Verificationism
Logical Positivism is a philosophical movement aimed at rejecting non-empirical language as meaningless. Philosophers like Comte and Mill, impressed at the power of science, wanted to universally extend the use of the scientific method, thinking scientific knowledge the only factual knowledge. Comte coined the term positivism to describe the scientific method of reliance on objective empirical data used to make empirical generalisations with predictive power. This was developed to focus on language by Russell and early Wittgenstein. ‘Logical’ emphasises Russell’s influence of focusing on the logical form and use of language.
Verificationism was invented by the logical positivists of the Vienna Circle, a group of philosophers, the most famous of which was A. J. Ayer. They believed that metaphysical claims (a priori reasoning about reality beyond empirical investigation), including religious language, is meaningless.
Ayer argued that the classic debates between empiricists and rationalists “are as unwarranted as they are unfruitful”. The empiricists claim that knowledge must be derived a posteriori from sense experience. However, rationalists/metaphysicians often claim that their premises are not based on their senses but derived from an a priori faculty of intellectual intuition which enables them to know about reality beyond sense experience.
Ayer claims that it is impossible for an empiricist to prove that a priori reason/thought cannot know things beyond a posteriori reason, because empirical thought cannot tell us about anything beyond empirical thought, including whether or not there anything beyond it. In other words, the problem with denying metaphysics is that it requires a metaphysical claim to do so.
So, Ayer concludes that the elimination of metaphysics should not be based on empirical claims, but on logic. It cannot be attacked by factually criticising its method of a priori intuition. Ayer claims instead he can eliminate metaphysics not by suggesting a factual limit to empirical thought but by accusing the metaphysician of disobeying the rules governing the significant (meaningful) use of language. So, Ayer thinks he can avoid the question of whether there really is in fact a faculty of intuition by claiming that metaphysical language is meaningless.
The verification principle is how Ayer did this. It states: “A sentence if factually significant (meaningful) if, and only if, we know how to verify the proposition it purports to express – that is, if we know what observations would lead us to accept the proposition as true or reject it as false.” If a claim cannot be verified by sense experience, then it is not factually significant and only has a non-cognitive emotional significance. This allows Ayer to avoid having to make the metaphysical claim that metaphysics is impossible. Instead, he can say that metaphysical utterances are meaningless because they cannot be verified in sense experience.
The idea is that words get their meaning by connecting to things in our shared experience, or by being true by definition. If a word connects to the world, that connection should be verifiable.
For Ayer, language can only be meaningful if it is cognitive and either analytic or verifiable.
‘God’ is a metaphysical term according to Ayer, which means it is about something beyond the empirical world, so there can be no way to empirically verify it.
Overly restrictive: Ayer’s theory was criticised for being overly restrictive of meaning. Wouldn’t History be considered meaningless because it can’t be empirically verified?
Ayer’s response was to come up with weak verification. We can weakly verify anything for which there is some evidence which provides probability for it being the case. E.g. Historical documents and archaeological findings can be verified, and on the basis of those we can weakly verify that there were certain civilisations in the past with certain histories to them.
Arguably Ayer has opened the door to religious belief here, however. For example, the teleological argument attempts to infer God’s existence from experience of the world.
Ayer initially argued for weak verification, but later decided it ‘allows meaning to any indicative statement’. So, he developed:
- Direct verification – a statement that is verifiable by observation. E.g. ‘I see a key’ is directly verifiable and so has factual meaning.
- Indirect verification – when things we have directly verified support a statement which we haven’t directly verified but know how to verify, we can be said to have indirect verification for it. E.g. ‘This key is made of iron’.
This seem to rule out the possibility of verifying God since we don’t know how to verify God.
Eschatological verification
Hick argued that there is a way to verify God and religious language, because when we die, we’ll see God and then we’ll know. Hick illustrated this with the parable of the celestial city, where two people, one atheist and one theist, were traveling along a road. The theist believes there is a celestial city at the end of the road, the atheist does not. This is an analogy for belief in an afterlife. Hick argues that when we get to the end of the road of life, if the theists are right and there is an afterlife, then we can verify God’s existence. This makes religious language verifiable in principle.
However, we can’t be sure that there really is a celestial city at the end of the road – that there is an afterlife where we can experience and verify God. It’s only a possibility. Ayer’s claim is that something must be verifiable in practice or principle. He gave the example of mountains being on the dark side of the moon as something that was verifiable in principle. They had not seen the dark side of the moon in his time, but they knew that in principle it was possible to go there and look. However, claiming that this was verifiable in principle required that they knew that it was verifiable in principle because they knew the moon existed, knew that travel in space was theoretically possible and knew they simply had to look once traveling there.
