Verification Principle

Demonstrating the truth using empirical evidence
Language is only meaningful if it can be verified by sense-observation (knowledge gained through your senses)

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Verifictionists

Movement was inspired by science-empirical evidence to confirm a hypothesis
Language tells us something about the way the world is. If they can’t be proven right or wrong they are tautologies (meaningless)
For example ‘my car is red’ is meaningful as it can be verified by
However, ‘the car is beautiful’ is a subjective opinion therefore cannot be verified so is a meaningless statement
Weaknesses:
- The approach was strict and scientific and meant the majority of what people said was proven meaningless despite it making sense
- Swinburne gave the example ‘all ravens are black’. People would accept this but there is no way of finding this out. Always a possibility of one or more ravens not being black. Therefore Verificationists would say this is meaningles
- Another problem is statements about history. To say the battle of Hastings occurred 1066 is meaningless, as you cannot observe this

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If a statement is not verifiable it is meaningless (not ‘factually significant’)
Not denying people statements important to them eg ‘God answers my prayers’but it has no factual significance
Ayer came up with a procedure to test whether a statement is verifiable. The statement in testing is a ‘putative proposition’
Ayer distinguished ‘practically verifiable’ (statements tested in practise) and ‘verifiable in princicble’ (verifiable in princicble but not in practise).
Ayer distinguished between strong and weak verification:
- Strong= everything conclusively verified by experience and observation
- Weak= something that is probable (eg all ravens are black)
If you apply the principle of verification to religious claims:
- The claims are deemed meaningless
- Cannot be supported by observations from sense experience with probability
- Statements about God do not tell people anything about the world

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After his theory being heavily criticised he responded by publishing a second edition of his book
He changed the definition of a principle of verification to- ‘A statement is held to be literally meaningful if it is either analytical or empirically verifiable.’
It was pointed out that nothing could be verified with strong and weak statements but he concluded that some statements could be conclusively verified
To replace strong and weak verification he came up with directly and indirectly verifiable statements:
- A directly verifiable statement is one that itself is observation statement or is in conjunction with one. Therefore can be directly observe
- By indirectly verifiable he meant a statement that is not directly verifiable or analytical, but directly verifiable evidence could support it

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Religion is not meaningless because its truth is verifiable in principle and therefore meets the principles of verification

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It is meaningful to have a statement that is not verifiable
Swinburne’s gives the example of the toys in the cupboard:
- The toys only come out at night when no one sees them
- No way of verifying this movement/life in the toys

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