Compact Entailment and Wright's Verification Principle

Abstract

In 'The verification principle: another puncture-another patch'2 Crispin Wright attempts to revive the verification principle. He does not agree with the positivist idea that there is a language of pure sense experience, a language used to record observations that are in no way theoretically conditioned, but he argues that 'the optimistic sort of scientific realism', which he finds attractive, requires that there be 'one, relatively large but not comprehensive class of statements bearing differently ... on the distribution of truth-values among the members of' the 'basic class of observational statements', statements recording 'states of affairs' that we can observe to obtain 'at each given point in our history'. By giving a viable formulation of the verification principle, he aims to substantiate his 'suspicion' that the larger class of statements, members of which are called verifiable, is not only noncomprehensive but also very 'narrow indeed? But the principle he formulates cannot serve the aim; on the principle, as I shall show, any contingent statement is verifiable.4