Philosophy Concordance - online philosophical quotations

But what, it may be asked, of the verification theory of meaning?

The verification theory of meaning, which has been conspicuous in the literature from Peirce onward, is that the meaning of a statement is the method of empirically confirming or infirming it. An analytic statement is that limiting case which is confirmed no matter what.

Then what the verification theory says is that statements are synonymous if and only if they are alike in point of method of empirical confirmation or infirmation.

So, if the verification theory can be accepted as an adequate account of statement synonymy, the notion of analyticity is saved after all. However, let us reflect.

Radical reductionism, in one form or another, well antedates the verification theory of meaning explicitly so called.

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

The objects of verification or confirmation being statements, this emphasis gave the statement an ascendancy over the word or term as unit of significant discourse.

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.

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.