Truth, Verifiability, and Propositions about the Future

HE contentions of this paper are essentially two. One is that truth does not consist of verifiability -and still less of verification-in the sense in which this has been maintained by some pragmatists, operationalists, and positivists. The other is that in a certain other sense of "verifiability", which will be described, truth is the same thing as verifiability. The paper, it should be understood, attempts only to make clear what is and what is not the relation between truth and verifiability. It does not attempt in addition to carry the analysis of verification itself to the point where it would, by implication, furnish a terminal answer to the question, what is truth. The latter task, because of space limitations, must be reserved for some future occasion. I. Tlwo senses of "verification". Etymologically, to verify is to make true; and some writers have contended that truth is something a proposition acquires in the very operation by which we verify it. It will be shown below that this contention rests on nothing more solid than certain confusions. For the moment what we need to notice is that, etymology notwithstanding, to "verify" a proposition does not in ordinary usage mean to make it true but either to discover whether or not it is true, or to assure oneself that it is true. More explicitly, the word "verification" has a generic and also