Verificationism

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. Attempts to define a precise criterion of meaning faced intractable problems from the movement's inception. The earliest versions were found to be too restrictive in that they excluded universal generalizations, such as scientific laws. Various alternative proposals were devised, which distinguished between strong and weak verifiability or between practical and in-principle verifiability, and probabilistic variations. In the 1950s, the § theoretical foundations of verificationism encountered escalating scrutiny through the work of philosophers such as Willard Van Orman Quine and Karl Popper. Widespread sentiment deemed it impossible to formulate a universal criterion that could preserve scientific inquiry while rejecting the metaphysical ambiguities the positivists sought to exclude. By the 1960s, verificationism had become widely regarded as untenable and its abandonment is cited as a decisive factor in the subsequent decline of logical positivism. Nonetheless, it would continue to influence later post-positivist philosophy and...