What is meaning? - Verificationism

hello YouTube well I'm gonna have a look at some different theories of meaning and in this video we're going to examine one of the most significant theories of meaning with verification ISM verification ISM verification ISM has adherents in many schools but it's most strongly associated with the logical positivists logical positivism flourished around the early to mid 1900s and the goal of its adherence was to radically reform philosophy they wanted to clear away philosophies cobwebs some might say by using a bulldozer on the house but anyway the logical positivists were very impressed by the success of the sciences mathematics and logic all of these disciplines had seen major revolutions around this time and there was a strong sense that these were the the best way of advancing knowledge now philosophy was not in such good shape philosophy they felt couldn't boast the same kind of progress and it hadn't led to the same kind of technological innovations that science maths and logic had been responsible for and there was a sense that a lot of what passed for philosophy a lot of the traditional debates in philosophy especially in metaphysics were just stale fruitless and pointless so they wanted to really reform philosophy and verification ISM was kind of a tool that they they wanted to use to do that and they're also not very keen on things like religion or spirituality either so that's the intellectual background in which verification ISM was developed for application ISM is essentially a theory of meaning which aims to demarcate meaningful from meaningless statements the idea can be expressed in a single principle the verification principle a statement is meaningful if and only if it is either analytic or empirically verifiable what does this mean well firstly let's consider analytic statements traditionally a distinction is drawn between analytic and ethic statements analytic statements are statements which are true or false in virtue of their meaning synthetic statements are statements that are true or false in virtue of the way the world is so if I say it is raining in order to tell whether this is true or false we have to examine the world for example by looking out the window so this statement is synthetic whenever hand if I say all bachelors are unmarried this is true simply invert you of the definition of Bachelor Bachelor is defined as unmarried man so it's not it's not possible for this statement to be false it must be true just because of how our words are defined we don't need to examine the world to see check it's true we know it's true just because of what our words mean so this statement is analytic right then according to the verification principle then analytic statements are fine but they don't say anything about the world they don't give us any factual knowledge they're just a matter of definitions conventions that's that's what they're true or false in virtue of so they don't really tell us anything what about empirically verifiable one statement is empirically verifiable just in case there is some set of observations that would show it to be true consider again it is raining we all know what observations would show this to be true if we were to walk outside and see and feel droplets of water coming down from the sky this would show that the statement is true or if we can't go outside ourselves for some reason you could get someone else to set up a video camera which gives you a live feed of your garden then if you see rain on the live feed you know it's raining so there are many ways that we can tell whether or not this is true now the set of observations that would show a statement to be true is known as that statements verification condition so seeing water fall from the sky is part of the verification condition of the statement it is raining right now according to verification ISM the meaning of a synthetic statement just is its verification condition so that means if you go outside you will see droplets of water fall from the sky is part of what it is raining means so it follows trivially that any synthetic statement that does not have a verification condition that is for which there are no observations that would show it to be true is meaningless so this is what verification ISM as a theory of meaning proposes analytic statements are meaningful simply as a matter of convention and for synthetic statements meaning is identified with the verification condition I hope that's fairly simple why what's the motivation - what's the motivation here why should we accept this well the basic idea here is that statements make claims about the world and the only access we have to the world is through our experience so if we don't know what our experience would be like if a statement is true then it's not really making claims about the world at all hence it's meaningless consider the statement there is a unicorn standing outside my window now suppose that this statement is true ask yourself what difference does it make how does the truth of this statement affect our experience well if we looked out the window we'd see a unicorn okay so the truth of this statement would make a difference but now consider there is an invisible intangible silent odorless and otherwise completely undetectable unicorn standing outside my window well this statement is grammatically correct superficially it looks meaningful and it looks like it says something about how the world is but now suppose it's true and try to imagine what would what would be different well clearly nothing would be different whether this is true or false our experience of the world would be exactly