Ayer Handout

A.J. Ayer:
The most wicked man in Oxford


Little-Known Facts:

He hated the name Alfred and preferred to be called Freddie.

He wrote Language, Truth and Logic when he was 24. It became the principal text of a British school of philosophy which went by the label of `logical positivism'.

When he was asked what he was going to write next, gleefully replied, "There's no next. Philosophy has come to an end. Finished." But it struggled on, and 40 years later, asked about the book's faults, he said: "Well, I suppose the most important defect was that nearly all of it was false."

Today, his whole approach is rather passé and is principally employed for purposes of undergraduate target practice.

He once rescued Naomi Campbell from the violent attentions of Mike Tyson: "At a New York party, an elderly Ayer found Tyson forcing himself on the young model, then at the beginning of her career. Ayer ordered Tyson to desist. Tyson: 'Do you know who the f*#k I am? I am the heavyweight champion of the world.' Ayer stood his ground. 'I am the Wykeham Professor of Logic. We are both pre-eminent in our field. I suggest that we talk about this like rational men.'" Ayer and Tyson began to talk and Naomi slipped out.

He once said that the Pope had done more evil than Stalin.

He alienated both the Church, as well as the Oxford philosophical establishment (`The traditional disputes of philosophers,' he wrote, `are, for the most part, as unwarrantable as they are unfruitful.')

He was befriended by Wittgenstein, who developed a crush on him when the two met in Cambridge.

He was described as "very clever" by Einstein.

He had a large and influential band of admiring disciples.

Talking to him, as one of his wives once noted, was like playing tennis against a brick wall: you could gain a certain useful experience from the process, and you could give up when you felt tired.

He believed that the job of the philosopher was logical analysis, the sorting out of conceptual problems. He insisted that philosophy and life should be kept apart.

He once confessed that he would sacrifice all his friends for the most ephemeral love affair.

He was known as a socialite, a selfish egomaniac and a serial philanderer.

He married four times and was deeply attached to each of his wives. Despite his appalling treatment of them, his children and numerous girlfriends, almost all forgave and remained close to him.

He campaigned for a number of causes including reformation of the laws on abortion and homosexuality.

He's known in England as "football's most famous egghead".

When one old flame asked him what he would say to St Peter, he replied, "I have made a mess of my personal life, but I taught my students to find the truth."


LANGUAGE, TRUTH AND LOGIC

THE ELIMINATION OF METAPHYSICS:

All meaningful propositions concern either empirical matters of fact or are analytic. If a putative proposition is neither of these then ‘…I hold that it is metaphysical, and that, being metaphysical, it is neither true nor false but literally senseless’ (LTL, Preface, p.9).

"Language, Truth and Logic" sought to rid philosophy of the metaphysical waffle that Ayer believed had plagued the subject since Plato. Ayer wished to give philosophy the same epistemic status and certainty as science, which he believed was the greatest achievement of the human intellect. Science was able to answer questions, whereas much of the philosophical enterprise concerning “the meaning of life”, aesthetics, ethics and religion seemed imprecise, indecisive and faintly ludicrous.

CONSEQUENCES:

Mathematics and logic are vacuous (they comprise a body of ‘tautologies’)
Putative propositions regarding extra-empirical issues (e.g. the nature of an
experience transcendent reality) are senseless
This offers ‘solutions of outstanding philosophical disputes'

It was unclear, for Ayer, whether many philosophical dilemmas had, or could ever have, a solution. In order to separate the wheat of meaningful philosophical issues from the chaff of nonsensical ones, Ayer devised the Principle of Verification, which says that a statement is meaningful if and only if it is true by definition or provable by experiment.

HUME and AYER:

Similarities: Like Hume, Ayer wanted to separate facts and values. Only the propositions of science, for him, were a genuine form of knowledge since they could be verified by observation.

But, there are differences:

Hume: "If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for
instance; let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or
number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matters of
fact or real existence? No. Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain
nothing but sophistry and illusion" (Enquiry)

Ayer: ‘What is this but a rhetorical version of our own thesis that a sentence which does
not express either a formally true proposition or an empirical hypothesis is
devoid of literal significance?’ ( LTL, chapter 3, p.40)

Hume (a psychological empiricist) makes a genetic claim (‘all ideas are derived from sense impressions’). According to Ayer, this is but a contingent generalization in psychology which is vulnerable to counter-examples.

Ayer's claim is not a psychological one, but ‘a criterion of significance’. According to him, propositions which are true by definition are logically necessary truths such as “your mother's mother is your grandmother”. Empirically verifiable statements are ones that are provable by experiment. If one wished to prove whether magnesium burns with a white flame, for instance, there is an empirical procedure to follow in order to find out. The verification principle thus provides clear demarcation criteria to distinguish between sense and nonsense.

THE VERIFICATION PRINCIPLE

‘We say that a sentence is factually significant to any given person, if, and only if,
he knows how to verify the proposition it purports to express – that is, he knows
what observations would lead him, under certain conditions, to accept the
proposition as being true or reject it as being false’ (LTL, chapter 1, p.16).

Wittgenstein pointed out the limitations of the verification principle on the basis of the following 2 reasons:

1. There is no way to verify what goes on in 'other minds'
2. A non-verifiiable hypothetical statement about the future might be meaningful.
3. Can the verification principle itself be verified???

What raised the hackles of Ayer's contemporaries was that, according to his methodology, most religious, metaphysical and moral statements were judged factually meaningless. His moral philosophy became known as “emotivism” because it claimed that moral language merely expressed the speaker's emotions or feelings. Thus if I were to say “war is wrong”, I would be giving vent to my personal distaste of war and nothing more. (Opens the door for nihilism, moral relativism...)

Ayer championed epistemology (theory of knowledge), philosophy of language and the philosophy of science as worthwhile disciplines. He explained the proliferation of metaphysics by suggesting that its proponents had made a category mistake. While it is a useful shorthand to assign a catch-all description such as “tree” to a collection of sense experiences, these descriptions do not exist as separate entities in their own right. Discrete sensory phenomena, which have been called the flashcards of experience and atoms of perception, are all there is, and to believe that anything else has a real and separate existence is misguided.

According to Ayer, the role of philosophy was to preside over the work of scientists and assist in matters of categorisation and justification.

GLOSSARY

Philosophy: The 'handmaiden of science', the wholly analytic business of identifying 'definitions in use'.
Definition: In philosophy, a the translation of a statement into an equivalent statement of 'definition in use' to test its veracity; unlike dictionary definitions.
Metaphysics: Meaningless nonsense caused by misunderstandings of grammar.
Verification: The business of determining whether a proposition is meaningful or not. If it could, even if only in theory, be verified by observation then it is meaningful.
Strong Verification: Where a proposition is rendered certain
Weak Verification: Where a proposition is only rendered probable.
Basic Propositions: Information held in the mind about a single experience and therefore incontestably verified.
Deduction: The inference of specific events from known rules.
Induction: The inference of general rules from known events.
Material Things: Logical constructions out of sense-contents.
Empiricism: The belief that all knowledge is derived from experience.
Tautology: Repetition of the same information in such a way as to give the impression that something new has been discovered. Tautologies are necessarily true. Mathematics is a tautological system, but can still be surprising because it deals with such a large system.
A Priori: That which is known to be true, independent of experience.
Emotivism: The utterance of statements indicating the speakers emotional state
Literal Meaning: a property of some item (e.g. sentence) in virtue of which it is
capable of being true or false