“Verification: In empiricist philosophy, knowledge-claims are accepted as scientific only if they are verifiable. To verify a statement is to provide evidence, generally of and empirical or observational kind, for believing it to be true. In logical empiricism the meaning of a statement was treated as equivalent to its method of verification, and only verifiable statements were accepted as meaningful. In non-empiricist philosophies of science, and in less extreme forms of empiricism, it is accepted that evidence may give good reasons for believing in the truth of a statement, whilst falling short in the sense of conclusive proof.”
Excerpted from: Marshall, Gordon, ed. Oxford Dictionary of Sociology. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.
Mark's Text Terminal 