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What is the Verifiability Criterion a Criterion of?
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 January 2010
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As my title implies, I think the verifiability criterion is indeed a criterion of something. I do not intend, therefore, merely to commemorate it. On the other hand I am not sure that those who put it forward in its more liberal forms as a criterion of ‘factual significance’ or ‘literal meaningfulness’ were right in what they identified as the consequence of a sentence's failing to satisfy it. What I want to argue for, in a somewhat reductionist spirit, is a resurrected version of the ‘weak’ verifiability criterion. My resurrected version will certainly appear more rarefied, in so far as it is independent of (and does not therefore require to be embodied in) empiricism. It will, I hope, also be purified of some of the mortal blemishes from which the criterion, as construed by members of the Vienna Circle, seems not to have recovered.
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- Papers
- Information
- Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements , Volume 9: Impressions of Empiricism , March 1975 , pp. 137 - 153
- Copyright
- Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 1975
References
page 138 note 1 And were so dismissed, respectively, by A. J. Ayer (see Language, Truth and Logic, 2nd ed. (Gollancz, 1946) pp. 128 ff.)Google Scholar and Moritz Schlick (see his paper, ‘Positivism and Realism’, Pt 3, trans. Rynin, D., in Logical Positivism, ed. Ayer, (Free Press of Glencoe, 1959) pp. 92 f.)Google Scholar. Both Ayer and Schlick, in the passages referred to, offer behaviouristic accounts of statements ascribing experiences to others.
page 138 note 2 For example, in Hempel, C. G.'s paper, ‘Problems and Changes in the Empiricist Criterion of Meaning’, Revue Internationale de Philosophie (1950).Google Scholar
page 140 note 1 Thus Schlick, in the introductory piece he wrote for the first volume of the Circle's journal, Erkenntnis (1930–1931)Google Scholar, quoted from Rynin, David's translation in Logical Positivism, ed. Ayer, p. 54.Google Scholar
page 141 note 1 In his remarks in this passage Wittgenstein shows an indebtedness to Hertz and, perhaps through Hertz, to Mach. Mach himself acknowledged that his point of view was ‘close to’ that of Hume. So, while the connection between Wittgenstein and Hume is probably at several removes, in their views on the ‘causal nexus’, the resemblance is no coincidence.
page 141 note 2 This is conceded in the Philosophische Bemerkungen (Blackwell, 1961) pp. 66 ff.Google Scholar, 200 ff. Ramsey, F. P., in his posthumously published The Foundations of Mathematics (1931)Google Scholar, had argued that if a universal sentence is not a conjunction ‘it is not a proposition at all’ (p. 238).Google Scholar
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page 143 note 3 Russell, in his paper ‘Logical Positivism’, implies, I think wrongly, that verificationists would say they had the same meaning. See Logic and Knowledge, ed. Marsh, R. C. (Allen & Unwin, 1956) p. 376Google Scholar. But it is clear in this paper that Russell would have disagreed with anyone who thought solipsism meaningless.
page 143 note 4 See, for example, Mysticism and Logic, p. 148.Google Scholar
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page 145 note 1 ‘Meaning and Verification’, Philosophical Review (1936) section 1.Google Scholar
page 146 note 1 This papei acknowledges a great debt to conversations with Wittgenstein. But Professor Anscombe is surely quite mistaken in construing the paper, as she does in her An Introduction to Wittgenstein's Tractatus, pp. 152 ff.Google Scholar, as though it was an interpretation of the Tractatus, or based upon one.
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page 149 note 2 Engels, Manchester and the Working Class (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1974) p.103.Google Scholar
page 151 note 1 I do not intend to imply by saying this that no causal explanation can be given of the particular ways such a captain does call when the coin is tossed. Such explanations would obviously not refer to his beliefs about the outcome, though other beliefs about the situation, e.g. that it was for him to call, are likely to feature.