Abstract

Verificationism is a theory about meaning. It is a theory closely associated with a group of philosophers, called the logical positivists, who introduced the principle of verifiability: a sentence is cognitively meaningful only if it is verifiable. This principle, as formulated and defended by the logical positivists, has been widely rejected. Nevertheless, there are several important contemporary philosophical doctrines which are driven by verificationist considerations. The most important of these doctrines is Dummett's attack on the realist meaning-theory, more precisely, the view that the meaning of our sentences can be given in terms of verification-transcendent truth conditions. ;My dissertation is an attempt to give a contemporary account of the doctrine of verificationism; this discussion has two main facets. First I consider a defense of the principle of verifiability. This defense is drawn from two arguments: Dummett's manifestation argument and a version of Wittgenstein's private language argument. The main thesis of the manifestation argument is that any acceptable meaning-theory must be able to give an informative account of our ability to understand a language by telling us what we know when we grasp the meaning of an expression. This amounts to the requirement that the meaning-theory analyze our understanding in terms of a recognitional ability. The private language argument is used to reject a possible realist response to the manifestation requirement. ;The second phase of my reconsideration is an attempt to give a verificationist meaning-theory. The meaning-theory proposed is one that retains the appeal to truth conditions, but rejects the realist characterization of truth. The starting point for this endeavor is intuitionism: a philosophical doctrine about the meaning of mathematical statements; this view is then generalized to apply to other areas of discourse