Verificationism

Verificationism is the view that a statement or question is only legitimate if there is some way to determine whether the statement is true or false, or what the answer to the question is. It is a view mostly closely associated with the logical positivists of the early twentieth century, who established and applied this doctrine to distinguish between meaningful and meaningless assertive sentences. However, the core idea of verificationism is much older, dating back at least to Hume and the empiricists, who believed that observation was the only way we can acquire knowledge.

Historically, the verificationist criterion has been used to render meaningless, false, unscientific, or in some other way illegitimate many philosophical debates, due to their positing of unverifiable statements or concepts. Notoriously, verificationism was used by the logical positivists to rule out as meaningless religious, metaphysical, aesthetic, and ethical sentences. However, not all verificationists have found all sentences of these types to be unverifiable. The classical pragmatists, for example, saw verificationism as a guide for doing good work in religion, metaphysics, and ethics.