EMPIRICIST THEORY OF MEANING KEVIN FRANCIS THIRD YEAR PHILOSOPHY Foundationalism can be seen as the expression of the empiricist

thought that verification and justification,telling whether something is true and backing up ones claim about what is true, must rely on upon ones evidence of ones senses; not in the first instance maybe but at the end of the day.The evidence of our senses is what we start from when we need to construct a justification of our beliefs, on this approach.Evidence of our senses is not only what we appeal to in justification and verification, it is also what we start from in learning a language.This is held by the empiricist to be basic in epistemology and also the basic in theory of meaning.An empiricist theory of meaning will be one which enshrines this dependence of all language learning and thus of all meaning of language on the evidence of ones senses. VP: a statement has empirical meaning if its truth would make a difference to the evidence of our senses If its truth makes a difference to the evidence of our sense is equivalent to: VP1: A statement has empirical meaning if its verifiable And from this account of empirical meaning there naturally arises an account of what it is for someone to understand a statement or know its meaning UP1: a knows the meaning of p if a knows how to verify p This could be expanded to read as UP1: a knows the meaning of p if a knows what difference the truth of p would make to the evidence of as senses And from this we could derive what the meaning of a particular statement s is : MP: the meaning of S is the difference that the truth S would make to the evidence of ones senses All three principles are accepted by the empiricist.VP1: is the core of the position known as logical empiricism or logical positivism. Strong verification is conclusive verification; a statement is conclusively verifiable if, once we have the best possible evidence for it, there remains no possibility that the statement is false.Weak verification is less than than conclusive.A weakly verifiable statement is not itself strongly verifiable but is confirmable or disconfirmable by appeal to other statements which are conclusively verifiable; that is strongly verifiable can count as evidence for it or against it. We could insist that verifiable in VP1 means strongly verifiable.But this would rule out so many of our statements as insignificant that it would be self defeating.On the other hand empiricist are not normally tempted to suppose that there are no strongly verifiable statements at all.Statements which simply report the evidence of ones senses, whatever they may be can be conclusively verified when ones senses do in fact produce that evidence.The most plausible of empiricism holds that statements can be

divided in two classes, those that are strongly verifiable and those that are not strongly verifiable by themselves but are confirmable and discomfirmable by appeal to the strongly verifiable one.Logical empiricist differ on which statements can be held conclusively verifiable.Ayer for instance takes the classical line that observation statements are those which describe the nature of our present sensory states.Quine on the other hand takes the evidence of ones senses to concern not what is inernal to the observer but what is external to him that is to say the presence of a certain (public) stimuli.An observation statement is one which is made in response to certain stimuli and strongly verifiable by appeal to the occurrence of such stimuli.There are three main verification theories of the logical empiricist Phenomenalism Phenomenalism as a theory of the meaning of non observation statements held originally that such statements are quivalent in meaning to a list of statements about what we would be observed under differenct circumstances, all linked by conjunction.For instance what it is for there to be a red rose in this darkened room is for it to be the case that if we were to turn the light on, we would make a certain observation and if we were then to move to another place then we would make a rather different observation.Phenomenalist tended to take it that the observation statements report the nature of the observers sensory states.And if this is so we would would get the result that instead of atleast being two radically different things in the world, sensory states and material objects, there is only one sort of thing, sensory state and all putatively other sort of things are reducible to complexes of actual and possible things of the first sort.this is the metaphysical advantage of phenomenalism.The epistemological attraction is that knowledge of the external world is genuinely possible.Such objects do not lie beyond our grasp for we can hope that every member of the set of statements about what would be observed should be conclusively verifiable and in such a case there remains no possibility that the material objects should be false.Phenomanelism of this sort would be a form of anti-realism. If we could specify and verify every member of the set of observation statements which together make up the meaning of a non-observation statements, that non observation statement would in accordance with the verification principle, have its own determinate meaning and in certain circumstances be determinately be true or false.This would be the phenomenalists ideal situation as all such non observation statements would be strongly verifiable.But thats not the case for two reasons.First it seems possible that in most cases the conditional statement of what would be observed in certain circumstances cannot be all verified, because there will be cases on which if we verify one, we lose the chance to verify another.If only some can be verified, the non observation statement would be no more than weakly verifiable.Secondly it is not clear that conditional statement are strongly verified by simply showing the antecedent and consequent are true.eg you can read English and you are reading this book, but it is not true that if you can read English, you are reading this book.Although there are some shortcomings, phenomenalism narrows the gap between the world we experience and our experience of it.This form of phenomenalism is a form of recutionism.But a problem faced by this form of phenomenalism is that no philosopher has succeeded in showing what such a reduction would look like in detain.It seems implausible to suppose that a statement about a red rose, did have these or that consequences for possible observation.So not only will it be infinitely in length,the list of conditional statement would be rather vague in content as well.To the extent the range is vague, to that extent non observation statement have an indeterminate meaning and the range of circumstances under which they are determinately true or determinately false is greatly reduced, perhaps to nothing.This means

