The criterion which we use to test the genuineness of apparent statements of fact is the criterion of verifyability. We say that 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--that is, if he knows what observations would lead him, under certain conditions, to accept the proposition as true, or reject it as being false.... To make our position clearer, we may formulate it in another way. Let us call a proposition which records an actual or possible observation an experiential proposition. Then we may say that it is the mark of a genuine factual proposition, not that it should be equivalent to an experiential proposition, or any finite number of experiential propositions, but simply that some experiential propositions can be deduced from it in conjunction with certain other premises without being deducible from those other premises alone.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... research is never completed ... Around the corner lurks another possibility of interview, another book to read, a courthouse t...o explore, a document to verify.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
You see how this House of Commons has begun to verify all the ill prophecies that were made of it--low, vulgar, meddling with ever...ything, assuming universal competency, and flattering every base passion--and sneering at everything noble refined and truly national. The direct tyranny will come on by and by, after it shall have gratified the multitude with the spoil and ruin of the old institutions of the land.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In properly organized groups no faith is required; what is required is simply a little trust and even that only for a little while..., for the sooner a man begins to verify all he hears the better it is for him.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The main objection to religious myths is that, once made, they are so difficult to destroy. Chemistry is not haunted by the phlogi...ston theory as Christianity is haunted by the theory of a God with a craving for bloody sacrifices. But it is also a fact that while serious attempts are constantly being made to verify scientific myths, religious myths, at least under Christianity and Islam, have become matters of faith which it is more or less impious to doubt, and which we must not attempt to verify by empirical means. Chemists believe that when a chemical reaction occurs, the weights of the reactants are unchanged. If this is not very nearly true, most of chemical theory is nonsense. But experiments are constantly being made to disprove it.... Chemists welcome such experiments and do not regard them as impious or even futile.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In the field of politics the equivalent of a theorem is a perfectly disciplined army; of a sonnet or picture, a police state under... a dictatorship. The Marxist calls himself scientific and to this claim the Fascist adds another: he is the poet--the scientific poet--of a new mythology.... Each applies to human situations the procedures which have proved effective in the laboratory and the ivory tower. They simplify, they abstract, they eliminate all that, for their purposes, is irrelevant.... They compel the facts to verify a favorite hypothesis, they consign to the waste paper basket all that, to their mind, falls short of perfection. And because they thus act like good artists, sound thinkers and tried experimenters, the prisons are full, political heretics are worked to death as slaves, the rights and preferences of mere individuals are ignored, the Gandhis are murdered and from morning till night a million school-teachers and broadcasters proclaim the infallibility of the bosses who happen at the moment to be in power.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
For now we take the floor Quite unremarked-on, and I feel once more... That silent beckoning from you verify All I remember weaker, but Something in me starts toppling.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Let us pray that the great historic tragedy of our time may not have been enacted without instructing our whole beloved country th...rough terror and pity; and may fulfillment verify in the end those expectations which kindle the bards of Progress and Humanity.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
To judge the appearances we receive of things, we should need a judicatory instrument; to verify this instrument, we should need a... demonstration; to rectify this demonstration, we should need an instrument: so here we are arguing in a circle. Seeing the senses cannot decide our dispute, being themselves full of uncertainty, we must have recourse to Reason; there is no reason but must be built upon another reason, so here we are retreating backwards to all eternity.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »