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To what extent is the verification principle relevant to the meaning of a statement?

The Verification Principle was used by a group of scientists and philosophers known as the Vienna Circle who wanted an account of what constitutes meaningfulness in order to avoid ‘meaningless’ philosophical talk. From their discussions came Logical Positivism. Logical Positivism stemmed from both empiricism and positivism. Empiricists believe that all knowledge comes from experience. Positivists believe that scientific methodologies should be applied to many disciplines, including the humanities. The Logical Positivists combined the views of both, believing that philosophical methodology should be as strict as that of the physical sciences. They wished to explain meaning whilst eliminating metaphysics – and for this they used the Verification Principle. For the purpose of this essay, due to space considerations, I shall be considering Ayer’s formulations of the Verification Principle as opposed to that of Carnap.

In order to assess the meaning of any proposition or statement of fact the Logical Positivists needed a criterion of significance. They thought that there were only two types of proposition that are meaningful; logical truths (in the form of tautologies) and verifiable empirical propositions. The latter can be seen to be derived from Empiricism because it is based on empirical evidence whereas the former is based on logical (scientific) reasoning. They argued that logical proofs, in the form of tautologies, are a priori, because they are automatically true with respect to their meaning, and thereby analytic, whereas observation statements are synthetic a posteriori. Ayer gives an example of the distinction between analytic and synthetic propositions as follows:

Thus the proposition ‘There are ants which have established a system of slavery’ is a synthetic proposition… On the other hand, the proposition ‘Either some ants are parasitic or none are’ is an analytic proposition.[i]

In order to verify the first proposition we would need to go out and look for evidence in the world in order to prove that it is meaningful. However since ‘a tautology is true in virtue of its mere form’[ii] we do not need to look in the world to verify it – it is logically true. The motivations for asserting this are in order to allow for statements of logic and mathematics, which are not empirically verifiable. It has been argued that logical propositions of this form reveal something new to us under analysis even though they are logically entailed. The Logical Positivists felt that ‘they call attention to linguistic usages, of which we might otherwise not be conscious, and they reveal unsuspected implications in our assertions and beliefs’[iii] and also that logical analysis ‘makes us aware of all that we have implicitly asserted.’[iv]

The empirical principle of verifying the meaning of a statement with recourse to experience is the Verification Principle:

We say that a sentence is factually significant to any given person, if and only if, he knows how to verify the proposition that it purports to express.[v]

A statement is thereby meaningful iff it can be proved to be true or false, in principle, with recourse to experience. The Logical Positivists proceeded to claim that ‘…the meaning of a statement lies in the method of its verification. A statement asserts only so much as is verifiable with respect to it.’[vi] We know the meaning of any proposition if we know the method we would use in order to verify it (prove it either true or false).

According to the Logical Positivists any statements which do not fall under these categories, i.e. not logically or empirically verifiable, are meaningless. They claimed that this was true of the whole class of Metaphysics, as there are no tests that can be applied to them to test their truth or falsity. This view is summarised by M. Schlick:

If I am unable, in principle, to verify a proposition, that is, if I am absolutely ignorant of how to proceed, of what I must do in order to ascertain its truth or falsity, then obviously I do not know what the proposition actually states.[vii]

So, if there is no way in which I can verify a proposition then according to the Logical Positivists it is meaningless. There are statements which are trivially false or pointless to work out; examples given by Carnap include ‘the average weight of the inhabitants of Vienna whose telephone number ends with a 3’ and ‘in 1910 Vienna had only 6 inhabitants’. He said of such statements that:

Such sentences are really meaningful, though they are pointless or false; for it is only meaningful sentences that are even divisible into (theoretically) fruitful and sterile, true and false.[viii]

It can be seen that there are two types of meaningless sentences or propositions, either strings of utter gibberish using ‘words’ which are not contained in our language, or sentences ‘made of regular English words… [which] because they are grammatical from a superficially syntactic point of view… [give] a kind of illusion of understanding.’[ix] This second type is called a pseudo-statement because it appears to be grammatically a normal statement or proposition. Statements of Metaphysics are held to be pseudo-statements because although they are grammatically correct they are, in themselves meaningless, either because they are entirely nonsensical or because they contain a word whose meaning is not verifiable. For instance, Carnap gives the example of the word ‘teavy’. We would say that ‘in order to learn the meaning of this word, we ask him about its criterion of application: how is one to ascertain in a concrete case whether a given thing is teavy or not?’[x] If there are no circumstances in which we can empirically verify the meaning of the word then why should we believe that objects could have the attribute ‘teavy’ since it makes no difference to the world if it is true or false? The Logical Positivists argued that the same thing could be held true of most of the claims of Metaphysics.

