Verficationism

1
Verficationism

• Verificationists hold that to find out the
  meaning of a sentence, identify the states of
  affairs which serve as evidence for its truth.
• Theory presupposes the existence of original
  meaning words are meaningful for us, the trick
  is to translate novel sentences into our own
  known language

2
Meaning as Translation

• Another way to look at it meaning is meaning as
  translation.
• Lycan calls it epistemic because it locates
  meaning in our ways of finding out things
• It would be more appropriate to characterize it
  as a pragmatic approach because the emphasis
  isnt on what it is to know but on how we
  come to know.

3
Observation Statements

• Verificationists confine theory to the privileged
  class of observation statements.
• statements about matters-of-fact, statements
  about the descriptive characteristics of the
  world
• color, shape, and, in general, ground floor
  meanings
• Hempel called these directly observable
  characteristics

4
Behaviorism

• Verifcationists were the new enemies of
• the ethical community
• the religious community
• Verificationists were friends of behaviorism
• for behaviorism, statements about peoples mental
  characteristics can be reduced to statements
  about peoples complex behavior and the mind is a
  black box

5
Black Boxes

• What is it to say that something is a black box?
• It was a famous criticism before the invention of
  programming and reverse engineering.
• the criticism has lost its bite
• interesting case of a critique collapsing in the
  face of conceptual change

6
Combinatorial Explosion

• Critique of Verificationism
• Lycans critiques involve the claim that relying
  on the fact that a set of sentences about states
  that serve as evidence for truth is too open
  ended.
• Is it?
• Lycan presupposes that it is possible a naive
  theory of meaning himself
• he ignores the possibility that sentences only
  fit together in a certain way.

7
Quines Attack

• Quine attacks the notion of meaning as
  translation
• the most well-known
• Lycan correctly notes that Quines attack on the
  analytic-synthetic distinction works against
  verifcationistic theories but little else

8
Meaning as Translation

• Quine attacks the notion of meaning as
  translation
• Not directed against original meaning
• original meaning is short for the view that
  while sentence meaning is a function of
  combination, meaning of the parts isnt merely a
  function of combination.
• Quines attack is widely misunderstood (by Lycan
  too) (continued next slide)

9
Translation

• Quine asks, how can we really know what
  categories another language uses?
• Quine thinks it obvious that it is impossible to
  identify the categories because categorical
  differences can never be identified
• In other words, we can never get from here to
  there because there is no bridge.
• Unless our categories serve as bridges too, we
  are locked into our own conceptual framework by
  them.
• categories define the conceptual framework