ABSTRACT
This chapter looks closely at Karl Raimund Popper's defense of falsifiability as a criterion of demarcation, against the criticisms of Carl Gustav Hempel, directed at falsifiability as a criterion of meaning. Popper in fact does employ falsifiability as a criterion of demarcation between science and metaphysics, but he rejects the use of falsifiability as simultaneously a criterion of meaning. The search for a criterion of empirical significance was, an attempt to draw a line around all non-analytic doctrines which were also, as a matter of fact, true or false, hence genuine statements. As Popper himself emphasizes, "Note that I suggest falsifiability as a criterion of demarcation, but not of meaning. Falsifiability separates two kinds of perfectly meaningful statements: the falsifiable and the non-falsifiable. It draws a line inside meaningful language, not around it". Hempel's first criticism, pointed out the unwarranted exclusion of purely existential statements and mixed quantifications from the realm of significance.
