Verificationism

Its History and Prospects

C.J. Misak

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781134800346
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Geschichte & Theorie der Philosophie

Verificationism is the first comprehensive history of a concept that dominated philosophy and scientific methodology between the 1930s and the 1960s. The verificationist principle - the concept that a belief with no connection to experience is spurious - is the most sophisticated version of empiricism. More flexible ideas of verification are now being rehabilitated by a number of philosophers.
C.J. Misak surveys the precursors, the main proponents and the rehabilitators. Unlike traditional studies, she follows verificationist theory beyond the demise of positivism to examine its reappearance in the work of modern philosophers. Most interestingly, she argues that despite feminism's strenuous opposition to positivism, verificationist thought is at the heart of much of contemporary feminist philosophy.
Verificationism is an excellent assessment of a major and influential system of thought.

1

FOUNDERS

GEORGE BERKELEY (1685–1753)

Verificationism is usually thought to be a cornerstone of empiricism, the view that experience is our only source of knowledge about the world. We shall see that many of the problems and issues which concerned two early British empiricists, Berkeley and Hume,¹ continue to be at the heart of more recent debates.

Here is how Berkeley’s empiricism manifests itself:

It is evident to anyone who takes a survey of the objects of human knowledge, that they are either ideas actually imprinted on the senses; or else such as are perceived by attending to the passions and operations of the mind; or lastly ideas formed by help of memory and imagination—either compounding, dividing, or barely representing those originally perceived in the aforesaid ways.

([1710] (1901):257)

What we can know is what we can sense or what we can construct from what we have sensed—by remembering, imagining, or by a kind of cut and paste method on those sensory materials.²

This is a view about the origins of our thoughts, a view which holds that all of the materials for thought come from the senses. Once we have this view in hand, we can then ask what we can have a thought of, what we can frame an idea of, or what can be a content in our minds. Certain things, it seems, fail to meet the standards set by Berkeley’s thesis about the origins of thought.

One thing it seems that we cannot have a thought of is a mind-independent entity. For if our source of knowledge is our own experience, then how can we construct a concept of a world independent of our experience? This is a point which Berkeley presses and it is a point which we shall have to return to again and again in this book. Berkeley thought it led to immaterialism or idealism, the view that there are only two kinds of things in the world —minds and their ideas.³

It would seem that a denial of the existence of the material world would be thought contrary to commonsense. But Berkeley thinks himself to be of ‘a vulgar cast, simple enough to believe my senses, and leave things as I find them’. ([1713] (1901):445) His project is to set straight the sciences and the ‘scientific’ philosophy undertaken by Locke and Newton by returning to the ‘high-road of plain common sense’. ([1710] (1901):237) His most systematic work, published in 1710, is titled A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge: Wherein the Chief Causes of Error and Difficulty in the Sciences, with the Grounds of Scepticism, Atheism, and Irreligion, are Inquired Into. In it, he says:

I am inclined to think that the far greater part, if not all, of those difficulties which have hitherto amused philosophers, and blocked up the way to knowledge, are entirely owing to ourselves. We have first raised a dust, and then complain we cannot see.

([1710] (1901):238)

In order to see when we have raised a dust, Berkeley thinks that we must apply the principle at the heart of his doctrine of the origins of ideas—only that which is conceivable, or that which one can frame an idea of, makes sense. If a philosophical difficulty turns on something which we cannot properly frame an idea of, the difficulty is a spurious one.

We must remember here that conceivability, for Berkeley, does not extend to the wildest stretch of our imaginations. What is conceivable is that which we can experience: ‘my conceiving or imagining power does not extend beyond the possibility of real existence or perception’. ([1710] 1901:260) What we can conceive of is what we can ‘copy’ from ideas which arise from sense experience; it is what we can encounter in sensory experience.⁴

Berkeley’s view about the origins of ideas or the contents of our thoughts becomes a semantic thesis in the following way. With Locke and Hume, he thought that words get their meanings by standing for ideas.⁵ Thus, if you cannot get an idea of x then you do not have a meaning for the term you use to name x. If we are to ‘annex a meaning to our words’, we must ‘speak only of what we can conceive’. ([1710] (1901):245) So until the person who claims to believe in the existence of x can tell me what it means—can say what sensory-produced idea it stands for—I cannot believe in it. For I will not have a grasp of ‘it’; I will not know the meaning of ‘x’ Berkeley puts the point nicely by stating that ‘you will not so much as let me know what it is you would have me believe’. ([1713] (1901): 432)

There are three advantages, Berkeley thinks, to adopting the principle that every idea must arise from sensory materials:

First, I shall be sure to get clear of all controversies purely verbal…Secondly, this seems to be a sure way to extricate myself out of the fine and subtle net of abstract ideas which has so miserably perplexed and entangled the minds of men …Thirdly, so long as I confine my thoughts to my own ideas …I do not see how I can easily be mistaken.