None of these requirements hold true in the case of the afterlife. We do not know that it exists. It’s possible that it exists, but that is not enough for us to justifiably claim that it is verifiable in principle, because we do not know that there are steps, had we the means to take them, that will provide the verification in question.
So arguably Hick only shows that religious language is ‘possibly’ verifiable, he hasn’t shown that it is verifiable in principle.
ta used to make empirical generalisations with predictive power. This was developed to focus on language by Russell and early Wittgenstein. ‘Logical’ emphasises Russell’s influence of focusing on the logical form and use of language.
The verification principle cannot be verified
It states that to be meaningful a statement must be analytic or empirically verifiable. However, that means that in order for the verification principle itself to be meaningful, it must be analytic or empirically verifiable. If we try to take the verification principle empirically then it would be an empirical claim that if we investigate what kind of meaning people use then we will see that it is either analytic or empirical. But that appears to be false since empirical evidence shows that people have meant something else by meaning throughout history e.g. Plato found it meaningful to talk of the world of forms and theologians find it meaningful to talk of God, both of which involve unempirical metaphysical terms.
Ayer responds by admitting that the verification principle cannot be a factual statement about the meaning of factual statements and claims instead that it is a methodological stipulation, a tool which the logical positivist adopts for methodological purposes. It is a tool which enables us to figure out whether a statement has empirical meaning.
The tools of empiricism do not disprove rationalism: this appears to reduce the verification principle into a tool one might use if you already agree with empiricism. A priori metaphysical statements are now only meaningless to this particular empirical tool, rather than categorically meaningless. In that case, Ayer has not shown that the non-empirical approach leads to meaningless metaphysical statements, only that they are meaningless from the perspective of the tools of empiricism. This no longer shows that we have to accept empiricism to avoid saying meaningless things, only that if we accept empiricism, we will find the results of a non-empirical approach meaningless.
Falsificationism
Karl Popper thought he could capture empiricism better than verificationism could. Popper was impressed with Einstein who claimed Mercury would wobble in its orbit at a certain time in the future because if that prediction was wrong, Einstein’s theory would be falsified. Popper was less impressed with Marxists and Freudians because they only looked for verifications of their views without ever admitting a way they could be falsified. Popper concluded that true empiricism operates by falsification, not verification.
Furthermore, Popper thought verificationism couldn’t capture empirical generalisations, which he illustrated with the claim ‘all swans are white’. To verify that would require knowing that at no point in time nor at any place in the universe did a non-white swan ever exist. However, the claim is falsifiable because we can say what would prove it wrong; seeing a non-white swan.
Anthony Flew applied falsificationism to religious language. He claimed that religious belief is unfalsifiable because believers can’t say what could prove their belief false. It follows that they are not actually asserting anything about reality.
The parable of the gardener
Flew illustrated his approach using belief in a gardener as an analogy for belief in God. Two people are walking and see a garden. One claims there is a gardener who tends to it, so the other suggest waiting and seeing if that is true. After a while, the other says ‘actually, they are an invisible gardener’, so they set up barbed wire fences and so on to try and detect this invisible gardener, at which point they then say ‘actually, it’s a non-physical gardener’.
At this point the other person gets annoyed an asks what is for Flew the crucial question: “But what remains of your original assertion?”. The religious person claims to believe in a God, but in order to protect that belief from empirical testing they continually add qualifications to the belief, saying it’s ‘not this’ and ‘not that’, etc. Well eventually, it’s going to be nothing, is Flew’s point, causing the concept of God to “die a death of a thousand qualifications”.
Flew ends with the question – what is the difference between a world in which this gardener (God) exists, and a world in which it doesn’t exist. If belief in God is consistent with any possible discovery about reality, then its existence surely can make no difference to reality. It cannot be about reality. Flew claims Religious language therefore ‘fails to assert’ anything. It is unfalsifiable and so meaningless.
Religious language expresses unfalsifiable belief
Empirical knowledge is only ever our current best explanation of the available evidence. So, all our beliefs about reality could be wrong. You might think it is certain that the Sun exists, for example, but you could be in the matrix, dreaming, or in an alien reality TV show. You can’t know anything about reality for certain. Empiricists tend to accept this.
All our beliefs about reality are falsifiable (could be false).
So, a belief that is unfalsifiable cannot be about reality.
