Ontological Perspectives on Faith and Reason by Don S. Browning
Chapter 9: The Metaphysical Target and the Theological Victim by Malcolm
II. The Verifiability Principle
The story of the bold launching of "the verifiability principle" and of the sober second thoughts that succeeded it has been told many times over.6 It is worth repeating here, even in truncated form (which, for example,
omits considering the issue of specially designed empiricist languages) because:
1. It was the main anti-metaphysical weapon in the positivist’s arsenal.
2. Ogden alluded to it without giving any details as to what was at issue.7
3. In general, the authors who have contributed essays on this subject to journals of religious thought have generally given the results of
philosophical reflections on the verifiability principle while noting that they do not have the time to go into the details. This procedure
underscores the weaknesses of positivism while shortchanging the self- critical candor and the methodological power of the analytic thinking that succeeded it.
4. Examination of some of the specific arguments involved will show us the kind of considerations that have led to the reformulations of the principle, and in many cases, to its abandonment.
5. Reflection on these arguments will enable us to see just how alien the spirit and method of post-positivistic analysts are to the spirit and
concerns of the philosophical theologians who employ transcendental concepts.
The bete noire of positivistic analysis is the type of metaphysical
statement whose form leads us to suppose that it is telling us something about a possible state of affairs when analysis shows that it is not, and, what is more could not, be doing anything of the kind. The point was driven home by means of their most famous illustration (now as dated as the movement which spawned it), the statement, "There are
mountains on the far side of the moon." The point of the illustration was that this statement, which cannot be verified in fact because of technical limitations, is verifiable in principle. Anyone who understood it would be clear as to just the sorts of observable phenomena that would count for and against the truth of the statement and would, therefore, know how to proceed to check it out if he were in a position to do so. The statement, "There are angels on the far side of the moon," is
grammatically similar to the one about the mountains; but positivists insist that the similarity is fatally misleading. The blanket invocation of non-sensible characteristics that are used in the definition of angels renders sensible experience irrelevant to establishing the truth or falsity
of the assertion. The fact that sense experience is irrelevant to it in principle, shows that the statement, "There are angels on the far side of the moon," is not entitled to the relatively elevated status of falsity, but, rather, it is worse off than a false statement, it is meaningless.
Therefore, a philosopher who spent time examining arguments for the existence of angels, or any of the other non-sensible entities ("forms,"
"essences," and so on) that philosophers contrive, would be in the idiotic position of Kant’s man who held a sieve underneath a male goat while another man milked it.
The sort of thing that the verifiability principle was designed to exclude was formulated succinctly by Walter Stace: "The word ‘metaphysical’
may, of course, be variously defined, but in this context what is meant by it is evidently any type of thought which depends upon the
distinction between an outer appearance and an inner reality, and which asserts that there is a reality lying behind appearances, which never itself appears."8 The transcendent God of the Judeo-Christian tradition is certainly an instance of "a reality behind the appearances which never itself appears." Thus the application of this seemingly reliable and quick
"litmus paper test" to metaphysical assertions seemed to eliminate this God in addition to "the absolute," "substance," "the thing-in-itself," and countless other traditional terms. Here was an unprecedented
phenomenon: "Pandora’s box" in reverse. The havoc that had been unleashed by the metaphysical tradition could now be rectified.
Positivistic literature abounded with examples of one sort of
metaphysical "howler" after the other being exposed, folded up, and packed back into a bottomless bin labeled "meaningless"! The
transcendent God of the Judeo-Christian tradition was another victim of this wholesale application of the verifiability principle, but he was not the major target.
The sketch of the verifiability principle that I have presented is ample enough to serve as the basis of an examination of some of the problems associated with it.9 They will be considered under three headings: (1) the status of the principle itself; (2) the excessive restrictiveness of the principle; and (3) the excessive permissiveness of the principle.