Ayer found that there was a need to further clarify the Verification Principle. First he compared verification ‘in practice’ with verification ‘in principle’. The former is being able to actually perform the observations necessary in order to verify a proposition. For example, in order to verify the statement ‘my cat is in my garden’ I would just need to get up and look to see if he is or is not in the garden, thus rendering the statement true or false, and therefore meaningful. However there are other statements, such as ‘there is a nomadic race of aliens who live in the next solar system’. I would be incapable of verifying this particular statement, and indeed may never be able to, but I understand what I would need to do in order to verify it; go to the next solar system, observe whether there is life at all, and then observe whether or not it is nomadic in nature. Ayer opts for the weaker version of this, statements which can ‘in principle’ be verified, in order to not to rule statements of the following sort meaningless:

There remain a number of significant propositions, concerning matters of fact, which we could not verify even if we chose; simply because we lack the practical means of placing ourselves in the situation where the relevant observations could be made.[xi]

He also distinguishes between strong verification and weak verification. A statement would be strongly verifiable if it can be conclusively proved by experimental or observational evidence, and weakly verifiable if evidence can only show it to be probable. Again Ayer opts for the weaker of the two because Humean views of necessity would seem to rule out empirical proof. He says:

No matter how often it is verified in practice, there still remains the possibility that it will be confuted on some future occasion. The fact that a law has been substantiated in n-1 cases affords no logical guarantee that it will be substantiated in the nth case also, no matter how large we take n to be.[xii]

There are difficulties with Ayer’s original interpretation of the Verification Principle, because it has been argued that sentences that they would want to call ‘meaningless’ can still be allowed:

This formulation of the verification principle fails. Take some experiential proposition… “O”, and any “nonsensical” statement “N”. Then, since the observation statement “O” can be deduced from “N”, together with “if N then O”, but not from “if N then O” on its own, “N” counts as factually meaningful according to this formulation of the verification principle. Thus, if we take “N” to be “the Nothing nothings” and “O” to be “that pillar box is red”, we can establish that “the Nothing nothings” is factually significant.[xiii]

So, according to this initial interpretation of the Verification Principle sentences such as ‘the Nothing nothings’ are still factually significant and thereby meaningful. Ayer goes on to produce a second version of the Verification Principle, which is summarised in his preface to the second edition of Language, Truth and Logic. Unfortunately the second interpretation has been shown by Alonzo Church to have much the same problem as the first. This inability to provide a cohesive account of the Verification Principle has proved a difficulty for the Logical Positivists, and many competing versions have been (unsuccessfully) proposed.

In addition, since a statement is meaningful only as far as it is verifiable it seems strange that in scientific theories, such as theories of gravitational fields, there are many statements that are not verifiable. Since such statements are very abstract they cannot be directly tested. Schlick argued that the principles of a scientific theory are not propositions as such, but are instead rules of inference. If this is the case then there is no difficulty with them not being verifiable because the question itself just does not arise. This difficulty is neatly summarised by A. C. Grayling:

…the general laws of science turn out not to be, even in principle, verifiable, if ‘verifying’ means furnishing proof of their truth. Another victim is history: in what way can the truth of assertions about the past be verified by present or future observations?[xiv]

Another criticism raised against the Verification Principle is that ‘…the principle itself falls into neither of the categories of significant propositions which it is used to demarcate. It is not a tautology, nor is it empirically verifiable.’[xv] And so we can see that Logical Positivists have to provide an account of either how their own principle can be verified or why it does not need to be.

It has been argued also that there is no single criterion of verifiability. There are many considerations for any propositional statement. For example, the following may need to be taken into account:

Are my eyes open?
Am I looking in the right place?
Are there any distortion effects on my vision? (e.g. fog or haze)
Etc.

