Logged out
Access All our Essays in an Instant
Swap your work for FREE access, or pay £4.99 for instant access
Explain what is meant by verification and falsification in the context of debates about religious language.
Member rating:
(1 vote)
| Words:
| Submitted: Fri Jan 28 2005
Page Preview
On the left is an image preview of every page of this document, and below are the first 150 words with formatting removed:
Q. Explain what is meant by verification and falsification in the context of debates about religious language. (8) Verification and falsification are concerned with the meaningfulness or otherwise of religious language. What has become known as the Verification Principle maintains that a statement is only meaningful if we know how it can be proved to be true or false. This can be because it is an analytical statement or synthetic and thus verified through empirical means. It is important to note that in the context of the Verification Principle the word meaningful means logical, in other words a statement can only be logical if we very its truth or falsity. A group of prominent thinkers known as the Vienna Circle are often described as logical positivists. They considered that religious language was meaningless or illogical because it could not be tested empirically, and was not analytical. A.J. Ayer developed this theme to produce...
To see the full version of this document, and 145,328 others