the same makes no difference at all even even if it's true there's no possible way we could know it the unicorn is totally under tense well has no effect on anything so according to the verification principle this statement is actually meaningless and that there is I think some intuitive plausibility there there is a difference I think between this first statement between saying there is a eunuch standing outside my window which we can show to be true or false and saying there is a completely undetectable unicorn standing outside the window I think there is a an important difference between those statements right that's the the basic idea of verification ISM now there are a few immediate objections to the verification principle as I've explained it so far an immediate objection to it is that it completely ignores many kinds of discourse many sentences don't have verification conditions because they're the wrong kind of sentence take for example a questioned such as could you pass the salt questions can't be true or false they may presuppose certain things so this question here presupposes that there's salt on the table but it can't actually be themselves true or false and it's still perfectly meaningful though and similarly commands such as get out and poetry and jokes poems and jokes meaningful but they don't have verification conditions now this is not really a problem it's important to bear in mind that the scope of verification ism was was always fairly limited verification ISM is concerned with what's known as literal meaning the conveying of information about the world truth aptness so in this context meaningless should be understood to mean neither true nor false truth appleís is not the only kind of meaning but it's what concerned the verification ists this was a sort of meaning they were they were interested in so they're not denying that there can be you know poetic meaning for example they're just not interested in that now there are some other objections that are rather more problematic than this consider the core of Pluto is made of cheese now we currently have no way to verify this there's nothing we could do at present to tell if this is true or false well the verification principle then renders it meaningless but it certainly doesn't seem to be meaningless after all in the future we might be able to build rockets and go to Pluto and drill down to its quartz check it in which case this statement would then become meaningful and it's very very odd indeed to say that his statements and meaning should hinge on our current degree of technological development so there's a there's a counterintuitive Mystere so that's one problem another problem consider this statement all Ravens are black nothing could show this to be true if we see a million Ravens and every one of them is black the next the next Raven could be white the problem of course is that the statement covers an infinite number of cases and we can never observe an infinite number of cases there are many other statements like this and that some of them are very important in the sciences this all men are mortal salt dissolves in water ice melts at zero degrees at standard atmospheric pressure it you know these that can be multiplied endlessly it's very odd to say that these should be meaningless it is actually possible to maintain that little statements like this are meaningless certainly some verification ists for example Moritz Schlick took this view about second class here slick viewed through these sorts of statements as being more like rules than factual statements but however we explain it the idea that these are basically meaningless is extremely counterintuitive and you know that's perhaps not not really acceptable so can we resolve these problems can we resolve them well AJ air makes two important distinctions between verification in practice and in principle and between strong and weak verification a statement is verifiable in practice if we are currently in a position to verify it given our current resources so the core of Pluto is made of cheese is not verifiable in practice a statement is verifiable in principle if we can conceive of what of observations would need to be made what sort of position we would need to be in to verify it now in the case of Pluto it would in principle be possible to send a rocket out there and dig a massive hole to the center of the planet to see what it's made of so the core of Pluto is made of cheese is verifiable in principle right secondly a statement is strongly verifiable if it's truth can be conclusively established by experience and a statement is weakly verifiable in experience can make its truth probable so those statements like all Ravens are black cannot be strongly verified we can't conclusively show them to be true they can be weakly verified we can show that they're probable now if we spell out the verification principle using in principle weak verification we can avoid the counterintuitive results we just saw AR suggests but to find out whether a sentence is meaningful we should ask will any possible observations be relevant to the determination of its truth or falsehood would any possible observations be relevant to the determinists termination of its truth or falsehood so we can avoid those immediate problems now I said that the logical positivists wants to radically reform philosophy that was the sort of circumstances in which the verification isn't emerged verification ism is a powerful weapon that can be used to to cut down significant areas of philosophy so I want to consider some of its consequences I'm going to be relatively brief but I'll give you some sense of just