Verificationism has had a bad press for many years. The view that the meaning of our words is bound up with the discernible difference it would make if what we say, think or write were true or false, nowadays is scorned as “positivist” though it was shared by eminent empiricists and pragmatists. This paper seeks to sort through some of the complexities of what is often portrayed as an unduly simplistic conception. I begin with an overview of its main logical (...) empiricist varieties before considering which aspects of it fall victim to which of the three major types of objection that have been raised against it. I will conclude that what is left standing is a modest proposal that seems worth further investigation. (shrink)

Interpretations abound about Husserl’s understanding of the relationship between veridical perceptual experience and hallucination. Some read him as taking the two to share the same distinctive essential nature, like contemporary conjunctivists. Others find in Husserl grounds for taking the two to fall into basically distinct categories of experience, like disjunctivists. There is ground for skepticism, however, about whether Husserl’s view could possibly fall under either of these headings. Husserl, on the one hand, operates under the auspices of the phenomenological reduction, (...) abstaining from use of any epistemic commitments about mind-transcendent reality, whereas conjunctive and disjunctive accounts of perceptual experience, on the other hand, are both premised on some form of metaphysical realism. There seems to be a basic incompatibility between the former approach and the latter. I examine this line of thinking and argue that the incompatibility is only apparent. (shrink)