VERIFICATIONISM

VERIFICATIONISM

1. STRONG VERIFICATION PRINCIPLE

   • Statement is only meaningful if it can be verified by a sense observation or it is a tautology.
     • Religious statements have no meaning because they cannot be verified as true or false, and therefore do not teach us about the world we live in now.
       • For example, the statement 'God is good' is meaningless as we can never experience through empiricism the goodness of God as God is beyond our understanding.
   • Strengths
     • Establishes a clear definition of meaning for everything around us and only enables us to focus on subject areas which teach us about the world around us. Through this logic, it makes no sense to further investigate topics such as religion which don't teach us about the world around us.
   • Weaknesses
     • Too rigid in that it doesn't allow us to make statements about history, because we can't possibly verify past-events through empiricism.
     • Scientific laws are also considered meaningless according to strong verificationism, because there is always the possibility of experiments showing different results. For example, to say that gravity is constant is meaningless because you can't verify this as true or false through empiricism at all places on Earth at once.

2. WEAK VERIFICATION PRINCIPLE

   • Developed by A.J. Ayer,, Ayer saw problems with the verification principle being strict and so came up with a modified version - weak verification principle
     • For a state,ment to have meaning we need to be able to suggest how it could possibly be verified.
       • For example, universal statements such as ' All ravens are black' are now given meaning because they can be suggested methods to be verified. In this example, it would be to collect all the ravens on the planet and to see if they are all black.
   • Presents religious statements as meaningless as it can't be suggested how we can check the truthfulness of them.
     • John Hick would argue against this by saying that we can verify religious statements eschatologically.
       • He uses the analogy of two travellers walking through a tunnel arguing about whether at the end of the tunnel there is a celestial city. Like the traveller, the believer's statements can be verified at the end.

3. Verificationists came about from logical positivists and they have their origins in a group called the Vienna Circle.

   • Aim of verificationists is to indicate what is factually meaningless so that it isn't investigated further. They believe that language should tell you something about the world. Statements that don't are factually meaningless.

4. It could also be argued that a statement can be meaningful without being verifiable. Swinburne puts forward the example of Schrodinger's cat which is about whether or not the cat in the box is dead or alive. And you cannot know because if you open the box the cat would die.