Page:Schlick - Gesammelte Aufsätze (1926 - 1936), 1938.djvu/215

 is of course possible to give a verbal description of any situation, but it is impossible to understand the description unless some kind of connection between the words and the rest of the world has been established beforehand. And this can be done only by certain acts, as for instance gestures, by which our words and expressions are correlated to certain experiences.

Thus, if I utter a sentence, and you ask me what I mean by it (perhaps by shrugging your shoulders or by looking at me with a vacant stare) I shall have to answer you by translating the sentence into a language you understand, or, if you do not understand any language yet, I shall have to teach you one; and this involves certain acts on our part, I have to make you undergo certain experiences. All your future understanding will be by virtue of these experiences. In this way all meaning is essentially referred to experience.

It must be clear by this time that there is only one way of giving meaning to a sentence, of making it a proposition: we must indicate the rules how it shall be used, in other words : we must describe the facts which will make the proposition "true", and we must be able to distinguish them from the facts which will make it "false". Still in other words: The Meaning of a Proposition is the Method of its Verification. The question "What does this sentence mean?" is identical with (has the same answer as) the question: "how is this proposition verified?"

It is one of the most serious errors in philosophy to think of a proposition as possessing meaning independently of the possible ways of its verification. People have fallen into hopeless confusion because they believed they knew the meaning of a phrase, and yet had to declare themselves unable in principle to define any circumstances in which it would be true. As long as it is logically impossible for me to indicate a method of ascertaining the truth or falsity of a proposition, I must confess I do not know what is actually asserted by the proposition.

After you have once seen this clearly you will no longer understand even the possibility of a different opinion : you will recognize that no opinion can even be formulated without admitting the truth of the preceding remarks. The view contained in these remarks has, it is true, found many opponents, but the very name by which it is usually called shows that it has not been properly understood. It is known as the "experimental theory of meaning". But it is not a theory; there can be no "theory" of meaning. A theory is a