criterion broadly, a sufficient condition for the presence of a certain property or for the truth of a certain proposition. Generally, a criterion need be sufficient merely in normal circumstances rather than absolutely sufficient. Typically, a criterion is salient in some way, often by virtue of being a necessary condition as well as a sufficient one. The plural form, ‘criteria’, is commonly used for a set of singly necessary and jointly sufficient conditions. A set of truth conditions is said to be criterial for the truth of propositions of a certain form. A conceptual analysis of a philosophically important concept may take the form of a proposed set of truth conditions for paradigmatic propositions containing the concept in question. Philosophers have proposed criteria for such notions as meaningfulness, intentionality, knowledge, justification, justice, rightness, and identity (including personal identity and event identity), among many others.
There is a special use of the term in connection with Wittgenstein’s well-known remark that ‘an ‘inner process’ stands in need of outward criteria,’ e.g., moans and groans for aches and pains. The suggestion is that a criteriological connection is needed to forge a conceptual link between items of a sort that are intelligible and knowable to items of a sort that, but for the connection, would not be intelligible or knowable. A mere symptom cannot provide such a connection, for establishing a correlation between a symptom and that for which it is a symptom presupposes that the latter is intelligible and knowable. One objection to a criteriological view, whether about aches or quarks, is that it clashes with realism about entities of the sort in question and lapses into, as the case may be, behaviorism or instrumentalism. For it seems that to posit a criteriological connection is to suppose that the nature and existence of entities of a given sort can depend on the conditions for their intelligibility or knowability, and that is to put the epistemological cart before the ontological horse.
See also PROBLEM OF THE CRITERIO. K.B.