PHIL 2504 Lecture Notes - Lecture 6: Verificationism, Truth Condition, Logical Positivism
31 Mar 2018
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Theories of meaning and the meaning facts. Theories of meaning will examine questions about meaning facts, including: What makes a linguistic expression meaningful as opposed to meaningless. The nature of analytic meaning (remember truths of fact versus of meaning distinction) Verificationism"s roots in logical positivism (empiricism): a difference must make. Before asking whether a sentence is true, we first need to know whether it is meaningful. Rather than assume sentences are meaningful and worry about how to identify meaningless ones, verificationists did the opposite. Theory supplies an epistemic account of meaning that is practically guiding. A sentence"s verification condition is the set of possible experiences that would show that sentence to be true. A sentence"s falsification condition is the set of experiences that would show the sentence to be false. The verification condition can test not only for meaningfulness itself, but also for particular meanings. Verificationists say no: they allow some sentences that are not empirically testable to be meaningful.