how powerful this this theory is of just what you can do with it so let's have a look let's begin with philosophy you might have noted the verification ISM seems to lead to a problem for philosophers namely what exactly is the function of their discipline what role does philosophy have philosophy is not empirical it's not like science it doesn't proceed by gathering evidence through observation but it follows by the verification interval but philosophy cannot make any claims about the world and this is in fact what the verification is held philosophy can't help us gain any knowledge about the world it can't make any factual statements instead a function of philosophy is one of analysis it analyzes clarifies and unpacks our concepts of statements and discovers their logical implications philosophy is essentially concerned with definitions the statements of philosophy though they may be significantly more complex are fundamentally all of the same kind as all bachelors are unmarried they are tautologies they tell us nothing about the world instead philosophy is concerned with our language with the way with our way of speaking about the world now if this seems to devalue philosophy bear in mind that most verification this would say pretty much the same thing about logic and mathematics logic and mathematics can be very useful and helpful despite dealing only with tautologies and the same is true of philosophy clarification of concepts is an important activity of course it's far removed from how many people conceive of philosophy so you can see what I mean when I say they were there aiming for radical reform a good example of philosophy according to the the verification is we'd be Russell's theory of descriptions well it's most most verification lists anyway I'm not going to explain that here but I have a video series about it so go and check that out a verification is two like that theory it's it's kind of a paradigm example of philosophy as analysis and it was pretty influential to the logical positivist so go and have a look at my video on that right then religion take the traditional conception of God as omnipotent omniscient omni-benevolent etc some people have attempted to prove the existence of God a priori as in the many kinds of ontological argument naturally the verification ists would reject this for them all analytic statements our tautologies from a tautology only other tautologies may follow and tautologies tell us nothing about the world so the existence of God must be an empirical hypothesis and therefore for the verification ist's must be empirically verifiable now what could possibly verify the existence of God what observations could we make that would make its existent existence probable well obviously there are many arguments for God a classic argument is that God is needed to explain the regularities in nature or to explain the complexity of the universe and of life also explain what whatever teeny logical arguments basically I assume you're familiar with many variations of these so we can say then that some observations that will empirically verify the existence of God are one the regularity of the universe and to the complexity of life these are the verification condition of God exists or at least part of it and as we know these are observations we make all the time but here's the problem remember that according to verification ISM the meaning of a statement just is its verification condition so if the verification condition of God exists is simply there is regularity in nature of complexity in life then God exists just means there is regularity in nature and complexity in life now no theists would be prepared to accept that this is all they mean when they say God exists when they say God exists they're asserting the existence of a transcendent being whose properties go far beyond any observations we could make but this is just to say that the existence of God is in fact not verifiable unless some think about this a bit a bit more so times are we saying that God is an omnipotent omniscient benevolent etc being now what observations could we make to verify it here's the problem God is by definition omnipotent so that is all-powerful hope you possibly verify something all powerful we could verify the existence of a very very powerful being if after we die we get transported to heaven meet some guy with a big beard who can do anything you ask for then you have good reason to believe in a very powerful being but of course that being isn't necessarily all-powerful here's the point whatever difference an all-powerful being could make to our sense experience it would only take a very powerful being to make that same difference similarly for omniscience how could we possibly verify that a being is all-knowing we could verify that it has a lot of knowledge but all the knowledge so most verification is reject belief in God now note that they wouldn't say that it's false that God exists it's simply meaningless a statement God exists tries to say something about the world and it simply misfires is neither true nor false and the same is true of God does not exist it's meaningless neither true nor false so verification is - not standard atheists although they don't believe in God they wouldn't they wouldn't say God does not exist either because they would regard both of those statements as being without truth value right then ethics ethics verification ISM was used to support a significant theory in meta ethics called emotivism or the the llegué theory which was developed by AJ Ayer emotivism starts by accepting the is or gap and the fact value distinction insights well articulated by David