Beware the Limits of Verification

The logical positivists, while advocating for scientific verification as a means to establish truth, faced a significant paradox. Their commitment to verification led to self-contradiction: rejecting not only unverifiable philosophies and religions but also the very foundations of science itself. Karl Popper and David Hume highlighted this challenge, explaining that scientific theories derived from empirical experimentation are inherently unprovable in a strict sense. The example of swans illustrates this point; for centuries it was believed all swans were white until the discovery of black swans, demonstrating that no amount of verification can guarantee the absolute truth of a universal claim.