About a century ago, Charles Sanders Peirce asserted that the meaning of an ‘intellectual conception’ is identical with the ‘sum’ of its ‘practical consequences’ (cf. Peirce, 1958). And he thought this idea sufficiently important that he made it the primary maxim of the philosophy he called Pragmatism. This is nothing but an early statement of the Verifiability Theory of Meaning. And Pragmatism was the first philosophy dedicated to the proposition that theory of meaning can solve or dissolve the traditional problems of philosophy. Today the Verifiability Theory of Meaning has been pretty well abandoned, not, alas!, because the fundamental intuition behind it has been universally conceded to be erroneous, but simply because there are formidable technical objections to the doctrine. The fundamental intuition behind the doctrine has two closely related components. One component is the Open Question Argument: what more does the expression mean, if it means more than that we will have certain experiences? The other component is the argument, often found in nineteenth century literature (and still occasionally found today) that to believe in things that are not concepts (or at least mental entities) is to believe in things that are inconceivable.† The reply to the Open Question argument is that the Verificationist philosopher is here speaking as if he had succeeded in the enterprise of translating our commonplace talk of things into a sensationalistic vernacular.
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