Hume so the is aunt gap is states that we cannot derive normative statements which describe value which tell us what ought to be and ought not to be from descriptive statements which merely tell us how the world is in other words we can't derive value from values from facts we can reason from descriptive premises to a descriptive conclusion for example all men are mortal Socrates is man therefore Socrates is mortal the premises and conclusion of this argument that all descriptive and the argument is clearly valid it's perfectly fine argument similarly we can reason from normative premises to a normative conclusion as in you ought not to kill other humans Bob is a human therefore you want not to kill Bob the first premise there and the conclusion is normative now both of these arguments are fine however human to doubt that very often in moral discourse people will reason from purely descriptive statements alone to a normative conclusion here is a simple example humans will feel pain if you hit them Frank is a human therefore you ought not to hit Frank the problem in this case is that the conclusion simply doesn't follow from the premises there's just it's not logically valid you cannot get that conclusion logically from those premises now we can try adding more descriptive premises to the argument but the conclusion still won't logically follow so I could add for example you know humans if your pain if you hit them Frank is human pain is a form of suffering therefore you want to hit Frank again the conclusion does not logically follow okay you cannot get this normative conclusion from those descriptive premises let's try again let's add premise for Frank does not want to suffer again the conclusion still doesn't follow it does not matter how many facts we state here it is it seems impossible to derive a normative conclusion from purely descriptive premises in order to derive this conclusion we would need to add a normative statement to the premises such as you want not to inflict pain on humans if we if we add you ought not to inflict pain on humans to two these two premises up here we have that as premise 3 then we get the conclusion simple as that but without that normative premise we can't get the normative conclusion so that's the the is aunt Gaby fact value distinction is closely related to this gap the point is that there is a fundamental metaphysical gap between facts and values so take a disagreement about value judgments such as abortion one person says it's always wrong another says it's always permissible now this disagreement may rest on facts for example perhaps the extreme pro-lifer says it's wrong because the fetus has a functioning brain and the extreme pro-choice sir says it's permissible because the fetus does not have a functioning brain in this case the disagreement concerns facts and both parties are wrong we can draw on the empirical sciences to show that they're wrong because we have ways of checking brain development in the fetus if the morality of abortion hinges on the status of the brain then one should be neither completely pro-life nor completely pro-choice and we can use the empirical sciences to show that however the disagreement maybe one of values they may agree completely about all the facts of the case they may both have perfect knowledge of the facts it could be simply that the pro-choice er holds that the woman's bodily autonomy Trump's all other considerations while the pro-lifer holds that the fetus has a right to life which trumps all other considerations so this is a difference in values and the point is that such values seem to be in us not out there in the external world certainly if the pro-choice er is correct or incorrect for holding that bodily autonomy Trump's all other considerations it doesn't it doesn't seem that the empirical sciences could show this values are a very different kind of thing from facts and certainly science has never been able to uncover uncover them and know that of course of logic or mathematics naturally there's been a great deal of discussion about these two distinctions I don't want to explore it here I'll just note that some verification is so they're certainly not all of them but some of them accepted both distinctions and these inspired the meta ethical theory of emotivism well it should be clear how verification is embezzle ease distinctions take any moral judgment such as it was wrong to shoplift that DVD well this clearly isn't isn't analytic nor does it seem to be possible given the azure gap and the fact value distinction to empirically verify it ask yourself what sort of observations could you make to show that it was wrong to shoplift that DVD is true or how about it was right to shoplift that DVD what observations could be make to show that it's true observations of the world do not bear on the question of value as noted it seems that two people could agree completely on all the facts about shoplifting but still make different moral judgments about it well it follows that moral judgments are simply meaningless they do not say anything about the world they are not capable of being true or false instead according to a a who developed emotivism moral judgments are simply expressions of emotion so it was wrong to shoplift that DVD does not say anything more than you shoplifted that DVD it was wrong to shoplift that DVD and it was right to shoplift that DVD both make exactly the same statement they both say exactly the same thing namely you shoplifted that DVD adding that an action is right or wrong does nothing more than Express a particular kind of emotion about it so it's like saying you shopping for that DVD and a