning star is the morning star.
Five pencils are more than two pencils.
Study how it works:
e.g. A sentence in foreign languge that you have no competence in.
Falsafa ni kufikiria. (Swahili)
What is needed to judge the truth and falsity of such an utterance?
Keywords: observation, experiment, empirical knowledge, experience
Meaningfulness:
Meaninglessness:
e.g. All squares became round.
e.g. Demon skepticism: We are constantly and systematically being
deceived by a powerful evil demon who feeds us
specious experiences (Descartes' evil demon thought experiment - against
the trustability of sense experiences).
e.g. The present king of France is bald.
e.g. More than two thirds of the patients who received cardiac surgery
demonstrate evidence of neuropsychologic
dysfunction postoperatively.
How about gibberish statements like "but of rabbit seal jeopardy so"?
VERIFICATION PRINCIPLE/CONDITION: A sentence is meaningful only if one
has a set of experiences to judge the truth of a
statement.
Falsification: If one has a set of experiences to judge the falsity of
the statement.
e.g. Chicago is in the USA.
The sun is shining.
The water is boiling.
It is Tuesday today.
It is raining.
Observation language is important (Statements that rely on sense-
impressions). Sentence meaning is identified with its verification
condition.
Possible advantages of verificationism?
An empirical criterion is introduced to connect the sentences to the
propositions that they express.
OBJECTIONS
1. Verificationism applies only to fact-stating declarative statements.
There are other kinds of acts we perform by using language.
(e.g., give orders, make promises, ask questions, etc.)
Reply: Verificationism focuses only on cognitively meaningful statements.
Cognitively meaningful statement is a statement of fact.
Such sentences (e.g., asking questions) can be meaningful in the ordinary
sense
(as opposed to gibberish statements), but they are not cognitively
meaningful.
Reply-to-Reply: An explanatory theory of meaning should be able to
account for all meaning facts, not only meaningfulness.
2. Understanding precedes verification. We have to first understand the
meaning of a sentence in order to expose it to verification condition.
In addition, we understand sentences such as "We are constantly deceived
by an evil demon..." (Demon skepticism)
These are sentences that are formed by meaningful words grammatically
strung together. It is problematic to treat them
the same as gibberish statements.
Reply: There is an illusion of understanding with the sentences that fail
verification test.
3. 'Observation language' is required by verificationists as a uniform
way of representing experience. But then it becomes subjective
and based on sense impressions.
e.g. I now see a pink rabbit in front of me. (Maybe the person is
hallucinating) (True for one person but not verifiable by another party.)
Otherwise, we need laboratory conditions to decide the truth and falsity
of statements.
Therefore, observation language can be relative even in seemingly
apparent conditions:
e.g. There is a chair at the right side of the table. (Depends on where
you stand)
e.g. There is a beatiful stork on the lamp post ahead. (Maybe you have a
poor eyesight and cannot distinguish the stork in the distance.)
4. Does verification test apply to the verification principle itself?
That is, is the verification principle empirically verifiable?
Some positivists say that it is neither true nor false. It is just a
proposal. But somehow we assume that it is correct, how can this be
possible?
Even we say that Verification Principle is scientifically verifiable, we
first have to read and understand it before we can verify it.
5. Some positivists restricted their observation language to statements
about people's subjective sense impressions.
But what is the criterion of observation?
e.g. An ant is a small insect. (If you look at an ant through a
magnifier?)
Observation itself is sometimes theory-laden since you have to specify
what is observed and how it is observed.
