verifiability principle
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English[edit]
Etymology[edit]
Coined by the philosopher Alfred Jules Ayer circa 1936.
Noun[edit]
- (philosophy) The principle, especially in 20th-century empiricism, that a statement has meaning if, and only if, either it can be verified by means of empirical observations or it is logically true by definition.
- 1962, Marvin Zimmerman, “The Status of the Verifiability Principle”, in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, volume 22, number 3, page 334:
- It is generally agreed among most advocates of the Verifiability Principle that analytic and empirical statements exhaust the class of cognitively meaningful statements.
- 2001, Samir Okasha, “Verificationism, Realism and Scepticism”, in Erkenntnis, volume 55, number 3, page 376:
- Carnap, for example, invoked the verifiability principle to argue that the problem of the external world was a 'pseudo-problem'—for neither the proposition 'there is an external world' nor its negation is verifiable in experience, so both are meaningless.
Synonyms[edit]
- criterion of verifiability, criterion of verification, principle of verifiability, principle of verification, verifiability criterion, verification criterion, verification principle