([1710] (1901):253–54)

We shall see that all of these are important to subsequent verificationists. The verificationist aims to identify spurious debates, one of which is said to be the debate over abstract ideas, which shall be considered below. And the verificationist often claims that one’s own sensory perceptions are infallible or cannot be mistaken.

By way of explanation of this third advantage, Berkeley says that ‘[t]he objects I consider, I clearly and adequately know. I cannot be deceived in thinking I have an idea which I have not’. ([1710] (1901): 254) I can know that I am not mistaken about the contents of my sensory perceptions as I have them. Thus, Berkeley thinks that he is ‘the farthest from Scepticism of any man’. For he knows ‘the existence of other things as well as my own Soul’. ([1705] (1901):26) And if one sticks to this immediate knowledge, the damage of misleading language will be minimized.

When put to use, Berkeley’s principle of conceivability operates in two ways, really opposite sides of the same coin. First, the principle imposes constraints on a concept—a concept must be connected to sensory experiences. Some purported concepts fall afoul of these constraints and are thus senseless. And second, the principle imposes conditions on the kind of concepts we can have; it imposes constraints such that our concepts of, say, matter and existence, must be of a certain sort.

Berkeley sets his principle to work against the view of abstract ideas held by the scholastics and by Locke.⁶ On this view, we can employ a method of abstraction to separate or distinguish different elements of a concept so that, although there cannot be a situation in which one element is actually isolated, we can tell that the elements are distinct. We can, for instance, suppose extension without colour, even though we cannot ever have colourless space. And we can take the idea that we have singled out and think of it as a universal abstract idea. That is, we can have the idea of extension or of colour ‘in abstract’, as opposed to the extension or the colour of some particular thing. (See [1710] (1901):240.)

Berkeley rails against this view. He finds that he cannot make these abstractions; he cannot, for instance, conceive colour without extension, nor extension without colour. The idea of extension is not independent of the idea of colour, for ‘in a strict sense, I see nothing but light and colours’. ([1709] (1901):192) And we cannot suppose colour without extension; what we perceive are coloured extensions. Similarly, there is no abstract triangle, which is ‘neither oblique nor rectangle, equilateral, equicrural nor scalenon, but all and none of these at once’. ([1710] (1901):246) Look into your own thoughts, Berkeley advises, and you will find that you cannot imagine such a creature.

Thus, abstract ideas fall afoul of Berkeley’s principle. They do not arise from perceptions and so we cannot frame an idea of them. Berkeley thinks that ‘trifling with words’ ([1710] (1901):302) in this way—using words which have no correlate in experience—has resulted in ‘a great number of dark and ambiguous terms’ being introduced into science, philosophy and morality. ([1710] (1901): 338–39)

We can also see an instance of the other verificationist strategy in Berkeley’s argument against abstract ideas. Our concept of general terms must be of a certain sort if it is to abide by the principle of conceivability. He argues that general words do not refer to abstract ideas; rather, an idea becomes general when it is made ‘to represent or stand for all other particular ideas of the same sort’. ([1710] (1901): 245) Thus a general term is connected or related to its particular concrete instances; it is not something abstract.

So here Berkeley’s principle acts both to challenge a view of a concept (abstract ideas as the referent of general terms) and to aid us in coming to the right view of a concept (general terms are terms which stand for particulars of which we have experience).

Berkeley also argued against the view that primary qualitites such as solidity, extension and motion inhere in matter, where matter is supposed to be ‘an unthinking substance’. ([1710] (1901: 262) The idea of substance, again found in Locke,⁷ is that, after we peel off the attributes from a thing, we are left with ‘something I know not what’. A thing or object, such as a table or a cherry, is composed of a substance in which a number of attributes inhere. The substance is the bearer or supporter of the attributes and is distinct from the sum total of those attributes. Our experience of an object, however, is limited to its attributes—we do not have any experience of the substance itself. Berkeley says, in contrast to this view:

I see this cherry, I feel it, I taste it: and I am sure nothing cannot be seen, or felt, or tasted; it is therefore real. Take away the sensations of softness, moisture, redness, tartness, and you take away the cherry… A cherry, I say, is nothing but a congeries of sensible impressions, or ideas perceived by the senses.

