Must Beliefs Be Verified To Be Meaningful?

Verificationism is the belief that any meaningful statement must be empirically falsifiable or verifiable.  

     Antony Flew (b. 1923) offered his contribution to the falsification debate by arguing that religious statements must be empirically falsifiable in order to be cognitively meaningful.  He illustrated this view with a story of two explorers who found a beautiful flower garden in the middle of a clearing in a jungle.  One explorer believed that the tended garden was a clear indication that there must be a gardner tending to it, but the other explorer disagreed and stated that there was no gardner.  They began to empirically observe the garden and never found any evidence (other than the existence of the garden and its beauty) of the gardner’s existence.  The two explorers never saw him nor heard him in spite of various tests that were implemented to do so.  Flew’s conclusion was that since the gardner’s existence was not empirically verified then any claim of his existence must be considered cognitively meaningless and totally void of conceptual content.  My first response to Flew’s argument would kindly be to ask, “by what authority do you become the one to determine what is cognitively meaningful?”  Why should Flew get to be the one who regulates for everyone else what concepts provide meaning.  The response might be that he is merely applying a universal standard of meaning according to what is falsifiable.  To which one should respond by asking, “by what standard do you verify the falsifiability of your proposition?”  The falsificationist is offering a rule by which meaningful statements are to be measured which is itself not a falsifiable idea.  Flew concluded his article with this question, “What would have to occur or to have occurred to constitute for you a disproof of the love of, or the existence of, God?”  But the question should also be considered by the one asking in this manner, “What would have to occur or to have occurred to constitute for you a disproof of your proposition that meaningful statements must be empirically falsifiable?”  There is no way to empirically falsify such a statement and is therefore by its own definition a meaningless statement.  The argument which requires falsification in order to determine meaning is therefore a self-refuting argument.  

The self-refuting nature of falsificationism is interesting enough but that’s not really my point.  I wish to point out that each of the explorers in the story were making decisions of faith.  The believer chose to believe that the best conclusion of the data presented was to affirm the presence of the gardner or better yet, maybe he just believed in the existence of the gardner and therefore interpreted the maintenance of the garden as further proof of the gardner’s existence.  He believed it to be so.  The unbeliever also chose to believe that there was no gardner.  He believed that the lack of verification during his empirical observations indicated that there was no gardner, or possibly he believed already that there was no gardner and found no reason to adjust his belief based upon a lack of verifiable evidence (in spite of the curiously obvious planting and maintenance of the garden).  He believed it to be so.  Both made decisions based on faith.  The role of faith in the metaphysical presupposition underlying falsificationism is that one’s ability to falsify is reliable.  It is an assertion of faith to presume that one’s ability to process data empirically is a dependable exercise.  My intent is not necessarily to criticize processing data empirically, but merely to point out that it ultimately involves assertions of faith.

Another example of falsification has been offered by A.J. Ayer who wrote, “A sentence is factually significant to any given person, if and only if, he knows how to verify the proposition which it purports to express.”  The key phrase is “knows how to verify” which indicates the meaningfulness of a proposition depends upon the ability of the given person’s ability to verify such a statement.  The subjectivity of such a statement reveals its inconsistency.  A small child knows not how to verify the provision of her mother but she certainly finds tremendous meaning in that provision.  The reply may be that this is too simplistic and childlike of an objection, but that would miss Ayer’s point.  Ayer’s point is exactly that the significance of a statement depends upon the person knowing how to verify its propositional expression.  The inconsistency may not matter to Ayer considering his other views that “psychological states are irreducibly mental and the self is just a bundle at a time and a series through time of discrete, otherwise ownerless mental states (feelings of pain, thoughts of lunch, desires for love).”

  These “ownerless mental states” involving such significant events as the feeling of pain and the desire for love may not have created trouble for Ayer but for most of the rest of us these are meaningful and not “ownerless” states.  Again this expression of falsification is self-refuting but in another fashion.  If the significance of a statement is found only in the ability of a person to verify the statement then what happens when two or more people offer contradictory statements that they each consider to be meaningfully verified.  Who determines which person gets to be the referee of such a contest?  Why should Ayer’s statement that it is meaningless to say that God does or does not exist be any more or less significant than my statement that God does exist?  His quest for falsification cannot be falsified and is therefore an expression of faith developed from certain metaphysical presuppositions.  It is an expression of faith in man’s ability to build rational arguments upon empirically observed data but also an expression of faith in man’s ability to falsify statements according to what is not even falsifiable.