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Verificationism: Its History and Prospects VERIFICATIONISM Not a chronological account of verificationist philosophies, Misak’s book nevertheless draws on a wide range of historical and contemporary sources to advance an argument for a position difficult to label in a non-misleading way. She calls her position ‘moderate verificationism’ but also presents it as a development of Peircean pragmatism. Crucial to this view is a broader concept of experience and a broader account of what it is to understand a sentence than are found in earlier forms of verificationism. I would urge those discouraged by the current state of Anglo-American philosophy to give Misak a hearing. In her hands philosophy is flourishing. Peter H.Hare State University of New York at Buffalo Verificationism is a survey of the precursors, the main proponents and the rehabilitators of one of the most influential concepts in philosophy and scientific methodology between the 1930s and the 1960s. In line with the resurgence of interest in logical positivism amongst philosophers of science, Verificationism assesses the more flexible ideas of verification which are now being put forward. As the most comprehensive survey of verificationism, this book will be important for researchers and lecturers in the fields of philosophy of science and empiricism. It will also be of interest to those working in general epistemology and in moral philosophy. C.J.Misak is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Toronto; she is the author of Truth and the End of Inquiry. PHILOSOPHICAL ISSUES IN SCIENCE edited by W.H.Newton-Smith THE RATIONAL AND THE SOCIAL James Robert Brown THE NATURE OF DISEASE Lawrie Reznek THE PHILOSOPHICAL DEFENCE OF PSYCHIATRY Lawrie Reznek *INFERENCE TO THE BEST EXPLANATION Peter Lipton *TIME, SPACE AND PHILOSOPHY Christopher Ray MATHEMATICS AND THE IMAGE OF REASON Mary Tiles METAPHYSICS OF CONSCIOUSNESS William Seager *THE LABORATORY OF THE MIND James Robert Brown *COLOUR VISION Evan Thompson * Also available in paperback VERIFICATIONISM Its History and Prospects C.J.Misak London and New York First published 1995 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 © 1995 C.J.Misak All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book has been requested ISBN 0-203-98024-7 Master e-book ISBN ISBN 0-415-12597-9 (hbk) ISBN 0-415-12598-7 (pbk) For David CONTENTS Introduction viii Acknowledgements xv 1 FOUNDERS George Berkeley (1685–1753) 1 David Hume (1711–1776) 8 Auguste Comte (1798–1857) 16 John Stuart Mill (1806–18 73) 23 Ernst Mach (1838–1916) 27 Pierre Duhem (1861–1916) 32 Albert Einstein (1879–1955) 37 Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) 40 Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) 46 2 THE LOGICAL POSITIVISTS AND THE VERIFIABILITY PRINCIPLE The program and its motivations 55 The strong version and its consequences 61 Objections and amendments 66 The verifiability principle and science 77 Popper’s alternative 80 Controversies about experience and truth 83 3 PEIRCE AND THE PRAGMATIC MAXIM The spirit of pragmatism 91 The quest for a generous criterion 93 vii Effects on the interpreter 97 A non-question-begging account of experience 99 The context of inquiry 105 Truth and reality 112 4 WHAT IS IT TO UNDERSTAND A SENTENCE? Dummett and the Acquisition Argument 119 The objection from severity 126 The objection from Quinean holism 133 More objections from holism 141 Truth and pragmatism again 147 5 SOME FURTHER SUGGESTIONS Van Fraassen and the status of unobservable entities 151 Wiggins and the convergence requirement 159 Peacocke’s Discrimination Principle 165 Rorty and the attack on philosophical claims 179 Conclusion 187 Notes 193 References 215 Name index 235 Subject index 237 INTRODUCTION One idea promoted by logical positivism has shown itself to be remarkably resilient. This is the thought which is at the heart of the verifiability principle: a belief with no connection to experience is spurious. A belief which aspires to knowledge cannot reach above or behind experience; if it pretends to do so, it is in some way illegitimate. The logical positivists took the required connection with experience to be empirical verifiability. And they took the nature of the illegitimacy to be meaninglessness. In order to be meaningful, a hypothesis must be such that there is in principle an experiment or observation which would verify it or show it to be true or false. But the idea that a belief with no connection to experience is spurious has many other guises. Its roots go as deep as Berkeley