through some fallacy by which these two notions are confounded. I do not know if Russell’s statement, “Empirical knowledge is confined to what we actually observe” (quoted by Professor Lewis loc. cit. 130), must be interpreted as containing this fallacy, but it would certainly be worth while to discover its genesis.
Let us consider the following argument which Professor Lewis discusses (131), but which he does not want to impute to anyone:
- Suppose it maintained that no issue is meaningful unless it can be put to the test of decisive verification. And no verification can take place except in the immediately present experience of the subject. Then nothing can be meant except what is actually present in the experience in which that meaning is entertained.
This argument has the form of a conclusion drawn from two premisses. Let us for the moment assume the second premiss to be meaningful and true. You will observe that even then the conclusion does not follow. For the first premiss assures us that the issue has meaning if it can be verified; the verification does not have to take place, and therefore it is quite irrelevant whether it can take place in the future or in the present only. Apart from this, the second premiss is, of course, nonsensical; for what fact could possibly be described by the sentence ‘verification can take place only in present experience’? Is not verifying an act or process like hearing or feeling bored? Might we not just as well say that I can hear or feel bored only in the present moment? And what could I mean by this? The particular nonsense involved in such phrases will become clearer when we speak of the ‘egocentric predicament’ later on; at present we are content to know that our empirical-meaning postulate has nothing whatever to do with the now-predicament. ‘Verifiable’ does not even mean ‘verifiable here now’; much less does it mean ‘being verified now’.
Perhaps it will be thought that the only way of making sure of the verifiability of a proposition would consist in its actual verification. But we shall soon see that this is not the case.
There seems to be a great temptation to connect meaning and the ‘immediately given’ in the wrong way; and some of the Viennese positivists may have yielded to this temptation, thereby getting dangerously near to the fallacy we have just been describing. Parts of Carnap’s Logischer
