Verification and falsification

Overview

Recall questions on logical positivism, Ayer's verification principle in its strong and weak forms, the self-refutation problem and other criticisms, eschatological verification, Flew's parable and challenge and believers' responses, Hare's bliks, Mitchell's partisan and stranger, and whether verification shows religious language to be meaningless.

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 did the logical positivists claim?

   Model answer

   They held that the only statements worth taking seriously are those of logic and mathematics on the one hand and empirical science on the other. Metaphysics, theology, ethics and aesthetics, they argued, produce sentences that look like statements of fact but cannot be tested against anything, and so say nothing at all. Their programme was to identify a criterion that would separate genuine assertions from disguised nonsense.

2. 2

   State the verification principle as Ayer presents it.

   Model answer

   A sentence is factually significant to a given person if, and only if, that person knows what observations would lead them to accept it as true or reject it as false. Alongside this, Ayer allows that tautologies are meaningful because they are true by definition, though they tell us nothing about the world. Anything which is neither a tautology nor open to empirical testing is, on his account, literally without meaning.

3. 3

   Why is it important that the verification principle is a criterion of meaning rather than of truth?

   Model answer

   Because it is not a claim that religious statements are false. A false statement is perfectly meaningful; we understand it and have simply established that things are otherwise. Ayer's charge is far stronger: that sentences about God fail to make any assertion at all, so there is nothing there to be true or false, believed or denied. Students who present the principle as an argument that God does not exist have misunderstood what it says.

4. 4

   What is strong verification, and why did Ayer reject it?

   Model answer

   Strong verification requires that a statement be conclusively established by observation before it counts as meaningful. Ayer rejected it as far too severe, because it would eliminate the general laws of science, which no finite set of observations can conclusively prove, along with statements about the distant past and about other people's inner lives. A criterion that destroys physics along with theology is useless.

5. 5

   What is weak verification?

   Model answer

   It requires only that some possible observations would be relevant to the statement, making it more or less probable. On this looser test, a claim about the far side of the moon is meaningful before anyone goes there, because we know what would count as evidence. Ayer adopted this version so that scientific and historical claims survive while, he argued, religious ones still do not.

6. 6

   Why does Ayer's position imply that the sentence God exists is not false?

   Model answer

   Because falsity is a status only a genuine proposition can have. If no observation would count either way, the sentence has failed the test for making a claim about the world, so it never gets as far as being assessed. Ayer's point is that it belongs with expressions of feeling rather than with statements about how things are.

Other ways to work this

The same content, four other ways.

What is inside Levo

Six ways to work the same material.