Meaning and empirical justification

The paper illustrates some problems arising when the project of building a theory of meaning based on the notion of verification is extended beyond the mathematical domain, to cover empirical sentences. The central suggestion is to equate knowledge of the meaning of A with the capacity to decide the relation “x is a canonical justification for A”. The theoretical notion of canonical justification for A must be defined in such a way as to turn out to be decidable because the corresponding intuitive notion is epistemically transparent, in the sense that an intuitive justification for A is not a justification for A unless it is recognized as such by an idealized knowing subject.