The problem of the status of the verifiability principle was avidly seized upon by non-positivists. They claimed that since the verifiability
principle was itself neither analytic nor synthetic it should — according to the positivists’ own canons — be dismissed as a piece of nonsensical metaphysics. This, of course, would destroy it as an anti-metaphysical
weapon. Positivists were not overly concerned about this criticism. They felt that it showed an absence of understanding of the central issues on the part of the non-positivists who invoked it. They handled it in a variety of ways. Their most frequent defense was to concede the point that the verifiability principle was not a statement (and that it was therefore neither analytic nor synthetic), but they claimed that is was a useful proposal for discriminating between meaningful and meaningless assertions. The justification for it would then be that its use eliminates the inadvertent nonsense put out under the name of metaphysics, while highlighting the characteristics that endow synthetic statements with meaning.
It was precisely the ineffectiveness of this pragmatic justification of verifiability that put the principle under fire even among philosophers who were sympathetically disposed toward its anti-metaphysical intent.
The application of the principle seemed, on further analysis, to be excessively restrictive because it branded as meaningless all sorts of synthetic propositions whose meaningfulness the positivists themselves had no desire to call into question. In limiting the exposition of this point, I propose to focus on the way in which the "logical" side of logical positivism put its "positivistic," that is, anti-metaphysical, side under pressure. Consideration of universal synthetic statements will enable us to get at the issues. "All crows are black" is not the kind of statement whose meaningfulness (as opposed to its truth) anyone, positivist or not, wants to attack. However, when tested by the verifiability principle, it turns out to be meaningless because it can never — in principle — be verified. No matter how many instances of black crows have been tallied, there is always the possibility of a yellow one turning up. And, apart from casting unwonted aspersions on the meaningfulness of statements of the kind just cited, the rampant application of the verifiability principle had the even more regrettable consequence of catching scientific laws in this same net because they too had this universal form. Positivists, because of the excessive restrictiveness of the principle, found themselves in the embarrassing situation of throwing out scientific babies with the metaphysical bath.
Karl Popper’s discussion of "falsifiability" was initiated in response to this problem. He noted that although universal statements are not, in principle, verifiable, they are, in principle, falsifiable. One exception to a scientific law is enough to falsify it because it shows that the law does not hold universally (at least it shows this if the exception to the law is accepted as a genuine one; that is, as long as it is not regarded as the
result of faulty experimental work or of other peculiar circumstances that rule it out as a genuine exception to the law).10 I should note that Popper’s relation to positivism and his particular purposes in pressing the issue of "falsifiability" is too complex a matter to discuss here, but the appeal to it did seem to offer positivists a chance to salvage their enterprise of formulating a clear and effective criterion for
distinguishing scientific from metaphysical assertions. For some positivists insisted that, by contrast with scientific laws, such
metaphysical assertions as, "The Absolute is Perfect" are not falsifiable even in principle11. However, the test of falsifiability suffered from a major defect with which Popper himself grappled, namely, that no existential statement, that is, no statement which asserts that something exists, is ever conclusively falsifiable. No matter how long one has gone on fruitlessly searching for the Abominable Snowman, there is always the possibility that one will turn up. In light of this discussion, the coup de grace to both conclusive verifiability and to conclusive falsifiability is administerable by means of a statement, such as the one offered by J.
