Position
Confirmability Criterion
A sentence is cognitively meaningful if observation could confirm or disconfirm it to some degree, even though no finite body of observation could conclusively verify it.
Classification
- Position level
- specific
- Domains
- Philosophy of Language
Overview
Carnap's criterion was framed against the strict verifiability requirement rather than against its critics. Complete verification was too strong to keep: it disqualifies universal laws, since no finite set of observations establishes a statement about all cases, and science cannot proceed without them.
Replacing verification with confirmation keeps the empiricist point — that a sentence claiming to say something about the world must make some difference to what we could observe — while admitting sentences that observation can only support or undermine by degrees.
Position on
Incompatible positions
- Verificationism
Question scope: Cognitive Meaningfulness
References
- Rudolf Carnap, 'Testability and Meaning', Philosophy of Science 3 (1936) and 4 (1937)
- Rudolf Carnap, 'Testability and Meaning', Philosophy of Science 3 (1936) §§1–3 and 4 (1937), which replaces the requirement of complete verification with degrees of confirmation and testability
- Rudolf Carnap, 'Testability and Meaning', Philosophy of Science 3 (1936) §1, which argues that complete verifiability is too strong a criterion of significance and puts confirmability in its place, so the two criteria admit different sentences