Verification

“ The way one man’s inaccurate statement is blandly copied down by the next man, and verification shirked at every turn! Why will they do it, these little scientific folk? For the great ones never do. The great ones verify, or else, when they come to a hole in their knowledge, they frankly tell you that they don’t know. ”

“ For the sake of simplicity I have written as if the verification might occur in the life of a single philosopher,—which is manifestly untrue, since the theories still face each other, and the facts of the world give countenance to both. Rather should we expect, that, in a question of this scope, the experience of the entire human race must make the verification, and that all the evidence will not be 'in' till the final integration of things, when the last man has had his say and contributed his share to the still unfinished x. ”

“ If the verification system cannot receive inquiries at all times during a day, the person or entity merely has to assert that the entity attempted to make the inquiry on that day for the previous sentence to apply to such an inquiry, and does not have to provide any additional proof concerning such inquiry. ”

“ They are permitted to write the verification of the document before the document is verified because the writing is not the primary aspect of the verification; the signing is. There are those that disagree.
Paragraph 25- If witnesses came and testified that at the time of the verification the judges were not in one siting but that each judge accepted the testimony by himself, the verification is invalid. The judges themselves are not believed to say that they were not together and that they did the verification improperly. There are those who validate such a verification. ”

“ It means that in principle there are no limits to our knowledge. The boundaries which must be acknowledged are of an empirical nature and, therefore, never ultimate; they can be pushed back further and further; there is no unfathomable mystery in the world.
The dividing line between logical possibility and impossibility of verification is absolutely sharp and distinct; there is no gradual transition between meaning and nonsense. For either you have given the grammatical rules for verification, or you have not ”

“ Paragraph 3- What is the verification process? The witnesses of the document come and testify in front of three judges- who may even be laymen- that this is their signature and the judges will write on the bottom, “we were three who sat as one and so and so and so and so came and testified in front of us regarding their signatures and it became clear to us that this is their signatures. We uphold and affirm as is appropriate,” and they sign on bottom. ”

“ Every cognition involves a judgment and its verification, and the verification is founded on the congruence of judgments, one with another of a higher grade.
In the lower stages of the development of mind, verification is sometimes by repetition, oftener by submitting the judgment to verification by another sense; but in the higher stages of the development of mind, verification is by experimentation. We go on from generation to generation with unverified judgments and suppose that our concepts are composed of cognitions, when in fact they are composed of fallacious judgments. ”

“ Thus logical possibility or impossibility of verification is always selfimposed. If we utter a sentence without meaning it is always our own fault.
The tremendous philosophic importance of this last remark will be realized when we consider that what we said about the meaning of assertions applies also to the meaning of questions. There are, of course, many questions which can never be answered by human beings. ”

“ Everything that one man, by his own personal experience, can verify in the account of the world given by common sense and physics, will be explicable by some such means, since verification consists merely in the occurrence of an expected sense-datum. But what depends upon testimony, whether heard or read, cannot be explained in this way, since testimony depends upon the existence of minds other than our own, and thus requires a knowledge of something not given in sense. ”

“ Yet verification will triumph. Slowly but surely the world will come into the conviction that beliefs which shun verification, and practices which can not be brought to the test of utility, have no claim to respect. ”

“ Modern logic tells us that a statement of the kind requires verification; and modern writers, such as Bacon, Whewell, and Mill, are at great pains to point out the best methods of verification,—which after all consist in observing and experimenting further ”

“ There are no scientific truths which have not to be, and have not been, verified, and if verification is logically vicious, and cannot amount to proof, they are not absolutely true. But if the premisses of a demonstration are not absolutely true, neither can its conclusion be. What then becomes first of the value, and ultimately of the ‘validity’, of an ideal of proof which can never be exemplified by actual reasoning, and serves only to condemn it?
(4) The ideal of absolute certainty may be repudiated altogether, even as an ideal, for sound scientific reasons. ”

“ Truth HAPPENS to an idea. It BECOMES true, is MADE true by events. Its verity IS in fact an event, a process, the process namely of its verifying itself, its veriFICATION. Its validity is the process of its validATION. [Footnote: But 'VERIFIABILITY,' I add, 'is as good as verification. For one truth-process completed, there are a million in our lives that function in [the] state of nascency. They lead us towards direct verification; lead us into the surroundings of the object they envisage ”

“ It is not improbable that no human being will ever be able to verify or falsify it, but what philosopher would be bold enough to declare the sentence to be devoid of meaning! — I think it must be clear that we have nothing to do with this use of the term "verifiability", and that we must have had something else in mind when we said that the Meaning of a Proposition was its Method of Verification. ”

“ We have confined ourselves to bringing together one or other of two purely conventional definitions, and we have verified their identity; nothing new has been learned. Verification differs from proof precisely because it is analytical, and because it leads to nothing. ”

“ Verifiability, which is the sufficient and necessary condition of meaning, is a possibility of the logical order; it is created by constructing the sentence in accordance with the rules by which its terms are defined. The only case in which verification is (logically) impossible is the case where you have made it impossible by not setting any rules for its verification. Grammatical rules are not found anywhere in nature, but are made by man and are, in principle, arbitrary ”

