Verificationism

Smart

pp. 261-270

in: John Heil (ed), Cause, mind, and reality, Berlin, Springer, 1989

Abstract

Charlie Martin has always been highly resistant to verificationist philosophies. By these I mean not only the explicit verificationism of the Vienna circle and the early Ayer, but also the less explicit verificationism that could be found in Wittgensteinian and Oxford philosophy in the years immediately following the second world war. For example it was supposed that phenomenalism was adequately refuted by showing that sentences about physical objects could not be translated into sentences about sense data. Martin saw that this sort of thing cut no ontological ice. After all, it may be that sentences about nations are not translatable into sentences about citizens, but this should not lead us to think of nations as real entities over and above the citizens who make them up.

Cited authors

Wittgenstein Ludwig