ABSTRACT
The Verification Theory of meaning, which flourished in the 1930s and 1940s, was a highly political theory of meaning. It was motivated by, and reciprocally helped to motivate, a growing empiricism and scientism in philosophy and in other disciplines. The theory faces a number of objections: it has ruled a number of clearly meaningful sentences meaningless, and vice versa; it has assigned the wrong meanings to sentences that it does count as meaningful; and it has some dubious presuppositions. To a verificationist, a sentence's meaning is its epistemology, a matter of what its proper evidence base would be. Ludwig Wittgenstein would and did complain that the Verification Theory is yet another monolithic attempt to get at the "essence" of language and all such attempts are doomed to failure. Any version of the Verification Principle must presuppose an "observation language" in which experiences are described; hence it must countenance a firm distinction between "observational" and "theoretical" terms.
