21st Century

• Logical positivism


  The impact of the verification principle on the use of religion language
• Ayer's approach to verification

  Verification theory
• Participants in the falsification symposium

  • Flew
  • Hare
  • Mitchell
• Wittgenstein's views on language games and forms of life

  How language games may permit religious language to be deemed meaningful yet not cognitive
• There are many ways in which people talk about God and a wide variety of language is used
• The problem for any theist is how one talks about god in a meaningful way if God is transcendent and ineffable
• The problem about God-talk for other people is whether it means anything at all
• Vienna Circle


  A group of philosophers prominent in the two decades after the First World War who took a radical approach to the problems of the meaning of religious terms, dismissing them as meaningless
• Vienna Circle


  • Founded as a result of discussions in 1907
  • Flourished after 1922 when Moritz Schlick assumed leadership
  • Very influenced by modern theories of Science and new developments in Logic
• The Vienna Circle would last for little more than a decade
• Many of the Vienna Circle's leaders were Jewish, some were Marxist, and with the rise of Nazism, sought to continue their careers elsewhere
• A. J. Ayer's 'Language, Truth and Logic' of 1936 brought the ideas of the Vienna Circle to the attention of English readers
• Logical Positivism


  The 'pure' doctrine of the Vienna Circle
• Verificationism


  A philosophical movement which claims that language is only meaningful if it can be verified by a sense-observation or it is a tautology
• Verificationists aimed to apply the same approach to all use of language when making statements of fact as science, which emphasised the importance of confirming any statement by observation
• Factually meaningless


  Statements that do not tell us something that may be shown to be either true or false by sense-observation
• Meaningful statement


  • 'My car is red'
• Factually meaningless statement


  • 'The statute is beautiful'
• Verificationists argue that any statement that cannot be proved true of false is 'meaningless'
• The problem with early verificationism's strict scientific approach is that it would mean that many statements people make are meaningless, even when most people think they make perfect sense
• No statement can be made about history according to verificationism, as there is no way to verify historical facts by observation
• A.J. Ayer's verification theory

  The criterion we use to test the genuineness of apparent statements of fact is the criterion of verifiability
• Practical verifiability


  Statements which could be tested in reality
• Verifiability in principle


  Statements that are meaningful and verifiable but cannot be verified in practice due to lack of technology
• Strong verification


  Anything that can be verified conclusively by observation and experience
• Weak verification


  Statements that can be shown to be probably true beyond any reasonable doubt by observation and experience
• Ayer argued that the sense in which verificationism should be used is the 'weak' sense because the strong sense excluded too many things
• If the principle of verification is applied to religious claims, the claims can appear meaningless because they cannot be supported by observations from sense experience that go beyond reasonable doubt
• Ayer rejected any arguments from religious experience, arguing that religious experiences are not verifiable and therefore do not constitute meaningful statements
• Directly verifiable


  A statement that is either an observation-statement, or is such that in conjunction with one or more observation-statements it entails at least one observation statement which is not deducible from these premises alone
• Indirectly verifiable


  A statement that is not directly verifiable but can be shown to be true or false by reference to directly verifiable statements
• Observation-statement


  A statement which records an actual or possible observation
• Indirectly verifiable


  A statement that is not directly verifiable or analytic and in conjunction with certain other premises it entails one or more directly verifiable statements which are not deducible from these other premises alone
• Ayer stated that in weak verification, it was simply sufficient to state what observations would make the sentence probable
• Ayer gave the example of a sentence stating that there are mountains on the far side of the moon, which was verifiable in principle even though no one had seen the far side of the moon at the time
• Responses to verificationism


  • Verification is unverifiable
  • God-talk is eschatologically verifiable
  • Strong verification has been widely criticised
  • The Evidence Problem
  • Meaningful but unverifiable
  • Sentences of a different order
• Logical Positivism has been much criticized, including by Dorothy Emmet and Anthony Flew
• Falsification


  The key activity is that of falsification. The mark of a genuinely scientific statement is that it is possible to state what would falsify it.
• Popper proposed the Falsification Principle as a criterion of scientific status, not of meaning
• Flew suggested that God-talk is meaningless because it has no falsification criteria, using the analogy of the invisible gardener