Some notes primarily written for F1 and F2, but blogged because also relevant for U1.
Verificationism
Verificationism is the best-known candidate theory of meaning according to which religious language would be revealed as meaningless. It is the central tenet of the Logical Positivism developed by the Vienna Circle in the 1920s, and was brought to the attention of English Philosophy by A J Ayer in his 1932 book Language, Truth and Logic.
Verification Principle (“VP”)
A factual statement is meaningful if and only if
either (a) it is a tautology (it is analytic)
or (b) it is empirically verifiable in principle.
Application of the VP to the case of religious propositions like ‘God exists’ yields the result that such statements are meaningless – at least if they are understood in a fairly literal and traditional way.
For example:
• Insofar as we speak of God as transcendent – existing outside space and time – it seems that we are talking about something whose existence could not possibly be verified by any empirical method. This is because neither our senses nor our scientific probes can reach beyond our world of space and time.
• Similarly, if the claim is that there is an afterlife in a realm called Heaven or Hell that is similarly supposed to be causally isolated from the world in which we live. Nothing (or nothing that we can experience in this life) could count as empirical verification of the existence of such a world.
• Similarly, if the claim is that we have immortal immaterial (non-physical) souls, or if the claim is that God, or angels, or any part of the Creation is immaterial. No such entities could be detected by our senses or our science.
Since the religious claims here are propositional in form, they are factual statements. But they are neither analytic nor empirically verifiable; therefore, according to the Verificationist, they are meaningless.
Motivations
What is the attraction of the Verification Principle?
Well, what motivates it is really two thoughts:
1. If a statement is factual and meaningful, then there must be a real difference in the world between its being true and its not being true. The world is different, in some respect, if it is true, from the way the world would have to be if it were, instead, false.
Now, that thought is an excellent and persuasive one. If the world would be no different whether a statement was true or false, then, surely, that statement isn’t a factual statement about the world. It seems correct that the mark of a meaningful factual statement is that things would have to be one way for the statement to be true, and another – different – way for it to be false. To say that is to say that the truth, as opposed to the falsity, of a genuinely meaningful factual statement would involve a difference in the world – a difference in the ways things were.
2.The second, and more controversial, claim is the claim that scientifically-detectable facts about our world are the only facts that there are; and (?‘hence’) that the only things that we can meaningfully talk about are matters describable by science.
This seems to me much more dubious. First, we surely don’t know that there aren’t facts undetectable by science. Secondly, why can’t the meanings of our words stretch beyond what we can detect to be true or false? After all, we are very adept at manipulating concepts in our thought, by combining and relating and abstracting from simple concepts. We can accordingly construct complex concepts like immaterial realm causally disconnected from our world of space and time. But if we can construct such concepts, then why deny that we can create meaningful statements involving such concepts, even if we cannot tell whether such statements are true?
Objections to verificationism
1. Implausible results in certain areas of Philosophy
Verification leads to implausible results concerning certain subject-areas, including ethics and other minds.
In ethics, verificationists are forced (on pain of classing the whole of ethical discourse as meaningless) to adopt one of two views:
(a) The ‘naturalist’ view that ethical facts are just facts about what is conducive to human happiness or well-being. This places them within the field detectable by science; but it is far from obvious that this is the best, or even a very plausible, moral theory.
(b) The ‘non-cognitivist’ view that the meaning of ethical statements is not factual, but ‘expressive’ or ‘prescriptive’. Moral judgements like ‘torturing cats is wrong’ are not really statements of alleged fact, but disguised expressions of the speaker’s attitude, or disguised imperatives or exhortations to do or not to do certain things.
