Hostname: page-component-7c8c6479df-p566r Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-03-27T13:52:40.781Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Ayer, Language, Truth and Logic

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 January 2010

Extract

When, in 1979, A. J. Ayer was asked for an evaluation of his youthful Language, Truth and Logic (LTL), he replied: ‘I suppose the most important of the defects was that nearly all of it was false’. Like many of the claims in the book itself, this verdict is open to question. What was wrong with LTL was not so much that what it said was false, but that it presented philosophical issues in an excessively simple and aggressive way. Yet it was just this quality that put the book and its author on the philosophical map, ensuring for them an important place in the history of twentieth-century philosophy. LTL presented a challenge to traditional ways of doing philosophy, the reverberations of which are still evident today.

Type
Papers
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 1986

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Magee, B., Men of Ideas (London, 1978), 131.Google Scholar He went on to say, however, that he still believed in the same ‘general approach’.

2 This is a simplified quotation. In the original Ayer spoke of sentences which ‘purport to express’ propositions. ‘Proposition’ had been defined by philosophers to be necessarily true or false—and hence meaningful. Some of Ayer's critics objected that his criterion was incoherent because sentences, but not propositions, could be meaningless; whereas propositions, but not sentences, were capable of verification. Ayer replied in his new Introduction. However, I believe the difficulty can be avoided by using the term ‘statement’ (or perhaps, ‘alleged’ or ‘putative statement’) in a suitable sense. For discussion see my Logical Positivism, section 2.1.

3 ‘Logical Positivism—A Debate’. See Edwards, Paul and Pap, A. (eds), A Modern Introduction to Philosophy (New York: Free Press, 1965), 747.Google Scholar

4 Carnap, Rudolf, The Unity of Science (London, 1934).Google Scholar In Charles Dickens's novel, Mr Blotton is persuaded to agree that when he called Mr Pickwick a humbug, he had meant this word in a special sense and not with its usual connotations.

5 Carnap, R., ‘Testability and Meaning’, in Readings in the Philosophy of Science, Feigl, H. and Brodbeck, M. (eds) (Appleton, 1953), 84.Google Scholar

6 Reprinted in Stevenson, 's Facts and Values (Yale, 1963).Google Scholar

7 See also Ayer, 's The Foundations ofEmpirical Knowledge (London, 1940), 239240.Google Scholar

8 ‘Strong and Weak Verification’, Mind (1939).Google Scholar Reprinted in The Structure of Metaphysics (London, 1955).Google Scholar

9 ‘Verification and Experience’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society XXXVII.Google Scholar

10 ‘Problems and Changes in the Empiricist Criterion of Meaning’, Revue Internationale de Philosophie (1950).Google Scholar A revised version appears in section 4 of Hempel, 's Aspects of Scientific Explanation.Google Scholar

11 For discussion of the Principle, and its relation to the criterion, see my Logical Positivism, 1537.Google Scholar

12 One of the best expositions of this type of analysis is Schlick, 's ‘Positivism and Realism’ of 1932Google Scholar, reprinted in Philosophical Papers, Vol. II (Reidel, 1979) and in my Essential Readings in Logical Positivism (Oxford, 1981).Google Scholar

13 Notes of Wittgenstein's lectures are published in Moore, G. E., Philosophical Papers (London, 1959).Google Scholar

14 For further discussion by Ayer, see The Problem of Knowledge, 214ff.Google Scholar

15 The limits of argument were beautifully illustrated by Carroll, Lewis in ‘What the Tortoise said to Achilles’, Mind (1985).Google Scholar

16 An example is the flourishing literature, in the philosophy of mind, about materialism, which began largely with J. J. C. Smart's ‘Sensations and Brain Processes’ of 1959. In 1964 Norman Malcolm objected to Smart's thesis: ‘I do not know what it means to say that a … thought is a brain-process. In saying this I imply, of course, that the proponents of this view also do not know what it means. This implication is risky for it might turn out, to my surprise and gratification, that Smart will explain his view …’ (in The Mind-Body Problem, C. V. Boost (ed.), 171172).Google Scholar It is safe to say that Malcolm never had his surprise and gratification.