_018 Ayer & Logical Positivism

A.J. Ayer was a 20^th Century British philosopher who introduced the idea of logical positivism to England. This idea states that all problems can be answered either with science or logic.

The origin of the movement comes partly from an interpretation of Wittgenstein (who himself considered it a misinterpretation), following from the idea that all philosophical problems are problems of language. They came to the same conclusion but from a slightly different basis – the principle of verifiability. This claims that only statements which are logically or empirically verifiable can have any cognitive meaning.

Logical positivists also followed from the idea of Kant, that we can only have knowledge of the phenomenal world, the world of experience, and not of anything else. However, they took this one step further to say that anything which is not empirically testable or a logical truth is completely senseless; it has no meaning whatsoever.

This implies that thoughts about ethics, beauty and God were entirely meaningless as they are metaphysical – they are statements about the world but not referring to something in the world. Even concepts like causality, which are not themselves observable, must have no sense.

Science describes the world as we see it, which is all that we can ever know. Logic is known as tautology, meaning it does not tell us any new information but simply presents it in a different way, unpacking complex statements into simpler ones or vice-versa (analytic statements). This was known as strong verification, since its verification provided certain truth. Empiricism is weak verification as its truth is only deemed probably through experience.

For Ayer, there are different ways you could interpret what ethical statements are, since they aren’t meaningful. Ethics could be about what humans want; it could be a command or simply an expression of emotion. If I say that murder is bad, I am expressing my dislike of murder and commanding other people to not murder. I am not, however, creating a meaningful proposition about intrinsic right or wrong. This branch of philosophy is called meta-ethics and deals with what it is that ethics is trying to convey.

So if all of these metaphysical assertions are meaningless, what is the task of the philosopher? Ayer believed that it was to be the right-hand man of the scientist, to refine the methodology of science and clarify forms of argument. In this sense, philosophy was meant as an activity and not a doctrine in itself. This activity was to clear up confusion in language and unverifiable claims which could prevent scientific progress.

However, ultimately, just like Wittgenstein, many of the logical positivists began to take back their claims regarding these matters. Ayer himself said that “the main flaw of [logical positivism] was that nearly all of it was false”. One particular critic of the movement was Carl Popper who instead put forth the idea of scientific falsification, rather than verification due to issues like the problem of induction.

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Ayer, A.J., 1936, Language Truth, and Logic, London: Gollancz.