verificationism
Sign in to saveAlso known as verifiability criterion of meaning, verification principle
Verificationism, also known as the verification principle or the verifiability criterion of meaning, is a doctrine in philosophy which asserts that a statement is cognitively meaningful only if it is empirically verifiable (can be confirmed through experience) or an analytic truth (true by virtue of its definition or logical form). Typically expressed as a criterion of meaning, it rejects traditional statements of metaphysics, theology, ethics and aesthetics as meaningless in terms of conveying truth value or factual content, reducing them to emotive expressions or "pseudostatements" that are
~37 min read
Article
21 sectionsContents
- Historical background
- Conceptual origins
- Logical positivism
- Motivation
- Versions of the criterion
- Strong verification
- Weak verification and ''empirical import''
- Confirmation and translatability
- Protocol sentences
- Self-consistency and explication
- Criticism
- Carl Hempel and verification
- Karl Popper and falsifiability
- W. V. O. Quine, holism and analyticity
- Norwood Hanson and Thomas Kuhn
- Legacy
- Logical positivism
- Falsificationism
- Contemporary status
- See also
- References
Verificationism, also known as the verification principle or the verifiability criterion of meaning, is a doctrine in philosophy which asserts that a statement is cognitively meaningful only if it is empirically verifiable (can be confirmed through experience) or an analytic truth (true by virtue of its definition or logical form). Typically expressed as a criterion of meaning, it rejects traditional statements of metaphysics, theology, ethics and aesthetics as meaningless in terms of conveying truth value or factual content, reducing them to emotive expressions or "pseudostatements" that are neither true nor false.
Verificationism was the central-most thesis of logical positivism (or logical empiricism), a philosophical movement, in the empiricist tradition, originating in the Vienna Circle and Berlin Circle of the 1920s and 1930s. The logical positivists sought to formulate a scientifically-oriented theory of knowledge in which ambiguities associated with traditional metaphysical language would be negated or minimised, and empirical testability would be enforced as the paradigm of serious inquiry.