“ If an employer chooses voluntarily to seek verification of any individual employed by the employer, the employer shall seek verification of all individuals employed at the same geographic location or, at the option of the employer, all individuals employed within the same job category, as the employee with respect to whom the employer seeks voluntarily to use the verification system. ”

“ In our world, namely, abounding as it does in things of similar kinds and similarly associated, one verification serves for others of its kind, and one great use of knowing things is to be led not so much to them as to their associates, especially to human talk about them. The quality of truth, obtaining ante rem, pragmatically means, then, the fact that in such a world innumerable ideas work better by their indirect or possible than by their direct and actual verification. ”

“ The mere statement that no sentence has meaning unless we are able to indicate a way of testing its truth or falsity is not very useful if we do not explain very carefully the signification of the phrases ‘method of testing’ and ‘verifiability’. ”

“ From this difficulty the pragmatist alone escapes, by assuming his premisses provisionally and arguing forwards, in order to test them by their consequences. If the deduced conclusion can be verified in fact, the premisses grow more assured. Thus every real inference is an experiment, and 'proof' is an affair of continuous trial and verification—not an infinite falling back upon an elusive 'certainty,' but an infinite reaching forwards towards a fuller consummation. ”

“ So, too, the verification and confirmation of conviction by means of the repetition of the experiences gained of the way to truth, must appear to be necessary in order to counteract the infinite possibility of deception and error which, on the other hand, lurks in the way to truth. ”

“ For although the statement may be capable of verification by man, it is certainly not capable of verification by him, with any means and appliances which he has possessed; and he must have persuaded himself of the truth of it by some means which does not attach any credit to his testimony. Even if, therefore, the matter affirmed is within the reach of human knowledge, we have no right to accept it upon authority unless it is within the reach of our informant’s knowledge. ”

“ Now not only is this the case, but to deny that our verifications, whatever they are, always are facts that in their turn contain more Being than we at present verify, would be to assert that at present we consciously verify an infinity of facts. For to verify the fact that we make verifications, and to verify again this verification, and so on, all at the present moment, would indeed involve a present and completed infinite complexity of consciousness. Whoever asserts the thesis, however, that no fact is “accredited” from my point of view unless I now verify it, asserts a fact, viz. ”

“ Like a judgment of sensation, a judgment of perception may be a certitude or a fallacy. If it is a fallacy it must be corrected, and if a certitude it must be verified. If the form were determined by consciousness there would be no need of verification, but as it is external, verification is necessary. A judgment of perception is imperfectly verified by repetition, for if the likeness is discovered a second time the judgment may be supposed valid, though the same conditions for error may still exist. ”

“ The meaning of a proposition is the method of its verification. ”

“ Thus it has come about that many 60-called truths are not true at all, for the alleged process of verification was faulty; while supposed untruths may be destined in the fullness of time to be recognized as true. ”

“ The design of the institution-building projects contains features intended to remedy the shortcomings of the verification process. While the two functions are mutually reinforcing, the timing of their implementation is different: the shortcomings which have been verified can be remedied only if the projects achieve success in the medium term. ”

“ The empirical circumstances are all-important when you want to know if a proposition is true (which is the concern of the scientist) , but they can have no influence on the meaning of the proposition (which is the concern of the philosopher) . Professor Lewis has seen and expressed this very clearly (loc. cit. 142, first six lines) , and our Vienna positivism, as far as I can answer for it, is in complete agreement with him on this point. It must be emphasized that when we speak of verifiability we mean logical possibility of verification, and nothing but this. ”

“ This connection, by the way, is not such as to entitle us to say that physical substance is ‘a mere construction put upon sense-data’, or that a physical body is ‘a complex of sense-data’ — unless we interpret these phrases as rather inadequate abbreviations of the assertion that all propositions containing the term ‘physical body’ require for their verification the presence of sense-data. ”

“ Empirical possibility is determined by the laws of nature, but meaning and verifiability are entirely independent of them. Everything that I can describe or define is logically possible — and definitions are in no way bound up with natural laws. The proposition ‘Rivers flow uphill’ is meaningful, but happens to be false because the fact it describes is physically impossible. It will not deprive a proposition of its meaning if the conditions which I stipulate for its verification are incompatible with the laws of nature ”

“ A critical attitude towards allegations about ‘facts’ will enable him to minimize the dangers of error, deception, and bigotry. A conception of ‘principles’ as working hypotheses will discourage a servile and superstitious reverence for them, and justify the fullest freedom to experiment with whatever ideas hold out hopes of verification and of scientific progress. Together these three considerations will pretty thoroughly emancipate inquiry from the shackles of any mechanical scheme of ‘proof’. ”

“ Verification of due process also covers observance of procedural guarantees when individuals are brought to trial. Despite the recorded decrease in the number of complaints, analysis of these complaints shows that there continue to be violations of certain procedural guarantees, particularly of the right to be tried within a reasonable period of time. ”

“ The means used and the anonymity of those responsible have made verification difficult. In some cases, a series of threats were made using letters or telephone calls which repeat the same basic message. Several of the people who reported threats are individuals who have distinguished themselves professionally and publicly in their different fields of work, while others are well known for having handled trials which had a major impact on public opinion. ”