As to other minds, verificationism leads to the implausible ‘behaviourist’ theory that a person’s being in some mental state amounts to no more than his being disposed to behave in certain ways in response to certain stimuli. This is what verificationism has to do, in order to make the existence of other people’s thoughts verifiable by empirical means. Thus:
• The fact that Jones believes that it is raining amounts to no more than a set of facts about Jones’s actual and possible behaviour: the facts, for example, that, if he goes out, Jones will carry an umbrella (other things being equal); that if he is asked what the weather is like, he will reply (other things being equal) that it is raining; and so on.
This deeply silly theory is now generally regarded as fatally discredited, not least because it seems to leave out what is really central to mentality – namely, what it is like for Jones: how things seem to him within the private, inner, mental, world of his thoughts and feelings.
2. Intellectual arrogance
Verificationism puts all meaningful factual statements within our epistemic reach – in principle, if not in practice. We can in principle know everything that is a factual matter. But why think this? Why are we entitled to assume that the world must be such that every aspect of it is accessible to us by empirical means?
Verificationism conflates factuality with our ability to tell whether something is the case. Factuality should (I think) be thought of, instead, simply in terms of truth-conditions: if a statement is factual, then it has truth-conditions: there are ways that the world would have to be if the statement were to be true. But there is no need – intellectual arrogance aside – to assume that we can always in principle tell whether the conditions are satisfied, for literally any and every factual statement. We have (I think) no right to assume that the question whether a factual statement is true or not is one that we must, in every case, be capable in principle of answering.
Verificationism is, as a result, unjustifiably arrogant about our intellectual capacities, and about the capacity of scientific methods to detect all factual matters. Surely, if we are intellectually modest, we should admit that there may be factual matters that are beyond our capacity to verify. Why think that our senses and our science must in principle be capable of detecting everything that is capable of being the case?
3. Intuitively wrong results
Many statements that the VP classes as meaningless don’t intuitively seem to be meaningless.
There is a wholly undetectable, because immaterial, elephant in the room.
There is an immaterial God who transcends time and space and who created the world.
Again, these seem (arguably – it’s a bit controversial) meaningful, at least in that we think that we can understand what would have to be the case for them to be true, even though nothing in our experience could confirm their truth.
4. Difficulties with universal statements
Statements of things like physical laws take the form of universal statements. For example:
• All gases expand when heated
But it is obviously impossible to demonstrate their truth: it would be an endless task. When would you have finished verifying that every gas expands on every occasion of its being heated?!
5. Hollow victory over theism
Verificationism dismisses religious language as meaningless. But even from an atheist perspective, this is not really the desired result: it amounts to a rather hollow victory, because, since all talk of God is meaningless, if VP is true, the denial that God exists is just as meaningless as the assertion that He does exist.
Surely what we really want, if we are atheists, is to be able to say that we understand the theist’s claims all right; the problem is that there are powerful objections that suggest that the claims are not meaningless, but false.
6. Poorly motivated
Verificationism is poorly motivated, in that it is driven by the rather dubious assumption (see above) that scientifically-detectable facts about our world are the only facts that there are.
7. VP itself meaningless, by its own lights
Finally, there is a standard textbookish criticism that the Verification Principle doesn’t pass its own test of being meaningful.
The Verification Principle is not analytic – you cannot tell that it is true merely by reflecting on the meanings of the terms ‘meaningful’, ‘statement’, etc; so it must be synthetic.
If it is synthetic, then, by its own lights it is meaningful only if its truth can be empirically verified.
But how could the truth of the principle be empirically verified? You would have to identify all the meaningful statements, and check that all of them (and no others) were empirically verifiable. But this is impossible, for at least two reasons:
(a) To identify the meaningful statements, we would need a criterion of meaningfulness in order to do so. If the test were the one in the VP itself, then the exercise would be a pointless one. But if it were another criterion, then that criterion would be a competitor with the criterion given by the VP.
(b) Even if problem (a) could be overcome, the task would be impossible, for there is a potentially infinite number of meaningful statements. But there is no possibility of empirically verifying an infinite number of statements.
So the VP fails its own test, and is therefore meaningless. It therefore cannot be true.
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