0. Urmson that contains both a universal ("every") and an existential ("some") element: "Every person who walks under a ladder will meet with some misfortune."12
One way out of the difficulty that has been suggested is the abandonment of the demand for conclusive verification and
falsification. A statement would then be synthetically meaningful if some specifiable observation statements would tend to confirm or to falsify it.13 The suggestion has much to recommend it, but it will not serve as a means of neatly separating scientific wheat from
metaphysical or theological chaff. To appreciate this point, let us consider Basil Mitchell’s parable of the partisan and the stranger.14 In an occupied country, a partisan meets a stranger. In a night of intense communion between them, the stranger reveals himself as the leader of the resistance. The partisan, overwhelmed at this disclosure and
impelled to trust the stranger, promises to keep on trusting him,
whatever happens. His faith is soon put to the test because the stranger reappears as the head of the local unit of the Gestapo. The partisan keeps his trust and assures his comrades that the man is really one of them. After that, when members of the underground who have been taken into custody are unexpectedly released, the partisan’s faith in the stranger is confirmed; and when members of the underground are unexpectedly taken prisoner and are then executed, the evidence seems to go against his belief in the identity of the stranger. However,
persevering in his faith, the partisan assures his doubting comrades that
the stranger really is one of them but that he cannot intervene too openly on the side of the underground or his role as the leader of the resistance would be discovered by the Nazis. By means of this parable, Basil Mitchell claims that events in this world do count for and against transcendental theological assertions, for example, "God loves us"; but he also claims that we can, like the partisan, retain our faith even in the face of strong evidence that counts against it. Therefore, he insists that no amount of negative evidence can ever count conclusively against it.
Thus theological statements are held to be partially verifiable and
partially falsifiable, but not conclusively so. However, if conclusiveness is to be jettisoned from the empiricist criterion of meaning, then (if the line of thought illustrated by means of this parable is effective)
theological statements ought to be included in the lists of meaningful assertions. From the standpoint of the positivists, the floodgates would then be open.15
Logical probing into the nature and operation of synthetic statements uncovered further difficulties. One of the basic distinctions between analytic and synthetic statements concerns their logical status. An analytic statement is necessarily true or necessarily false. If it is true, then, its negation, which is necessarily (that is, under any circumstances whatever) false, is self-contradictory. By contrast, a synthetic assertion and its negation are both possible, and both are meaningful; one is true, the other is false, and it is observation that determines the issue.
The next problem we shall consider unfolds in the following way:
"There exists at least one black swan" is clearly, by any criterion, including the most stringent application of the verifiability principle, a synthetic assertion which is patently meaningful. Therefore, its negation ought to be equally meaningful. Yet, when we analyze its negation, namely, "There does not exist at least one black swan," we find that it is logically convertible to the universal proposition that "Nothing that is both a swan and black exists." However, we have noted that universal statements can never, in principle, be verified, and so this denial of an unquestionably meaningful synthetic proposition turns out to be
meaningless an utterly paradoxical result.16
The positivistic reaction to these difficulties was predictable enough:
they qualified or "weakened" the verifiability principle in the effort to make it permissive enough to allow for the validity of scientific
assertions, while still retaining enough strength (restrictiveness) to exclude metaphysical assertions. This is the theme of Ayers
Introduction to the second edition of his Language, Truth, and Logic (1948) which was published some twelve years after the original. With these difficulties in mind, he proposed the following, "weaker" version of the principle, "A statement is verifiable, and consequently
meaningful, if some observation-statement can be deduced from it in conjunction with certain other premises, without being deducible from these premises alone."17 The sort of thing that Ayer wanted to allow for by means of this reformulation of the principle is clear enough. A
statement about electrons is not verifiable by direct observation.
Nonetheless, when tied to all sorts of observations of photographic plates, meter readings, and the like, statements about electrons
functioning in the context of scientific theories — enable physicists to deduce further observation statements that could not be deduced from the exclusive consideration of the empirical data. The scientist then runs experiments to see whether the deduced observation statements are experimentally verified. Here then (if for the sake of argument, we refrain from raising further difficulties), we have an example of an effective application of the weaker, that is, the more permissive version of the principle, which permits the sobriquet "meaningful" to be
attached to the sort of scientific statements from which the older and tougher versions withheld it.