disapproving tone of voice so to say it was wrong to shoplift that DVD it was like it's just like saying you shoplifted that DVD ooh generalizing shoplifting is wrong expresses nothing more than shoplifting boo and this is the case for all other moral judgments hence the name yay boo Theory X is good just means X yay X is wrong just means X boo and that's that's all there is to it it's important to bear in mind the distinction between expressing and describing and emotion suppose you feel happy you may look glum because you have a glum looking face but you can describe your feeling by saying I feel happy on the other hand you may feel happy and you may say nothing but you can express your feeling by smiling now for emotivist s-- moral judgments are expressions expressions of emotion if i say murder disgusts me i am describing latitude to murder and what i say can be true or false because i could of course be lying but if i say murder is wrong by merely expressing my attitude and the question of truth or falsity simply doesn't arise of course i might be lying in a sense i might be trying to mislead as to my real feelings just as somebody who's feeling sad can pretend to be happy by smiling but clearly a smile cannot be true or false and so it is with moral judgments wrong judgments can't be true true or false although of course they they can be misleading you can mislead people perhaps you feel that murder is a really wonderful thing but you're not saying anything false by saying that murder is is wrong you're just expressing an attitude a rather surprising consequence of this view is that there are no real moral disagreements suppose two people observe an action say two men kissing one observer smiles because she thinks it's sweets the other has a look of disgust because he doesn't like gay men now his look of disgust doesn't contradict her smile they're just different reactions they're just evincing different feelings similarly if she says it's okay to be gay and he says it's wrong to be gay all they're both doing is evincing their feelings they're not making any statements about anything that can be contradicted so that's emotivism and obviously a motive ism can be extended to aesthetic judgments too so we can we can easily give the same account of aesthetic claims like um you know this painting is beautiful or this this music is ugly or whatever right then okay what about the mind the mind consider mental states suppose you say you're feeling happy you say I'm feeling happy what does this mean well the trouble is that there's no way for me to get inside your mind and observe your first personal mental states all I can access is your third personal behavior or third person behavior now for this reason verification is tend to support a view known as logical behaviorism the basic tenets of logical behaviorism is that all talk about mental states is really talk about actual or potential observable behavior as literally all there is to a mental state the behavior we usually associate with it let me repeat this because you know it's it's quite a radical theory let me repeat any statement that seems to refer to some sort of inner subjective first-person state really refers either to observable behavior also observable behavior that that would occur of certain conditions obtained so an analogy that's useful for understanding behaviorism is the dispositional property for example fragility fragility as a disposition would say it's only realized under certain conditions if I say this glass is fragile that means something like if I drop this glass from one meter onto a hard surface it will shatter and behaviorists argue that mental states should be analyzed in a similar way although of course in the case of mental states the conditional conditionals are much more complex so I say Frank wants an orange this just means something like if you ask Frank do you want an orange he will answer yes if Frank has oranges in his kitchen he will go to the kitchen and get one if you offer Frank either an orange or an apple he will choose the orange and and so on this can be extended indefinitely another example is don't talk to the Hut don't touch the hot stove you'll hurt yourself this means something like if you touch the hot stove you will cry and/or recoil suddenly from the stove and all nurse the part of your body that touches the stove and so on again extended indefinitely that the pain that you feel on touching the hot stove or the the pain that you say you feel on touching a hot stove that just is the observable behavior all that pain is is you know you're crying or you're moving away from the hot stove very suddenly that's all your pain is that you feel when you touch the hot stove this is obviously a very radical and implausible position very very very implausible there's a famous joke that demonstrates the implausibility of this viewpoint it goes something like this what did the behaviorist say to his wife after sex while that was great for you how was it for me it's a silly joke but the objection is sound obviously obviously there is more to mental states than behavior nobody is really a logical behaviorist no one is don't come to me telling me you're a logical behaviorist nobody can really believe this it is nonsense there are plenty of other problems with logical behaviorism I'm gonna look at it in detail in another video so I'm not gonna deal with it here but it is utterly utterly ridiculous it's as ridiculous as it sounds I don't I don't like telling people this some this this this idea this position because it is so ridiculous but I think when you tell people what it is they assume they must be misunderstanding