Verificationism
Verificationism was a movement in Western philosophy—in particular, analytic philosophy—that emerged in the 1920s by the efforts of a group of philosophers known as the logical positivists, who aimed to formulate criteria to ensure philosophical statements' meaningfulness and to objectively assess their falsity or truth.
Description
Initially, logical positivists sought a universal language whereby both ordinary language and physics—thereby all of the empirical sciences—could be represented formally via symbolic logic, whereupon the empirical sciences' basis in observation or experience could be clearly discerned and mimicked by philosophy.
Logical positivists' verifiability principle—that only statements about the world that are empirically verifiable or logically necessary are cognitively meaningful—cast theology, metaphysics, and evaluative judgements, such as ethics and aesthetics, as cognitively meaningless "pseudostatements" that were but emotively meaningful.
The verificationist program's fundamental suppositions had varying formulations, which evolved from the 1920s to 1950s into the milder version logical empiricism.
Yet all three of verificationism's shared basic suppositions—verifiability criterion, analytic/synthetic distinction, and observation/theory gap—were by the 1960s found irreparably untenable, signaling the demise of verificationism and, with it, of the entire movement launched by logical positivism.
See also
External links
- Verificationism @ Wikipedia
