Meaning of verifiability principle | Babel Free

Definitions

The principle, especially in 20th-century empiricism, that a statement has meaning if, and only if, either it can be verified by means of empirical observations or it is logically true by definition.

Examples

“It is generally agreed among most advocates of the Verifiability Principle that analytic and empirical statements exhaust the class of cognitively meaningful statements.”

“Carnap, for example, invoked the verifiability principle to argue that the problem of the external world was a 'pseudo-problem'—for neither the proposition 'there is an external world' nor its negation is verifiable in experience, so both are meaningless.”

CEFR level