Philosophy Concordance - online philosophical quotations

One of these developments was the increasing emphasis on verification or confirmation, which came with the explicitly so-called verification theory of meaning.

Section 60), underlies Russell'a concept of incomplete symbols defined in use;16b also it is implicit in the verification theory of meaning, since the objects of verification are statements.

The language which Carnap adopted as his starting point was not a sense-datum language in the narrowest conceivable sense, for it included also the notations of logic, up through higher set theory.

This notion is of course implicit in the verification theory of meaning.

We have found ourselves led, indeed, from the latter problem to the former through the verification theory of meaning.

I am impressed also, apart from prefabricated examples of black and white balls in an urn, with how baffling the problem has always been of arriving at any explicit theory of the empirical confirmation of a synthetic statement.

We develop an algebraic theory for reasoning about them, but we find it inconveniently complex, because certain functions such as square root lack values for some arguments.

The physical objects are no more reducible to experience than the irrational numbers to rational numbers, but their incorporation into the theory enables us to get more easily from one statement about experience to another.

Science is a continuation of common sense, and it continues the common-sense expedient of swelling ontology to simplify theory.

If the kinetic theory were wrong, then no experience at all need correspond to it; but at the same time there would be a criterion for movement of molecules in a gas. The inventor of the theory would say "I am going to take such-and-such as a criterion".