Religious believers cannot say what could prove their belief false.
So, religious belief is unfalsifiable
Therefore, religious belief cannot be about reality and fails to have cognitive meaning.
Flew concludes that religious language is meaningless because it fails to assert anything about reality. Cognitive meaning requires expression of beliefs and Flew adds that it must be falsifiable. Even though religious language expresses beliefs, since they are unfalsifiable beliefs, religious language fails to have cognitive meaning.
The falsification principle cannot be falsified and is therefore meaningless.
Popper responded to this criticism by claiming that falsificationism was not a criterion of meaning, just a method of distinguishing the empirical from the non-empirical.
Since Flew used falsificationism as a criterion of meaning, however, it seems he makes falsificationism vulnerable to the same criticism verificationism had.
Religious belief is falsifiable
St Paul claimed that if Jesus’ body were discovered then belief and faith in Christianity would be pointless. This suggests Flew is incorrect to think religious language is always unfalsifiable as there are at least some believers whose belief is incompatible with some logically possible state of affairs. That would show that Paul’s religious language would pass Flew’s test of falsification and so would be meaningful.
The parable of the gardener suggests, however, that if we did discover Jesus’ body, Christians including St Paul might make some excuse as to why it’s actually not a valid test after all. For example, Christians might be tempted to think that the body is a fake put there by the devil. Tempting though that is, it underlines Flew’s point that there really is no way to falsify belief in God.
Mitchell’s critique of falsificationism
Basil Mitchell argued against flew’s conclusions with the parable of the partisan. Mitchell is not happy with Flew’s characterisation of religious belief as irrationally blind to any evidence which goes against it. Mitchell argued that rather than need to say what would prove them wrong, religious belief can be said to be connected to empirical reality if it allows empirical evidence to count against it, like the problem of evil. Mitchell imagines the example of a soldier fighting for the resistance against the government in a civil war. One day someone comes to them and claims to be the leader of the resistance, on their side, but a double agent pretending to be on the other side. The soldier decides to have faith in this person, even when they see them fighting for the government. This is analogous to faith in God, despite the counter evidence of the problem of evil. Mitchell’s point is that religious people do allow empirical evidence to count against their belief, they simply judge overall to retain faith. Their belief is connected to empirical reality as a consequence however, and can therefore be said to be cognitively meaningful according to Mitchell.
Arguably Mitchell’s criteria for falsifiability are insufficient. Merely allowing evidence to count against your belief doesn’t make it falsifiable. Only being able to say what would prove it wrong, not merely count against it, makes something falsifiable. Explaining what evidence runs against your belief is not sufficient to explain what evidence could disprove your belief.
Hare’s theory of Blicks
R. M. Hare disagreed with veriticationism and falsificationism and instead argued for non-cognitivism. Hare argued that religious language doesn’t get its meaning from attempting to describe the world, but from expressing ‘attitudes’ – which he called a Blick. The expression of attitudes is not an attempt to describe the world, therefore they cannot be true or false. Hare illustrated this with the example of a paranoid student who thought his professors were trying to kill him. Even when shown the evidence that they were not trying to kill him, by meeting them and seeing they were nice people, the student did not change their mind. Hare argued this shows that what we say about the world is really an expression of our Blick rather than an attempt to describe the world. If it were an attempt to describe the world, the meaning could be changed by that description being shown to be false. Because the meaning in the students mind was not changed by contrary evidence, Hare concluded that meaning must be connected to a non-cognitive attitude or Blick. Hare concluded that since Bliks affect our beliefs and behaviour, they are meaningful.
Blicks might look like beliefs about the world, but ultimately they are rooted in attitudes brought to the world and thus we should understand their true meaning to be as an expression of non-cognitive attitude.
Criticism of Hare: Although Hare saves religious language from being disregarded as a meaningless failed attempt to describe the world, nonetheless he only does so by sacrificing the ability of the meaning of religious language to have any factual content. So when a religious person says ‘God exists,’ for Hare they are really expressing their attitude rather than actually claiming that there objectively exists a God. Many religious people would claim however, that they really do mean that ‘there objectively exists a God’, irrespective of their attitude. Aquinas wrote many long books attempting to prove the seemingly cognitive belief in God true. So arguably Hare fails to capture the true meaning of religious language
Defence of Hare: Hare could respond that although many religious people may indeed feel like they are making factual claims about reality, their conception of reality is really just an aspect of their Blick. Saying God exists therefore really serves to add psychological force and grandeur to what is actually just their attitude.