ABSTRACT
Some modern empiricists—in particular, the majority of logical positivists—have, in my opinion, misconceived the relation of knowledge to experience. This has arisen, if I am not mistaken, from two errors: first, an inadequate analysis of the concept “experience”, and second, a mistake as to what is involved in the belief that some assigned property belongs to some (undetermined) subject. Two specific problems arise, one as regards significance, the other as regards knowledge of what are called “existence propositions”, i.e. propositions of the form “something has this property”. It is maintained, on the one hand, that a statement is not “significant” unless there is some known method of verifying it; on the other hand, that we cannot know “something has this property” unless we can mention a specific subject that has the property. In the present Chapter I wish to give reasons for rejecting both these opinions.
