verification principle

the criterion of SCIENCE proposed by Logical Positivists (see POSITIVISM) that to be accepted as 'scientific’ a proposition must be ‘verifiable’. Problems with the concept of VERIFICATION (e.g. we can never establish with certainty universal propositions, such as ‘all swans are white’, since we can never know future cases) have led some theorists (notably POPPER) to suggest that this must be replaced as the criterion of scientific statements by the conception of ‘falsifiability’, since a single contrary instance (e.g. a single instance of a ‘black swan’) will falsify a universal proposition (see FALSIFICATION AND FALSIFICATIONISM). Because it is also proposed by Logical Positivists as a criterion of‘meaningfulness’, a further criticism of the verification principle is that it leaves utterly unclear the status of the principle, which is itself unverifiable -the so-called ‘paradox’ of Positivism.

Collins Dictionary of Sociology, 3rd ed. © HarperCollins Publishers 2000

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It is such a pity that this Verification Principle has closed so many people's minds so they are unable to explore a reality that is beyond touch, taste and sight.

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The fourth response to the challenge of the verification principle lies in challenging the verification of that principle itself.

And indeed, on Ayer's standards, it seems that the verification principle is as metaphysical as talk of God....

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The first of these, unsurprisingly, is that of the logical positivists, and traces the familiar history of the demise of the verification principle. The second, picking up theses discussed in her earlier book, is the pragmatist principle of Charles S.

The classical verification principle runs into trouble over dispositional terms and other subjunctive idioms, over the need for a non-circular defence of its revisionary conception of meaning, and over the debates about the role and nature of the experiential basis of meaning and knowledge.

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