Therefore, it is not simply a matter of going out and observing. In addition it has been argued that all observation is theory dependant anyway. We have prior theories, which affect our current observations:

… our observations are conducted in terms of our antecedent theories, which therefore determine what we observe… But if theory is carried to observation, then the ‘meaning’ of observation terms, and the notion of observational confirmation of theory itself, is established in advance – logically speaking – of observation[xvi]

This entails that any attempt to verify a statement would automatically be biased and thereby not a ‘factual’ account of the type that the Logical Positivists were attempting to create.

Logical Positivists determine the meaning of a proposition to be the very methods of verification for it. This would seem to be counter-intuitive because ‘the business of setting out to verify the statement…would be impossible unless we already knew its meaning’[xvii] and since ‘the question of verifiability and verification conditions is conceptually posterior to knowing what the sentence means; it seems we have to know what a sentence means in order to know how to verify it.’[xviii] This would seem to pose a difficulty for the Verification Principle. It can be avoided by denying that it is a theory of meaning since ‘…even if it is true that a proposition acquires factual significance for me only if I can verify it, it does not follow from this alone that the method of verifying the proposition constitutes its meaning.’[xix] This would seem to be in tune with everyday views of meaning because there is some sense in which we would want to say that metaphysical propositions have meaning even if they are not factually significant.

To conclude, we can see that although the Verification Principle seemed initially fairly promising as a theory of meaning (although not towards a theory of metaphysics) it has several difficulties. It cannot explain its own methodology in a convincing way, and does not seem to be able to provide a satisfactory formulation of itself. As an explanation of meaning it appears to be analysing meaning in terms of a principle that can only be used if the meaning is already presumed. Therefore the Verification Principle does not seem to have added anything to our conception of meaning.

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[i] A. J. Ayer, Language Truth and Logic, Penguin Books 1990, p73
[ii] R. Carnap, ‘The Old and the New Logic’, Trans. Isaac Levi, Logical Positivism, Ed. A. J. Ayer, The Free Press 1959, p142
[iii] A. J. Ayer, Language Truth and Logic, Penguin Books 1990, p74
[iv] H. Hahn, ‘Logic, Mathematics and Knowledge of Nature’, Trans. Arthur Pap, Logical Positivism, Ed. A. J. Ayer, The Free Press 1959, p156-7
[v] A. J. Ayer, Language Truth and Logic, Penguin Books 1990, p16
[vi] R. Carnap, ‘The Elimination of Metaphysics Through Logical Analysis of Language’, Trans. Arthur Pap, Logical Positivism, Ed. A. J. Ayer, The Free Press 1959, p76
[vii] M. Schlick, ‘Positivism and Realism’, Trans. David Rynin, Logical Positivism, Ed. A. J. Ayer, The Free Press 1959, p87
[viii] R. Carnap, ‘The Elimination of Metaphysics Through Logical Analysis of Language’, Trans. Arthur Pap, Logical Positivism, Ed. A. J. Ayer, The Free Press 1959, p61
[ix] W. G. Lycan, Philosophy of language, Routledge 1999, p120-1
[x] R. Carnap, ‘The Elimination of Metaphysics Through Logical Analysis of Language’, Trans. Arthur Pap, Logical Positivism, Ed. A. J. Ayer, The Free Press 1959, p64
[xi] A. J. Ayer, Language Truth and Logic, Penguin Books 1990, p17
[xii] A. J. Ayer, Language Truth and Logic, Penguin Books 1990, p64
[xiii] A. Miller, Philosophy of Language, UCL Press 1998, p85
[xiv] A. C. Grayling, An Introduction to Philosophical Logic, Blackwell Publishers 1997, p217
[xv] A. C. Grayling, An Introduction to Philosophical Logic, Blackwell Publishers 1997, p219
[xvi] A. C. Grayling, An Introduction to Philosophical Logic, Blackwell Publishers 1997, p221
[xvii] A. C. Grayling, An Introduction to Philosophical Logic, Blackwell Publishers 1997, p220
[xviii] W. G. Lycan, Philosophy of language, Routledge 1999, p120
[xix] A. C. Grayling, An Introduction to Philosophical Logic, Blackwell Publishers 1997, p216

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