it because it's just so ridiculous it's everyday well I'll explain this in I'll dude I'll do this in another video about this but I won't write about it here but it is it is an extremely it's amazing that anybody could take this seriously I will just note in favor of logical behaviorism it does allow us to solve a number of perennial problems in the philosophy of mind so there's the problem of other minds which is how do we know that other people have Minds given that we can only access their behavior there's the mind-body problem what is the relationship between and matter for materialists as most philosophers are these days the question is how does matter give rise to the mind there's the problem of mental causation how can mental events cause physical events my speaking here is a physical event and one of the causes of this physical event is my desire to speak my desire to create this video but how can a desire which is a mental event cause a physical event so these are these are serious problems of an illogical behaviorist minds are just third-person observable behavior and there is no problem at all with knowing that other people exhibit the personal observable behavior there's no difficulty understanding the relationship between behavior and matter well that man should say behavior that when I've put put mine there but mind is is behavior so I should say understanding the relationship between behavior and matter there's no difficulty understanding how matter gives rise to behavior and there's no difficulty understanding how physical behavior causes other kinds of physical behavior so behaviorism does have some appeal because it allows us to so easily solve these problems that have vexed philosophers for millennia right then that's that's the philosophy of mind moving on science well much of science particularly much of physics concerns itself with entities that go far beyond our everyday experience a simple example might be hydrogen atoms contain one proton now obviously neither hydrogen atoms nor protons are observable we cannot experience things on such a small scale of course most verification is given their reverence for science would not want to say that such statements are meaningless the solution here is quite simple although we can't observe hydrogen atoms or protons directly they can make a difference to our experience because we we have all kinds of experimental equipment designed to do now remember that the meaning of a statement is its verification condition and verification condition of statements about unobservable x' are the particular states of all results from our observable experimental equipment so terms in science which seem to refer to unobservable entities do not really refer to an unobservable entities at all rather than merely tools for explaining and predicting observable phenomena the phenomena that we see in our experimental equipment all of the the meaningful statement is about unobservable as can be reduced to in fact we literally mean the statements about observable phenomena so when I talk about unobservable particles like hydrogen atoms I'm really talking about cloud chambers or diagur counters or C CDs and so on so verification ISM supports a very instrumentalist view of science science doesn't really discover hidden parts of reality a point of science is to make and test predictions on the on the observable level on the level of our experimental equipment okay moving on the past well we can't observe the past directly but we do have plenty of ways to verify past events however verification ISM does lead to some surprising views about the past suppose I say there are only five blades of grass on my lawn exactly five years ago this is verifiable and it's false since we can observe photos of my lawn from that time and see that there were more than five blades of grass similarly for there were over ten billion blades of grass on my lawn exactly five years ago we can see that there were not that many but consider there were less than a million blades of grass on my lawn exactly five years ago and let's let's assume that the average number of blades of grass were lawn my size is about a million approximately a million well in that case there's just no way to confirm this statement one way or the other there are photos of my law but non show the whole thing and non show it in sufficiently high definition to count each individual blade so this statement is not verifiable and that makes it meaningless for the verification astaire simply is no fact of the matter whether there were less than a million blades of grass on my lawn exactly five years ago and that is a deeply implausible conclusion in fact things are even more implausible than they and they then they appear here let's take something is verifiable such as Caesar crossed the Rubicon now remember that according to verification ISM sentences meaning is given by it's verification condition and the verification condition of C's across the Rubicon is the set of observations that would render it probable so that is the present evidence available in history books archaeological sites and so on but that means that C's across the Rubicon isn't really about the past at all it's rather about our present evidence for that past event it's not really possible to say anything about the past we can only talk about the present and the future about our present evidence for past events and then is a very surprising conclusion that we cannot really say anything about the past and that some statements about the past may be neither true nor false it is possible to be more liberal here we could say that the verification condition