B. Verification Principle

the verification principle is a philosophical attempt to challenge the meaning of certain types of language such as religious and moral language philosophically we must be able to agree on a consensus for the meaning of words in order to philosophize about them and use them if we cannot agree on a meaning then we cannot debate or analyze as you have seen in the previous film there are a number of problems with the use of religious language and thus it is important that we can have a short and certain agreement on the meaning of these words if we are going to say that the claims of religion are true coherent or false the verification principle demonstrates a cognitivist approach to meaning cognitivists claim that language is supposed to express propositions statements about the world and thus can be true or false this is also true of religious language and ethical language a cognitive as a a cognitivist approach then will hold that for a statement to be meaningful there must be a way of checking the proposition that is being made here is an example of a number of statements that can be analyzed for meaning some of them are religious or moral and some of them are not the verification principle aims to analyze these statements using the same criteria those that through this analysis stand up to verification can be declared meaningful those that do not stand up to verification will be meaning less we will return to these statements later on the verification principle has been influenced by the work of David Hume we have discussed Humes forg in a previous film to recap he Marg you that there are two questions to ask of any statement to decide whether it is possible to prove the proposition true or false does it contain matters of fact if so can you relate them to your experience to prove that they are true does it give the relationship between two abstract ideas or reasoning of the talk sort found in mathematics or geometry if the answers to both of these questions are no then Hume says we should reject the statement as meaningless because it will not give any reliable knowledge about the external world in addition the verification principle has been influenced by the work at Vick and Stein in his younger days now Vick and Stein later went on to change his mind however this early work suggests that the function of language is to picture the word with language we make ourselves pictures of facts the picture is our model of reality the words we use are linked to things in the empirical world if I say there is a chair in my dining room then I can picture the chair the word relates to an object in the real world languages for the purpose of creating a picture in our mind of how things are empirically the Vienna circle influenced by the work of human Wittgenstein were a group of philosophers that met together in Vienna in the 1920s their purpose was to try and establish a common criteria for meaning the Vienna circle adopted an approach that has become known as logical positivism the logical positivists claimed that a statement has meaning if there is a method available for verifying it ie if it is possible to perform an act that could establish the statement as true what we are concerned with here is not actually the truth or falsity of the statement it is not only true statements that have meaning what logical positivists claim is that when I say there is a chair in my dining room I must be able to go into the dining room and see the chair if that were not possible then the statement lacks meaning if I were able to check and discover no chair then the statement is still meaningful it is just false the vienna circle established a criteria for meaning by dividing statements into three categories the first are meaningful statements because there cannot be anything else these statements are analytic which means that they are true by definition analytic statements are meaningful but they don't really tell us anything because they are tautologies they contain within them their own meaning and are true by definition I do not need to go and check them to establish their truth in the empirical world because they do not require it this is what Anselm was trying to achieve with his ontological argument he attempted to make God exists an analytic statement mathematical statements are analytic and statements of definition the second category of statements are also meaningful these statements are ones which require additional information synthetic statements are propositions which make claims about the empirical world they need to be checked for truth with empirical evidence and thus are meaningful because I can go and find the information needed to check the claim for truth synthetic statements do contain information the final category of statements that the vienna circle identifies are meaningless statements any statements which are not analytic or synthetic are meaningless statements about feelings emotions subjective or abstract ideas are all meaningless because they are not self-evident and they do not make claims about the empirical world and its reality such statements cannot be checked and thus convey no meaning because they do not tell us anything about the real world let us have a look then at the list of statements from earlier it would seem from the work of the vienna circle that the statements can be divided in this way meaningful statements may be analytic such as these first two they can also be scientific such as these synthetic statements I can go and check these propositions and so they convey meaning however these other statements are all meaningless because they do not convey information that can be verified religious statements ethical statements statements that are subjective or emotive however here we stumble upon a bit of a problem historical statements are also meaningless because they cannot be verified sure I can go and find a history book but how do I know that the writer is making a verifiable claim I can't go and check the claim because I can't travel back in time and see in addition future statements pose a similar problem because again I am not in a position to go and check the truth of the statement when we look more closely we can see as well in that meaningful category a few meaningless statements have appeared I am NOT in the position to check all metals I can check some I can also go and look at the definition of a metal but actually this statement may be meaningless because all the time there is the potential for a metal to be discovered that does not expand when heated here in this world or under some conditions that I haven't taken into account then the statement is meaningless because it cannot be checked in addition the statement about the cat is actually a historical statement if we are not careful we reduce many scientific statements to meaninglessness what about those statements made by physicists that make propositions about the world but which we have no means of checking empirically string theory for example makes proposals about the makeup of the world which postulate the existence of different dimensions in order for the maths to add up these would be meaningless but a physicist would disagree a Jair visited the Vienna circle and can be described as a logical positivist since in his book language truth and logic in order to explore and develop logical positivism further and avoid some of the problems that had arisen from the verification principle clearly it is unsatisfactory for scientific and historical statements to be considered meaningless so err divided verification into two types strong verification would be where a proposition can be verified in practice this means that I could actually go and check the statements in reality so the chair is in my dining room is a statement that actually can be checked because we can go walk into the room and find the chair if I don't have a dining room or a chair it will soon be discovered and so this statement is meaningful the second category is the type of statement where some evidence that I could have could count towards the claim or I know what would need to be done to check the statement but maybe cannot actually do it if I make a historical statement now we can see that I know what I would need to do to check the truth of such claims about what happened in the past but since I can't time travel I can't do it I have some evidence that counts towards it because I have the writing of scholars who have investigated primary and secondary sources and so it's meaningful according to weak verification now what does Ayers work do for the list of statements from earlier our list of meaningful statements was pretty short but now we can move back to those statements that we had previously disregarded because according to weak verification there is some evidence that camps towards them or I know what to do to check the statement for truth but I'm not going to do it because it's not practical we can move past and future statements about the empirical world into the meaningful category for the same reasons and we can see that some subjective statements can be seen as meaningful because there can be some evidence that counts toward them there is evidence that counts towards the idea that I like New Model Army you only need to look at my CD rack or scroll through my mp3 player you could look through the ticket stubs as well from the concerts I have been to in addition we can say that there is evidence that could count towards ethical statements because we can look at the effects of certain actions like murder or see the consensus view we can look at the various theories of morality and see reasoning that counts towards the claim in addition religious statements may also be meaningful according to weak verification since we have covered arguments in AAS which may count towards the claims of God's existence and there are similar arguments that could support claims of the afterlife in contrast of the problems with verification principle as originally proposed air has accidentally made all language meaningful with weak verification in fact eventually air declared that his work had mostly been false having said this though the work of the vienna circle and logical positivists has been very important in the search for criteria of meaning it has shown that meaning may be more than simply the ability to have an empirical object that matches with the word that is written or spoken and it enabled other scholars to develop the search further for a criteria for meaning

Channel: Philosophy and Ethics

Views: 17,485

Rating: 4.7906976 out of 5

Keywords: Verificationism, Philosophy (Field Of Study)

Id: 381eZrBU86s

Length: 12min 37sec (757 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 15 2015