Is there a path half-way between realism and verificationism?

Abstract

There exists a traditional distinction, long recognized in the history of philosophy, which has, I think, strong intuitive appeal: the distinction between what makes an ordinary or scientific empirical statement true and our reasons for holding such a statement true. A statement is supposed to be true in virtue of the fact that it corresponds to some state of affairs in the world which it talks about. A statement is held true if, e.g., it is deducible from, consistent with, or supported by other statements that we hold to be true. If one assumes that one cannot compare a statement with some unconceptualized bit of the real world, one will be led to conclude that one's reasons for holding a statement true are restricted to relations holding between statements (such as consistency, contradiction, deducibility, inductive support, etc.). And of course this is consistent with the view that a statement is true if it agrees with some real fact or state of affairs to which it corresponds. In Tarski's semantic conception of truth (not unlike the redundancy theory of truth, in this respect), the truth predicate is seen as an instrument of semantic ascent: to assert that "All men are mortal" is a true sentence is to assert that all men are mortal. The metalinguistic statement has the same assertibility conditions, the same acceptability conditions, the same degree of confirmation, etc. as its simple objectlanguage counterpart. The semantic conception defines truth in terms of satisfaction. Satisfaction is a relation between linguistic and nonlinguistic entities. But since anything (e.g. mental entities) can count as non-linguistic, all contemporary analytic philosophers accept that the semantic conception is consistent with both idealism (or antirealism) and realism. In the 1930's, within the Vienna Circle, there arose a dispute about whether, in order to determine the truth of an empirical statement, one can "compare" it with real non-linguistic facts (or states of affairs) or only with other statements. 1 The semantic conception of truth afforded a way out of the dilemma, along the lines of a distinction between the semantic predicate "true" and pragmatic (or epistemic) predicates such as "verified", "refuted", "confirmed", "corrob