Verification Principle

Verification Principle

1. Cognitive

   • Language deals with factual statements that can be proved to be either true or false. These can be either empirically provable, such as 'The Queen is the Head of State', or statement that, as far as believers are concerned, contain meaningful factual content, such as 'God exists' or 'God loves me'.

2. Logical Positivism

   • Criteria of meaning
   • Used Hume's idea of empiricism & applied it to language
     • Experience could be categorised as a criterion of meaning
       • Experience is key
   • For anything to have meaning it has to be verifiable
     • see
     • hear
     • touch
     • smell
     • taste
     • It has to have the ability to be verified to be true or false
   • A sentence must be considered meaningless if it cannot be verified
   • Rejected metaphysics - it is fruitless
     • Meaningless to talk of God
       • Not possible to empiricaly test concepts of God
   • Only those propositions that can be verifies empirically have meaning
     • Shclick
       • 'The meaning of a proposition is the method of verification;
   • a posteriori reasoning
     • synthetic propsitions
   • Miracles are meaningless
     • The intervention of God is only the supposed effect

3. David Hume

   • All ideas are based on experience
     • Experience = True Knowledge
     • Matters of Fact
   • Logic & Mathematics not based on experience
     • 'relation of ideas'
   • Empiricism

4. A.J.Ayer

   • Tried to reinterpret the verification principle
   • Outlined distinction between verifiablity
     • In Pricniple
       • Therefore is meaningful
       • Scientific laws may be verifiable in principle
     • In Practice
       • Scientific laws can't be verified in practice
   • Other type of distincition
     • Strong Verification
       • To directly observe something
     • Weak Verification
       • Some form of sense experience that counts toward it
       • it is possible for experience to render it probable
   • Accepted a priori truths

5. Criticisms

   • The verifiction principle itself is maningless
   • Hick
     • Eschatological verification
       • We can verify God's exsitence when we die
   • Practical prolems
     • Blackholes
     • Mental Illnesses
     • Historical statements
   • Design Argument is weak verification for the existence of God
     • Evil & Suffering
   • Laws such as 'do not kill' can be considered menaingless
     • Affects religous and secular laws
   • Kieth Ward
     • 'If I were God I would be able to check out the truch of my own existnec'
       • Verifiable through principle

6. Strengths

   • Anything meaningful is learnt & developed through our experiences i.e. compassion
   • A.J.Ayer's development makes the principle more acceptable
     • Yet his development does not help talk of God
   • Makes us think about the meaning of langauge more carefully
     • You cannot make non-cognitive statements into cognitive ones