Verification and Falsification

Overview

Recall questions on the Vienna Circle and logical positivism, Ayer's principle, Flew's parable and the replies of Hare and Mitchell.

What you need to know

Answer each one before you reveal it.

Questions from this subtopic

Each one with the model answer underneath.

1. 1

   What were the logical positivists trying to do?

   Model answer

   The philosophers and scientists who met in Vienna between the wars wanted to clear metaphysics out of philosophy by settling what can meaningfully be said at all. Impressed by physics and by the new logic, they held that the only genuine statements are those settled by logic and mathematics on the one hand and by observation on the other. Anything else - traditional metaphysics, theology, much of aesthetics - was not false but was not a statement of fact in the first place.

2. 2

   Distinguish analytic and synthetic statements.

   Model answer

   An analytic statement is true or false purely in virtue of what its words mean, so it can be settled without inspecting the world, and it tells us nothing new about the world either. A synthetic statement says something that might have been otherwise, so it must be checked against experience. The positivist claim is that every meaningful statement falls into one class or the other, and that religious claims belong to neither.

3. 3

   Explain what Ayer's verification principle actually claimed.

   Model answer

   That a sentence is factually significant to a person only if they know what observations would settle it, or would at least count towards settling it. Ayer was careful that this is a criterion of meaning, not of truth: the point is not that religious claims are false but that they say nothing that could be true or false. He distinguished strong verification, which demands conclusive settlement by experience, from weak verification, which asks only whether observation bears on the claim's probability, and adopted the weak version, since the strong one would abolish scientific laws and all statements about the past.

4. 4

   What follows for religious statements on Ayer's account?

   Model answer

   That they are literally without factual meaning. The claim that God exists is not analytic, since denying it involves no contradiction, and no observation counts for or against it, since believers do not treat any state of the world as settling it. So it is not a claim at all. Ayer noted that this cuts in every direction: the atheist who denies God and the agnostic who suspends judgement are both treating a meaningless sentence as if it were a proposition, so his position is not atheism but the rejection of the whole dispute.

5. 5

   Why was the verification principle an embarrassment to its own supporters?

   Model answer

   Because it does not pass its own test. It is not true by definition, so it is not analytic, and no observation could verify it, so it is not empirically verifiable either. By its own standard it is therefore meaningless. Supporters tried recasting it as a recommendation about how to use words rather than as a claim, but that weakens it fatally, since a believer may simply decline the recommendation.

6. 6

   Besides failing its own test, what went wrong with the verification principle?

   Model answer

   It kept excluding too much or letting in too much. Universal scientific laws cannot be conclusively verified, statements about the remote past cannot be checked by any observation now available, and claims about other people's inner lives are verifiable by nobody but them - yet all of these look perfectly meaningful. Ayer's revised formulation in his second edition was shown to admit any sentence whatever. History and ethics kept being swept away alongside theology, and that pattern of endless repair is much of why the programme was abandoned.

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