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The Nature of Scientific Statements

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2022

David L. Miller
David L. Miller*
Affiliation:
The University of Texas, Austin, Texas
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Extract

In this article we will explain and defend the proposition: “A statement which prescribes (entails) the conditions for its verification is a scientific statement.” We will confine our consideration to factual (synthetic) statements alone, although it may be true that our proposed proposition refers to formal, analytic statements also.

If prescribing the conditions for its verification is the only necessary qualification for a statement to be scientific then obviously the means of arriving at such a statement is irrelevant. It does not matter whether we have performed many experiments or none before making a scientific statement. There are, of course, reasons for having a systematic method of arriving at the formulation of scientific statements, but this does not make them more, or less, scientific.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 14 , Issue 3 , July 1947 , pp. 219 - 223
Copyright
Copyright © Philosophy of Science Association 1947

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References

1 For a clear expression of the view that the meaning of a factual statement is identical with the means of verifying it, see Boas and Blumberg, “Some Remarks in Defense of the Operational Theory of Meaning,” Jour. of Philos., XXVIII (1931); Blumberg and Feigl, “Logical Positivism,” Jour. of Philos., XXVIII (1931). In “Logical Positivism,” we find, “To know the meaning of a proposition is to know what must be the case if the proposition is true.”

2 For an excellent recent criticism of this view see “Are all Empirical Statements Merely Hypotheses?”, by W. T. Stace, in Jour. of Philos., vol. XLIV, No. 2.