([1713] (1901):469)

Berkeley’s thought is that if we took away all of the sensations associated with an object—all of the attributes of a thing—we would not be left with a mysterious substance of which we could say nothing. We would be left with nothing at all. This is his conceivability principle applied to matter. We cannot conceive of existence abstracted from perception. And we cannot conceive of matter abstracted from extension:

It is said extension is a mode or accident of Matter, and that Matter is the substratum that supports it. Now I desire that you would explain to me what is meant by Matter’s supporting extension. Say you, I have no idea of Matter; and therefore cannot explain it. I answer, though you have no positive, yet, if you have any meaning at all, you must at least have a relative idea of Matter; though you know not what it is, yet you must be supposed to know what relation it bears to accidents, and what is meant by its supporting them. It is evident support cannot here be taken in its usual or literal sense, as when we say that pillars support a building. In what sense therefore must it be taken?

([1710] (1901):266)

Things, Berkeley argues, do not exist independently of our perceptions of them:

It is indeed an opinion strangely prevailing amongst men, that houses, mountains, rivers, and in a word all sensible objects, have an existence, natural or real, distinct from their being perceived by the understanding…yet whoever shall find in his heart to call it in question may, if I mistake not, perceive it to involve a manifest contradiction. For, what are the forementioned objects but the things we perceive by sense? and what do we perceive besides our own ideas or sensations? and is it not plainly repugnant that any of these…should exist unperceived?

([1710] (1901):259)

Berkeley’s view that objects are congeries of sensory perceptions is clearly a corollary of his view that the only things which exist are minds and their ideas. His argument for idealism also turns on his conceivability principle. Our conception of the world must arise from that which we can conceive. Since we can only conceive of ideas, we must take the world to consist of ideas. Here we have Berkeley’s immaterialism, his view that matter, as philosophers attempt to think of it, does not exist.

For Berkeley, an idea itself is a mental entity which exists only when perceived. And since ‘an idea can be like nothing but an idea’,⁸ there is no independently existing reality for ideas to correspond to. A physical body is ‘that which is immediately seen and felt, which is only a combination of sensible qualities or ideas’. ([1710] (1901):310) Sensory ideas (shapes, colours, etc.) are ‘observed to accompany each other’ and ‘collections’ of them ‘come to be marked by one name, and so to be reputed one thing.’ ([1710] (1901):258) When we talk of a physical object we really talk of a collection of sensory perceptions that we actually have or that we could have. We shall see that this view of material things is a mainstay of empiricism.⁹

We have seen that Berkeley did not think that his idealism entailed scepticism, the view that we cannot know anything. Indeed, the view Berkeley saw himself waging war against was the scepticism (and the implicit atheism) lurking in the picture of the mind and the world painted by Newton and Locke, the picture of the physical world as a machine working according to its own deterministic laws. On this view, the only role for God to play is to start the machine in motion. Berkeley thinks it is a virtue of idealism that God is not relegated to a bit part.

On Berkeley’s view, there is a distinction between real things and ideas of them, a distinction which has God playing the starring role:

The ideas imprinted on the Senses by the Author of nature are called real things: and those excited in the imagination, being less regular, vivid, and constant, are more properly termed ideas, or images of things, which they copy and represent.

([1710](1901):274–75)

Berkeley, who in 1734 was made Bishop of Cloyne, Ireland, offers us an argument for the existence of God. Every idea must be caused by something. And ideas, Berkeley argues, are passive; there is ‘nothing of power or agency included in them’. ([1710](1901): 270–71) Thus they cannot act as the cause of anything. Our minds can be the cause of ideas, such as the ones we create by imagination. But some ideas are not caused by us, such as the ideas that arise from the senses.

Those ideas have a remarkable consistency, suggesting that one powerful mind—the mind of God—causes them.¹⁰ God ‘contains and supports’ the sensible world. ([1713] (1901):424)

It is this thesis about God which enables Berkeley to combine his idealism—the thought that only minds and their ideas exist—with a kind of realism. Realism, as I shall use the term, is the view that truth, objectivity or reality transcends our knowledge or inquiry. Berkeley argues that thing...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Founders
• 2 The Logical Positivists and the Verifiability Principle
• 3 Peirce and the Pragmatic Maxim
• 4 What is it to Understand a Sentence?
• 5 Some Further Suggestions
• Conclusion
• Notes
• References
• Name index
• Subject index