Verification, falsification, and the logic of enquiry

Erkenntnis 34 (1):23 - 54 (1991)
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Abstract

Our starting point is Michael Luntley's falsificationist semantics for the logical connectives and quantifiers: the details of his account are criticised but we provide an alternative falsificationist semantics that yields intuitionist logic, as Luntley surmises such a semantics ought. Next an account of the logical connectives and quantifiers that combines verificationist and falsificationist perspectives is proposed and evaluated. While the logic is again intuitionist there is, somewhat surprisingly, an unavoidable asymmetry between the verification and falsification conditions for negation, the conditional, and the universal quantifier. Lastly we are lead to a novel characterization of realism.

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Peter Milne
University of Stirling

Citations of this work

Bruno de finetti and the logic of conditional events.Peter Milne - 1997 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 48 (2):195-232.

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References found in this work

Elements of Intuitionism.Michael Dummett - 1977 - New York: Oxford University Press. Edited by Roberto Minio.
What is a Theory of Meaning? (II).Michael Dummett - 1976 - In Gareth Evans & John McDowell (eds.), Truth and Meaning: Essays in Semantics. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Foundations of mathematical logic.Haskell Brooks Curry - 1963 - New York: Dover Publications.
What is a theory of meaning?Michael A. E. Dummett - 1975 - In Samuel Guttenplan (ed.), Mind and Language. Oxford University Press.
Elements of Intuitionism.Michael Dummett - 1980 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 31 (3):299-301.

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