This is philosophy bites with me David Edmonds and me Nigel Warerton.

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W.w. dot philosophy.com. We want to be able to understand the world, but how do we

know which statements we make about it are meaningful? Verificationists, such as the early 20th century group of philosophers

and scientists known as the Vienna Circle, came up with a two-pronged test for meaningfulness,

the verification principle.

Take any statement.

Ask is it true by definition, like all cats or animals, that is, is it analytic?

And if not, is it empirically verifiable? Can it be shown to be either true or false

by some kind of experiment or observation? An example of this would be all cats eat fish.

A statement which is false and can easily be refuted by finding a

cat that doesn't eat fish. But it's a meaningful statement nevertheless because it is

testable. If a statement is neither true by definition nor empirically verifiable, then it is meaningless.

Verificationism has rather fallen out of fashion now, but Liam Bright,

a philosopher at the London School of Economics, is sympathetic towards it.

Liam Blight, welcome to Philosophy Bites.

Hi. We're talking today about verificationism. Let's start with a definition. What is verificationism?

So verificationism is a thesis about how language works and what it says is that for a claim to be

cognitively meaningful and I'll say what that means in a second but for a claim to be

cognitively meaningful it needs to be such that it can be either confirmed or disconfirmed by sort of empirical evidence.

We could make some observations and however it not it's true.

Or it needs to be sort of logically or mathematically provable.

...