Empiricist criteria of cognitive significance

problems and changes

Carl G. Hempel

pp. 65-85

in: Sandra Harding (ed), Can theories be refuted?, Berlin, Springer, 1976

Abstract

It is a basic principle of contemporary empiricism that a sentence makes a cognitively significant assertion, and thus can be said to be either true or false, if and only if either (1) it is analytic or contradictory — in which case it is said to have purely logical meaning or significance — or else (2) it is capable, at least potentially, of test by experiential evidence — in which case it is said to have empirical meaning or significance. The basic tenet of this principle, and especially of its second part, the so-called testability criterion of empirical meaning (or better: meaningfulness), is not peculiar to empiricism alone: it is characteristic also of contemporary operationism, and in a sense of pragmatism as well; for the pragmatist maxim that a difference must make a difference to be a difference may well be construed as insisting that a verbal difference between two sentences must make a difference in experiential implications if it is to reflect a difference in meaning.