ABSTRACT
“Verificationism” is usually taken to refer to the core doctrine of logical empiricism/logical positivism. The aim of logical empiricism was to unify all inquiry under the umbrella of science. But it would be a mistake to think that the anti-metaphysical thesis of verificationism came into being with logical empiricism. It is firmly rooted in thinkers such as David Hume and August Comte. American pragmatism originated in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1870s in The Metaphysical Club – an informal reading group in which Oliver Wendell Holmes, William James, Chauncey Wright, Charles Sanders Peirce and others thrashed out their views. Ludwig Wittgenstein has often been taken to have been in league with the logical empiricists, much to his irritation and to the irritation of scholars of his work. Wittgenstein presented a “picture theory” of truth in the Tractatus, in which “The sense of a proposition is its agreement and disagreement with the possibilities of existence and non-existence of the atomic facts”.