and Hume and they are as widespread as Kant, Leibniz, Comte, Mach, Duhem, Wittgenstein, Einstein and Peirce. It is presently being rehabilitated, after the bruising it took in the logical positivists’ hands, in the work of Bas van Fraassen, Michael Dummett, Crispin Wright, Christopher Peacocke, David Wiggins, Richard Rorty and others. Indeed, the thought that philosophical notions must be connected to experience and practice is at the heart of much contemporary feminist philosophy. So the verificationist idea underlies all sorts of positions which are self-consciously anti-positivist. As A.J.Ayer, one of the most influential of the logical positivists, said, many years after his theory ceased to be a popular view, The verification principle is seldom mentioned and when it is mentioned it is usually scorned; it continues, however, to be put to work. The attitude of many philosophers towards it reminds me of the relation between Pip and Magwitch in Dickens’s Great Expectations. They have lived on the money, but are ashamed to acknowledge its source. (Ayer 1977:156) ix My project is to examine the history of and the arguments for a verificationist criterion of legitimacy, meaningfulness or whatever. This is easier said than done, for arguments here tend to be surprisingly thin on the ground. But once I have identified the considerations which sustain the idea, we shall have a better grasp of just what, if anything, is right about it. And once the defects in some of the proposed criteria are made apparent, we shall be in a better position to see just what sort of criterion, if any, ought to be adopted. Verificationists have tended to be vague about what their criterion is a criterion of. And many who reject the label, but nonetheless make use of the verificationist idea that our theories must be connected to experience and practice, often say nothing at all about what that might mean. Verificationism is usually thought of as a semantic doctrine: a view about the meaning or content of expressions. But we shall see that it can spring from a variety of other (related) sources—from a view about the origins of our thoughts, from a view about what makes for successful science, from an account of what an inquiry aimed at truth requires, etc. But whatever the source of a particular verificationism, when it comes to specifying what it is that the proposed criterion is a criterion of, its advocates more often than not turn to ‘meaningfulness’. Sometimes this seems to be simply in want of a better term, sometimes it seems to be a cloak for uncertainty about what the criterion demarcates, and sometimes the term is used self- consciously and carefully. The logical positivists were at first clear on this matter—they were indeed demarcating meaningful statements from meaningless gibberish—but we shall see that when that criterion proved elusive they too became cagy about what it was that was being marked off. In the chapters that follow, I shall look at the varieties, semantic or not, of verificationism—of the thought that our assertions must be connected to experience. So Popper, van Fraassen, and Rorty, for instance, appear as verificationists in the pages to follow, even though they do not put forward verificationist semantics. Where it is unclear what the criterion in question is a criterion of (meaning- fulness, usefulness in inquiry, what we can frame an idea of, or whatever) or where I want to be careful not to beg any questions, I shall use terms such as ‘legitimacy’ and ‘spuriousness’. The verificationist takes a legitimate or non-spurious hypothesis to be one which is appropriately connected to experience. A number of epistemological themes will emerge from the story that is told, for we shall see that the nature of truth and knowledge is very much at stake in debates about verificationism. Empiricism, or the view that experience is our only source of knowledge, is perhaps the x most well-travelled route to verificationism. And empiricism, after all, incorporates a view about how our beliefs can be justified—we break into the regress of offering reasons for beliefs by appealing, ultimately, to experience. But even those verificationists who are not easily located in the empiricist tradition find themselves straight away answering questions about the nature of truth, knowledge and reality. Perhaps the most important of the epistemological themes I shall uncover is that those who put forward a verificationist criterion end up, whether they intended to or not, with an epistemology heavy with anti-realist strains.
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