of statements about the past is the set of observations you would have made had you been there but this leads to problems because why shouldn't we say if this is allowed why shouldn't we then say for example that the verification condition of statements about supernatural beings is the set of observations you would make if you're another supernatural being and watching me say that the verification condition of statements about other minds is a set of observations you would make if you were that other mind you know its verification has been threatened with true realization if we start going down this path I suppose it if we allow verification in principle as I explained earlier then statements about the past we could say are verifiable in principle just as long as time travel is possible because then in principle we could travel back in time and check but that of course is very controversial so you know I mean who knows time travel into the past it doesn't seem to be possible so it seems that some these these statements are not verifiable even in principle and that's that's a problem right well I have covered a great deal of ground here probably too briefly but that should give you some sense of the consequences of verification ISM as you can see it's pretty severe not all verification lists have held have held all these views but it's fair to say that most of verification ist's held most of them and yeah there we are you can see how how radical a position this is and you can see how it can be used to enact radical reform in philosophy right then well we saw that verification ISM is concerned with literal meaning which is the meaning of statements but literal meaning is only one kind of meaning now in fact the verification ISM can be expanded into a more general theory of meaning as noted by Alex Miller so consider questions such as does God exist or widest salt dissolving water we can ask of questions such as these what observations would lead us to answer the question one way or the other and if there are no such observations then the putative question is really meaningless it's not a genuine question so we can say that the meaning of an interrogator sentence is a set of observations that would allow us to answer the question one way or the other so then the the sort of motivation of verification ISM can be expanded to cover questions and we can go further consider imperative sentences commands such as please pass the salt an imperative sentence six for us as a genuine command if and only if there are a series of observable actions that would constitute obeying the command in the case of please pass the salt is obvious what those actions would be now in fact I do think this makes sense as a theory of meaning for imperatives suppose somebody else as a command you don't understand say please the frizzled rocks what you do in this case is request more information about what you're being asked to do about what a series of actions you're being asked to undertake you'd want them to specify more clearly the series of actions you're being asked to undertake and if I were if I asked you to please do get a Frizzle trucks and you asked me to be more clear about what's being requested of you if I were then unable to specify any actions that you're supposed to do it would be a reasonable assumption that my apparent command was meaningless that I hadn't really acted a command at all if I was unable to communicate to you the actions I want to do to undertake so I think that makes sense as a theory of meaning for commands it has some implausibility at least consider desires such as I want an orange we can suggest that an expression of desire is a genuine desire if no me if there are series of observable events which would constitute the satisfaction of that desire so you know eating orange would counts as satisfaction of wanting an orange so it seems that the very that verification ISM can be used not just for literal meaning but also for interrogated meaning imperative meaning connective meaning and so on and I'm sure that you could extend this even further most verification is don't pursue this idea instead content to focus only on literal meaning but it's interesting and I think you know if verification ISM is being offered as a theory of meaning then we can ask why shouldn't it apply to all these other kinds of sentences some explanation needs to be given if we're going to sort of single out literal meaning as operating in this particular way but as saying that others other kinds of statements can can operate in a different way so so there's something to think about there well I think that's enough for now we'll have a look at the criticisms of verification ISM in another video at some point whenever I don't know when I'll get around to that but you are but that's verification ISM and as I say I did kind of speed through a lot of material there quite quickly I hope it wasn't I hope I didn't simplify things too much but you should have some sense of of the of what verification is amazing what of what kind of theory proposes and of the consequences it has and we'll have a look at some criticisms later so so that's verification and thanks for watching good bye

Channel: Kane B

Views: 4,643

Rating: 4.8222222 out of 5

Keywords: verificationism, verification, verification principle, logical positivism, positivism, ayer, empiricism, philosophy, logic, education, a. j. ayer, mortitz schlick, meaning, meaninglessness, analytic, synthetic, verification conditions, religion, ethics, philosophy of mind, mind

Id: u9h8z_n8Qrk

Length: 45min 13sec (2713 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 18 2013