Sample Material of UPSC Mains Philosophy (Optional) Study Kit
Topic: Philosophy of Religion (An Empiricist’s View of The Nature of Religious Belief)
R. B. BRAITHWAITE
‘THE meaning of a scientific statement is to be ascertained by reference to the steps which would be taken to verify it.’ Eddington wrote this in 1939. Unlike his heterodox views of the a priori and epistemological character of the ultimate laws of physics, this principle is in complete accord with contemporary philosophy of science; indeed it was Eddington’s use of it in his expositions of relativity theory in the early 1920s that largely contributed to its becoming the orthodoxy. Eddington continued his passage by saying: ‘This [principle] will be recognized as a tenet of logical positivism-only it is there extended to all statements.’! Just as the tone was set to the empiricist tradition in British philosophy -the tradition running from Locke through Berkeley, Hume, Mill to Russell in our own time-by Locke’s close association with the scientific work of Boyle and the early Royal Society, so the contemporary development of empiricism popularly known as logical positivism has been greatly influenced by the revolutionary changes this century in physical theory and by the philosophy of science which physicists concerned with these changes-Einstein and Heisenberg as well as Eddington-have thought most consonant with relativity and quantum physics. It is therefore, I think, proper for me to take the verification principle of meaning, and a natural adaptation of it, as that aspect of contemporary scientific thought whose bearing upon the philosophy of religion I shall discuss this afternoon. Eddington, in the passage from which I have quoted, applied the verificational principle to the meaning of scientific statements only.
But we shall see that it will be necessary, and concordant with an empiricist way of thinking, to modify the principle by allowing use as weIl as verifiability to be a criterion for meaning; so I believe that all I say will be in the spirit of a remark with which Eddington concluded an article published in 1926: ‘The scientist and the religious teacher may well be content to agree that the value of any hypothesis extends just so far as it is verified by actual experience.’