ABSTRACT
By the beginning of the second world war it had become clear to the more critical positivists that the kind of analysis they had first proposed would not serve. They had sought the ultimate meaning of every statement about the world in atomic facts of the form ‘this is blue’ or ‘this is bluer than that’. The progress of this sort of analysis was clogged and eventually brought to a halt by a mounting mass of difficulties. Had the analysts ever arrived at a single agreed-upon atomic fact? No, it was admitted that they had not. Did they have a clear idea of what they were looking for in such a fact? They did seem to be clear about one side of it, the attribute or relation involved; but the subject to which this was ascribed was left a mysterious and faceless something of which, in itself, nothing could be said. Furthermore, many kinds of meaningful statement stubbornly resisted analysis. Some of them did so merely because they were vague, like statements about the behaviour of nations; if one tried to reduce these to a set of precise sensory comments about the behaviour of Smith, Jones, and Brown, the lack of equivalence was manifest. More important were the statements that had a perfectly definite meaning and still resisted analysis. ‘There are a dozen chickens in the yard’; what were the sensible facts that answered to that ‘dozen’? Could I point to any sensible fact as what is meant by ‘John is thinking of Jane’ or even by ‘I am thinking of Jane’? How many atomic facts should we need to verify with certainty ‘this is an apple’? An infinite number, the positivists admitted. Are we not, then, indulging in a bout of metaphysics if we are rash enough to say anything about an apple? So it would seem. And our metaphysics becomes even wilder if we venture on a remark about the table in the living room when no one is there. Of course we believe that the table is there, but if our statement must refer to observable facts, and we have specified that they shall be unobservable, our statement ought to mean nothing. And what of the verifiability principle itself? It was the alpha and omega of the positivists; it was what sustained the demand for analysis, and supplied it a direction and a test. But when the principle was applied to itself, it collapsed, and not with a whimper, either, but with a portentous bang. It was plainly not an inductive generalization, nor could it be called a priori; and if it was the only other thing that it could apparently be, an arbitrary rule of practice, why should it be binding on anyone who preferred some other rule?
