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Franss
I'm revison Philosophy A2 for an exam on the 11th I've gone over the Verification Principle and Falsification Principle today and the Falsification Pricnciple with Flew and Popper has really confused me!
Could anyone help me by like giving a simplified explaination of what it is!
Cheers!

P.s. I'm on the OCR exam board!


They are both theories of meaning. Both give criterions under which sentences can be genuinely meaningful.

Verification principle-some sentence is genuinely meaningful only if there are some possible observations which would confirm that sentence true. e.g. 'That dog is 2 metres long' is meaningful according to the verification principle because there is a possible observation that would confirm it true i.e. if we measured the dog and found it to be 2 metres longs.

Falsification principle-some sentence is genuinely meaningful only if there are some possible observations which would confirm that sentence true.e.g. 'That dog is 2 metres long' is meaningful according to the falsification principle because there is a possible observation that would falsify it (show it to be false) i.e. if we measured the dog and found it not to be 2 metres long.

Hope this helped. If you want advantages and disadvantages of each then please reply.
tomheppy
They are both theories of meaning. Both give criterions under which sentences can be genuinely meaningful.

Verification principle-some sentence is genuinely meaningful only if there are some possible observations which would confirm that sentence true. e.g. 'That dog is 2 metres long' is meaningful according to the verification principle because there is a possible observation that would confirm it true i.e. if we measured the dog and found it to be 2 metres longs.

Falsification principle-some sentence is genuinely meaningful only if there are some possible observations which would confirm that sentence true.e.g. 'That dog is 2 metres long' is meaningful according to the falsification principle because there is a possible observation that would falsify it (show it to be false) i.e. if we measured the dog and found it not to be 2 metres long.

Hope this helped. If you want advantages and disadvantages of each then please reply.



Also, falsification principle says religious lang. is meaningless because religious people tend to move the goal posts, disallowing their beliefs to be falsified.
"God is benevolent!"
"What about suffering..?"
"Aah, that's not the kind of benevolent we mean"
Reply 3
Verification makes religious language meaningless because it cannot be empirically tested.

Falsification make religious language meaningless because religious believers don't consider arguments against religious belief - this means that nothing can be used to falsify their statements.

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