We have already noted the point that the logical relation of negation raised problems for the restrictive tendencies of the verifiability
principle. We must now note that the logical relation of the hypothetical,
"If . . . then . . .," plays just as damaging a role with regard to the
permissive tendencies of the weak version of the principle. Ayer himself (drawing on a critical essay by Isaiah Berlin) presents a reductio ad absurdum argument, which I shall somewhat modify.18 The first premise is: "If the Absolute is perfect then this is white." The second premise is: "The Absolute is perfect." Taken together, they yield (by means of Modus ponens) the conclusion: "This is white." This
conclusion is clearly a meaningful synthetic statement; indeed, it could serve as a prime example of one. By contrast, "The Absolute is perfect"
might serve as prime example of the kind of metaphysical or theological statement that positivists wanted to label meaningless. Yet by the
application of the weak version of the verifiability principle, the statement that "The Absolute is perfect" emerges as a meaningful instance of a synthetic assertion. Why? Because one could not deduce the conclusion, "This is white," from the first premise when taken by itself, nor could one deduce it from the second premise taken by itself;
but we have seen that we can deduce the observation statement "This is
white" from the two premises together. And Ayer notes that the procedure can be generalized. If we accept the weak version of the verifiability principle, any metaphysical statement which is set in a straightforward indicative form can, by conversion into the "If . . . then . . ." form, be endowed with synthetic meaningfulness.
It is now clear that no consensus regarding the verifiability principle is to be found within the broad spectrum of philosophers whose thinking may be classed as analytic; rather, there are two basic approaches to it.
The first of these is to keep on modifying the statements of the principle in the effort to attain an adequate version of it. Rudolf Carnap and C. C.
Hempel are outstanding representatives of this tendency. The latter, at the end of his survey of the problem has written: "Indeed, it is to be hoped that before long some of the open problems encountered in the analysis of cognitive significance will be clarified and that then our last version of the empiricist meaning criterion will be replaced by another more adequate one."19 His openness to criticism and his constructive efforts to uncover the principle underlying meaningful synthetic assertions make Hempel’s hope a laudable one; but, insofar as it runs athwart an important emphasis of contemporary analytic thought, it is somewhat suspect. Analysts today are concerned with the formulation of ever more precise questions and with the detailed analysis of fine points that are relevant to answering them. They react strongly against large-scale generalizations that are expressed in terms of what Gilbert Ryle calls "smother words." "Reality," "truth," "experience," and the like, are words that can be misused to blanket hosts of disparate phenomena and important distinctions. Many analysts would now
regard "verifiability" as a smother word because they suspect that undue rigidity is involved in the very effort to subsume the wide variety of synthetic assertions under the two categories "meaningful" and
"meaningless." While no one who has read Hempel can accuse him of simplicism in his recent work on this issue, the very refinement
displayed in these essays makes verifiability ineffective as the kind of instant metaphysical purgative it was originally intended to be.
The other, more common, approach to verifiability on the part of contemporary analysts is to regard it as an activity rather than a doctrine. They abandon the search for an adequate version of the
principle that could be defended against all corners, and use it instead as an important move in philosophical argument. Analysts who take this tack concede the ineffectiveness of verifiability as a "litmus paper"
device for eliminating metaphysics. Therefore, if a philosopher stakes
out a traditional metaphysical position, such as the "substance view" of the self, analysts of this kind do not dismiss it out of hand as a species of metaphysical nonsense. Instead, they examine the arguments one by one and challenge the metaphysical to make his claim good. The nature of this challenge has been succinctly stated by Elmer Sprague,
"philosophical debates are hottest between those philosophers who want to make certain entries in the list of what there is in the world and other philosophers who do not want to let them get away with it."20
One important feature of this story is the negative one. Positivists and their successors have not produced an adequate version of the
verifiability principle. However, their ability to nail down the inadequacy of the various formulations of it provides impressive evidence of their rigor. This contrasts sharply with what goes on in theological circles where theologians cannot seem to agree as to what does not "go." Nevertheless, there is some good news for theologians in this story of the quest for the verifiability principle, because the failure to make any particular version of it stick does mean that theology cannot be ruled out of court without examination. However, a word of caution is in order: To stand for an examination is no guaranty of passing it.21
III. The Abandonment of Positivistic Dogma and the Analytic Turn