Ayer's Logical Positivism

I know we are all in the common study of the History of Classical Philosophy, and the classical thought we deal with doesn't really get too deep into Empiricism (beyond its predecessors in the Atomists/Elementalists), but reading Ayer and Russell on the side this semester has been difficult for me. And so, in that struggle, I have tried to clarify (to myself) what I can glean from the meaning of these two and form some conclusions of my own, because much of my direction in philosophical study has its foundation, and relies, on what we can empirically know.

If you have read my other blogs you know that I have metaphysical, normative understandings of the universe that would already imply that I reject much of what the logical positivist has to offer.

In any event... This is my treatment of what I understand of Ayer's logical positivism. I'll be taking a class with Dr. Marcum this summer where I hope he illuminates my understanding here a bit.

Dr. Baird briefly touched on the Logical Positivists this semester (and it is because of his mention of them that I looked into it)-- So, I'll begin with how he characterized their movement:

~One thesis and One fundamental Claim: All cognitively meaningful propositions are either analytic or empirically verifiable

Analytic statements such as those in math/logic/language are empirical: OR, they are Nonsense

Metaphysical statements are pseudo-statements and are not cognitively meaningful

Just so happens, though that the thesis: All cognitively meaningful propositions are either analytic, empirically verifiable, or they are non-sense Is neither analytic nor empirically verifiable.

So... onto Ayer:

1... For Ayer, truth is first defined as being meaningful. Ayer requires that which is meaningful to be relevant to the world as it can be experienced; what could possibly be meaningful if it is impossible to experience? Once one agrees that truth could not be truth unless it is perceived to be so, then it is only logical to exclude all other persuasions from its serious pursuit. This being Ayer’s foundation, inherited from Russell and Hume, he must reject metaphysics and all other propositions which can be neither proven true nor false by “some possible sense-experience.” Ayer doesn’t attack the fruit of the metaphysician’s field, rather he argues that it is impossible for a metaphysician to make any sense at all seeing as the sentences they use, or propositions to be more accurate, cannot meet a significant definition of such, as they have no experiential meaning and thus no means to be proven true or false. For Ayer, such propositions are “literally senseless.” Ayer wants to argue, now that he has corrected the past problems of philosophers, that the philosopher’s job is never to conflict with the hypotheses of science and is to champion the refinement of logic as it can be used to sharpen the propositions of scientists. Philosophers and their philosophies are warned of inevitable frivolity by Ayer if they do not liken to their only useful role as that of scientists of logic.

2... The original verification principal only required that in order to determine whether or not a sentence had “literal meaning,” the proposition it expressed must be either analytically or empirically verifiable. Ayer dances in rebuttal to his critics as he offers one hedge after another. Ayer admits that a given sentence, even one he would say is meaningless, inherently implies an expression. To this possible “meaning” of a sentence, Ayer introduces the equivocation of the terms: sentence and proposition so that he may substitute the word “statement” synonymously for “sentence” while reserving the word “proposition” to continue to refer to the expressions of statements which can be either empirically or analytically verified. However, the full apologetic move arrives when the very word “verifiable” wants definition. Weak and strong verifiability are introduced so that the author does not find himself in a trap where he must categorize all that which the scientific method has yet to verify as meaningless. Offering this hedge of weak verification allows Ayer to escape a logical black hole of contradiction by allowing a degree of meaning to phenomena which could be conceivably verifiable by experience. In the end, it seems as though the stress of the author’s own defense has him parting with logic where he backs his own right to make uncertain assumptions in the face of an always present uncertainty which therefore must be assigned a probability factor according to some derived potentiality of experience.