abandonment of the original reduction theory, since it could no longer be claimed that a non observation statement was exactly equivalent in meaning to any collection of observation statements; however complex and conditional it might be. Carnaps Relaxation Rudolf Carnap came to the conclusion that the best that could be achieved was to specify, as far as one could, which observation statement were implied by which non-observation statement.This would not yield a reduction from one to another but carnap supposes that it still allowed the phenomenalist to claim that the concept of a material object could be reduced to autopsychological concepts, those which concern the nature of ones own sensory states.But it seems that there will always be some aspect of that statements meaning that will escape and remain unspecified.But this merely increases the sense in which the meaning of a non observation statement is indeterminate.It gives a good sense to the idea that a weakly verifiable statement can only be confirmed or disconfirmed and never conclusively verified.But the phenomenalist ever want to say such a statement is determinately true they must also admit there are facts in virtue of whuch it is true but which lie beyond the possibility of verification.The verificationist who is unwilling to admit the possibility of such facts must therefore say such statements, though perhaps may be determinately false when one of its consequences is observed to be false still cannot achieve the determinate truth. Quine Quine argues that we cannot hope to even specify observation sentences which are the consequences of given non observation statement.There are three distinct inputs to quines eventual position.The first in that quines thesis is undermined by data evidence.No matter how much evidence we have,there will always be different theories which explain and assimilate the data equally well.For eg- it is compatible with the result of all actual size and possible measurements to hold that either the universe if of a fixed size or that it is expanding at a constant rate. The second is the claim that non observation sentences face the tribunal of experience not singly but in groups.it means that individual non observation sentences can be conclusively verified or conclusively falsified by observation, by evidence of our senses.The reason is that such sentence do not occur in limbo; they occur as part of a more general theory.And because of this we have a choice to alter the theory when things dont go wrong at the observation level and there will always be more than one way to do it.Individual non observation sentences are never confirmed by experience.Experience can confirm theories and thereby confirm the sentence if which theories are constructed but it cannot confirm those sentences singly and directly.It is only able to confirm a non observation sentence in the light of the theory that surrounds it; alter the theory and the non observation might not be confirmed by experience at all. The third is the empiricist theort of meaning MP: the meaning of S is the difference that the truth of S would make to the evidence of ones senses. Quine uses these three inputs to argue against the notion of individual non observation sentences having a separate meaning on their own.But MP in specifying the observational consequences ofS we are specifying the meaning of S.But by the second claim, no individual non observation sentence has its own observational consequences all its own.For if it had then, when those consequences failed, would

no exactly where to revise.But we always do have such a choice and hence no sentence has observational consequences all its own.And this means, by MP that no non observational statement has a meaning all its oiwn; for there is no such thing as the difference its truth would make to an observation.Quines conclusion is that meaning belongs to theories and not sentences The conclusion can be expressed in two different ways.Quine holds that against Carnap that a non observational sentence does not have its own observational consequences.This shows that there is nothing which the sentence means taken all by itself.There is no determinate object which we can call meaning of the sentence.So at the non observational level, the sentential meaning is indertermninate.There are no facts of the matter about what the individual sentence means.This is the thesis of the indeterminacy of sentential meaning. So far as the non observational sentence go, quines theory of meaning can be called holisitic.Holism is the view that the meaning of sentence is indeterdependent, so what means depends on the meaning of other, and can be changed elsewhere.Meaning is something born primarily not by the parts but by the whole theory since the whole theory is the only thing that has its own observational consequences.We can see the whole theory as a sphere with observation sentences on the periphery and non observation sentences in the interior.Sentences near the centre are more resistant to revision then than our sentences further out. Synthetic sentences are those sentences when true are made by a combination of what they mean and how the world is.Analytic sententences on the other hand are true solely because of what they mean.Quines position has the consequence that there are no such analytic sentences.The sense in which we can talk of the meaning of an individual the sentence is not determinate enough to make it possible that a sentence is unrevisable true in virtue of that meaning.There are no analytic truth.