Towards A Kinder, Gentler Verificationism
A Sketch of
a Research Project
Jason Zarri
It often happens, for various reasons, that philosophers defend
radical views which, first, are too radical to be plausible, and second, are
such that a less radical and more plausible view would satisfy the underlying
motivations. Here is a historical example. The logical positivists famously
sought to eliminate traditional metaphysics by arguing that the statements
metaphysicians make are meaningless because of being unverifiable. Much of the
ensuing discussion concerned whether verifiability is really necessary for
meaningfulness. But clearly, even if the logical positivists were wrong about
this, they could still have a strong case for the elimination of metaphysics.
For already if they could establish that the statements made by metaphysicians
are unverifiable, they could argue for the pointlessness of the enterprise. If
we cannot obtain good evidence for or against the statements of metaphysics,
surely metaphysics is a pointless enterprise.
I
think it may be advisable to follow a wise point that lies buried in
Logical Positivism: Though it may very well be that unverifiable statements are
meaningful, and so true or false, this does nothing to prove they are
legitimate objects of inquiry. For the statements the positivists sought to ban
are, after all, unverifiable, and where there is no possible method of verifying a
statement, there is seemingly no means of resolving disputes concerning it.
Save in those cases where our psychology compels our universal assent, such as, perhaps,
our belief in the existence of other minds, there is, short of force, coercion
or sheer coincidence, no way to reach a consensus with respect to unverifiable
statements, and given this it appears unwise to argue over them. For if we do
not aim to achieve consensus, to what purpose do we argue? However, it must be
admitted that verifiability comes in degrees, and there are perhaps no
statements which are conclusively verifiable. Still, one can say that the
harder it is to verify or refute a given statement, the less reasonable it is
to argue over it. And of course to say that we shouldn’t bother arguing over something is not to say
that we cannot have our own, private opinion on the matter.
None of this is to say that the positivists were correct in determining which statements are verifiable and
which are not, only that we should not try to assess the truth value of
statements which are genuinely
unverifiable. I differ from the positivists in my estimation of the scope of
the unverifiable. I think there may be a great many metaphysical, religious,
and ethical claims which are verifiable. Furthermore, the methods of
verification employed need not be empirical; they need only be capable of deciding the issue under examination, of
resolving it one way or another. In light of this, I will henceforth talk of
decidability instead of verifiability.
In spite of the above qualifications, one might think that any
verificationist-inspired project is doomed to failure for much the same reasons
the Logical Positivists’ was. As hard as they tried to hammer out a workable
verification criterion, everything they came up with proved to be either too
strict or too liberal to suit their purposes. If one makes the criterion too
strict, it will turn out, for example, that the notion of a natural law is
meaningless, since one cannot verify that it holds in an infinite number of
instances. Statements about the remote past, the far future, and theoretical
entities would also go by the board. But if one liberalizes the criterion so
that we count as meaningful statements about things that experience only
renders probable, then one will have to admit things into one’s ontology that
would make a positivist shudder, such as the “élan vitale” of the vitalists or
the Absolute of the Absolute Idealists, if their existence would have any
implications, however slight, for our experience. The verification criterion
would then seem to impose no real constraints on the meaningfulness of
statements. The simple fact is that no verification criterion could do what the
positivists wanted it to do. One objection to my proposal, then, is this: Is
not my “decidability criterion” dangerously close to a liberalized verification
criterion? What, exactly, does the “decidability criterion” rule out?
My reply is that we should not try to deduce a priori that certain
classes of statements are undecidable; for there is, I think, no single form or
subject matter that unites all undecidable statements and makes them
undecidable. In my opinion, the positivists’ failure to recognize this point is
a major reason why their repeated attempts to formulate a workable verification
criterion failed. And even if there were a single form or subject matter which
all undecidable statements had in common, it seems unlikely that a priori
reflection could discover it. (One reason to think this is that the sustained a
priori reflection of the positivists failed to discover it.) Instead, we should
look to the past to see what kinds of statement have proved easy to decide and
which have not. My criterion, then, would counsel us to reject statements which
are of the same kind as those which history has shown to systematically resist
attempts at resolution. In future work, my task will thus be to show that this criterion
imposes non-trivial constraints on philosophical practice.
I
intend to develop my own kinder, gentler verificationism by using the views of
Rudolf Carnap as a foil. Though I sympathize with several facets of his
position, and with the motivation behind them still more, I think there are a
few important points about which he was mistaken. First, his conception of what
philosophical practice should be is excessively formal; it focuses too much on
language, and it seems to allow no room for the vagueness or open texture of words
and concepts; and it also seems to rule out Wittgensteinian “family
resemblances”.
Second,
his distinction between “internal” and “external” questions is too sharply
drawn. If we consider “frameworks” that are actually in use, in both the sciences and in the humanities, I think we will
find that it is not always so clear what counts as part of a framework and what
doesn’t. Also, I doubt very much that pragmatic considerations are the only
things relevant to the selection of a framework. Furthermore, there may be an
objective truth—one transcends any particular framework—even if we can’t know
what it is.
Finally,
Carnap’s views were bound up with the philosophy of language of his day, before
the advent of externalism and causal theories of reference, and stand in need
of substantial modification.
As
for my own account, I will try to accommodate the lessons we learned about
language and categorization from Wittgenstein and the theories in cognitive
science that his work helped to inspire, such as prototype and exemplar
theories of concepts. Also, on my view, we might be able to attain knowledge of
objective truth without having to “step outside” of our various
frameworks—though we might also be able to know the objective truth by doing
so,
if doing so is possible—by comparing our frameworks themselves against each
other and seeing what, if anything, they have in common. If all the viable,
mutually comparable frameworks concerning a given subject matter agree about
something, I think that is good evidence that it is probably true, provided
that the different frameworks come close to exhausting the possibilities. (This
is, in essence, a generalization of
my approach for getting eithical guidance from ethical theories.) And I see no reason why
our frameworks need to be (solely) linguistic. I will also try to give an
account which is consistent with causal and externalist views on reference and
mental content. And on my view,
what counts as evidence for what is in part determined by what “context of inquiry” one belongs to, among other things, and so my view of evidence is in some
sense externalist.
In
spite of the differences I have just spelled out, Carnap and I have something important in
common: we both put great stress on engaging in disputes only if
there is some way of resolving them.
