Ayer Analysis

Many philosophers have tried to answer metaphysical and ethical questions about the world.  Questioning whether God exists, or whether something holds moral value, is something that many philosophers have spent their entire lives doing.  In his famous book, Language, Truth, and Logic, A. J Ayer, who was a logical positivist, attempted to use empiricism to answer philosophical questions about many issues including religion, metaphysics, and ethics.  His view was that all sentences had to have empirical evidence to determine whether they are meaningful or meaningless.  His views showed that questioning issues such as religion, metaphysics, and ethics is pointless simply because they all turn out to be meaningless.  He wanted to differentiate between sentences of value and sentences of fact.  For example, Ayer thought that sentences such as “x is good” are neither true nor false, because they are neither analytic nor empirically verifiable.  However, Ayer’s goal was not to determine whether sentences were true or false, just whether they had meaning or not.  Throughout this essay I will explain Ayer’s verification principle, the difference between analytic and verifiable sentences, and also show how, according to Ayer’s views, all metaphysical sentences come out to be meaningless.

            The verification principle that Ayer used had several components.  First, it said that a sentence is meaningful if and only if it is factually significant or analytic.  It also said that a sentence is factually significant if and only if it can be verified by empirical evidence.  This leads to questioning whether a sentence can be verified practically or in principle.  Take the example we discussed in class, about the planet with one thousand moons.  While we do not know about a planet that has this many moons, it would be possible for us to verify it in principle.  Even if the sentence is nonsense, it is possible for us to imagine verifying it.  Ayer also said that sentences can also be strongly verified or weakly verified.  Strong verification establishes verification with complete certainty, while weak verification does not require conclusiveness.  It only raises the probability that it could be true.  In other words, a sentence is factually significant if and only if it can in principle be weakly verified by empirical evidence.  Take the sentence “all people are mortal.”  This sentence could never be strongly verified because there are an infinite number of possible people, so this sentence is only weakly verifiable.   

According to Ayer, all meaningful sentences that are analytic are considered to be relations of ideas.  Analytic sentences require a priori knowledge, are necessary, and are non-contingent.  This means that experience is not necessary to determine the truth of an analytic sentence, because the truth of the sentence depends on the symbols in the sentence.  If we can know something is true without having observed it, then it is true even if there are no empirical facts to support it.  These sentences are true no matter what.  We can see this in sentences such as “2+2=4” and other mathematical facts, as well as logic.

 However, not all analytic sentences are factually significant, some are tautologies.  While tautological sentences are informative to some extent, they do not say anything about the world.  As discussed in class the sentence “bachelors are unmarried” is the same thing as saying that unmarried men are unmarried.  This sentence would be true even if no males existed in the world, but it does not give us any new information about the world.  It only reminds us to use language correctly, that is to never call a woman a bachelor.  If I were to call a woman a bachelor, I would be exhibiting my failure to understand the word bachelor.  Similarly the sentence “oak trees are oak trees,” is merely restating the obvious.  Analytic sentences rather give us rules that govern our language, without offering factual information.

 In contrast, synthetic sentences, which are considered matters of fact, require a posteriori knowledge, meaning we need experience to verify them.  Synthetic sentences are contingent, meaning they are either true or false based on the facts and the linguistic components of the sentence.  For example, the sentence “it is raining outside” depends on if it is actually raining outside for the sentence to be true or not.  Furthermore, synthetic sentences do offer new information about the world.  The sentence “this oak tree is fifty years old” gives us factual information, and is synthetic because we could see from experience.  Synthetic sentences give us substantive information about the world, and they describe reality.

We can see through the principle of verification, and the two categories shown above how all metaphysical sentences are meaningless.  Take the sentence, “it is raining outside.” The sentence would have meaning whether it was raining or not.  It would just be false if we looked outside and saw that it was not raining.  There are ways to verify the sentence and see the truth or falsity of it.  However, take the sentence, “my soul will go to heaven when I die.”  This sentence is completely meaningless because there is no possible way to verify this, and it is also neither true nor false.  Ayer would say that all sentences like this are nonsense because of this.  Because of this, it is evident that science can be said, but when people try to speak about ethics of anything other than natural science that it should be demonstrated to them how what they are saying is meaningless.

  Furthermore, ethical questions are nonsense as well.  Saying that something is good, bad, wrong, or right does not make sense because they offer no factual information about something, and we cannot sense them.  Saying that “killing innocent people is wrong” simply states a fact about killing with some emotion behind it.  Nothing happens in the world if someone commits murder.  While ethics tries to say what is really important, it does not say anything.  Therefore, speaking of metaphysics and ethics is completely pointless, according to Ayer.  This is not to say that he is an atheist, he simply cannot verify one way or the other whether those types of sentences are meaningful or not.  Attitudes towards God are bound to fail, so Ayer claims that we can only say what God is not.

While there are many points to Ayer’s arguments that I agree with, I do see some problems with it as well.  I agree that we should not hold strong beliefs about certain issues unless we can show evidence of why they are true.  In my opinion, it does seem nonsensical to believe in metaphysics when there is no possible way to verify its truth or falsity.  Also, if we cannot ever really know the truth of something, why should we even bother spending so much time contemplating such issues?  It seems that we should just acknowledge the fact that we will not ever know one way or the other, which is what it seems Ayer does.  He realizes that it would take verification of metaphysics not existing to prove against those claims that they do exist.  It seems plausible to think that we can verify that a dog barks and not be able to verify that it exists.

 However, there do seem to be some issues with his argument as well.  Since we can only understand a sentence’s meaning if we understand how it can be verified then it would seem that his method of verification is circular.  Also, how do we know which experiences confirm a verifiable situation?  The sentence, “it is raining outside,” is a verifiable sentence, however, which of my experiences confirm it?  In other words, how can we confirm or disconfirm anything?  We know that if something is unverifiable that it has no meaning, but it seems confusing to always know when something can be verified or not, especially since things can be strongly or weakly verified.  It also seems confusing how to know when it is plausible to verify something in practice or in principle.  While we can verify that there are sixteen chairs in the room by practice, we can also verify that there is a planet with one thousand moons in principle.  If we can do that, then it seems that one could argue that it is possible to verify that anything exists in principle.

 Even though I do see these problems with Ayer’s arguments, I do feel that he does make a good attempt at trying to make our language more clear and to show how verification is necessary in our language.  In my opinion, his views heavily influenced the way we use science in today’s world.  Instead of questioning things, we often look to science and empirical knowledge to verify something.  Whether people agree or disagree with Ayer’s views, it can be said that he made a large impact on the way we view things in the world today.