ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the modality involved in the logical positivists' notion of verification in principle. It argues that they conflated substantive modality and logical modality. The tendency to revise the notion in light of one's metaphysics is also manifested in work which is not motivated by suspicion of the notion. On author's account, both empiricists and essentialists have been guilty of failing properly to observe demarcations between logic and metaphysics where modalities are concerned. Despite their desire to eliminate metaphysics, the logical positivists did not banish substantive modal talk from their philosophy. Like empiricists before and since, they conflated the notions of logical possibility and substantive possibility, thus neither successfully banishing objective non-logical modalities nor properly respecting the useful notion of logical possibility. The lack of entailment from the logical force point to the ontological point is all the more pertinent given that the possible worlds device is not genuinely explicative of the metaphysics of modality.
