MUCH OF WHAT WE SAY: MEANINGLESS?! (PART 1)

Moritz Schlick, Chair of the Vienna Circle

INTRODUCTION

In the 1920's, a group of scholars known as the Vienna circle, with scholars from the Berlin circle met at the University of Vienna. The conclusions that they arrived at were to dominate Philosophy for over 30 years.

These group of people gave birth to a movement known as 'Logical Positivism'. The implication of the theory suggested by the Positivists was to say that much of the language we use, such as in religion, morality and metaphysics is meaningless, as it did not meet certain criteria.

THE PRINCIPLE OF VERIFICATION

The Positivists applied the principles of science and maths to language and argued that language had to be based on experience. The idea was to determine what made a sentence 'literally meaningful'.

The Principle Of Verification states that, for a sentence to be meaningful, it had to be based on experience, in other words by our senses. 

A sentence is also considered meaningful if it met one of the following criteria:

i) Analytic statements: This would include a sentence such as 'A circle is round'. Any statement which is 'a priori', i.e. it has its own verification, as we know a circle is round.

ii) Mathematical statements: These statements can only be wrong due to human error, otherwise they are true.

iii) Synthetic statements: Statements which can be empirically tested to verify or to falsify them are known as Synthetic statements. They are 'a posteriori' statements; they make claims which can tested by observation and can therefore be said to be true or false. Theoretical statements such as 'life exists on other planets' are said to be meaningful, as in the future we could verify or falsify them. The example used by Ayer in 'Language, Truth and Logic' is to say that there are hills on the other side of the moon. At the time he wrote this there could not have been conclusively verified, yet to a Positivist it would have been meaningful.

LANGUAGE, TRUTH AND LOGIC  

Alfred Jules Ayer

The ideas of the positivists spread to U.S.A after the scholars had to escape oppression. Through the efforts of Alfred Jules Ayer, the work became accessible in Britain. He introduced their ideas in the English language. 

As I am currently reading his book, I will make references to it.

CRITIQUE OF METAPHYSICS

Ayer starts his book by criticising Metaphysics on the grounds that the statements used by the metaphysician are of no literal meaning. He says that no statement which refers to 'reality' which transcends the limits of sense experience can have literal meaning, 'from which it must follow that the labours of those who have striven to describe such a reality have all been devoted to the production of nonsense'. 

He distinguishes by between practical verifiability and verifiability in principle. A synthetic statement would be an example of the latter, such as there being hills on the other side of the moon. However, if we take a sentence such as 'the Absolute enters into, but is itself incapable of, evolution and progress' it cannot even be verified in principle, 'For one cannot conceive an observation which would enable one to determine whether the Absolute did, or did not enter into evolution and progress.'

Ayer goes on to explain how the statements of Metaphysics come to be made. He talks about the concept of Being. If we take the two sentences 'martyrs exist' and 'martyrs suffer', both consist of a noun 'martyr' and an intransitive verb, which may lead one to assume that both are the same logical type. However, even before Ayer, scholars like Kant and G.E Moore argued that existence cannot be used as an attribute, in the same way that, in this case 'suffer' is being used, 'for when we ascribe an attribute to a thing, we covertly assert that it exists.' Thus, a mistake is made if existence is treated as an attribute; people who assume this 'are guilty of following grammar beyond the boundaries of sense.'

Similarly, a mistake is made if we treat the sentence 'Unicorns are fictitious' in the same way as 'Dogs are faithful'. Dogs must exist in order to be faithful, but to say the same about unicorns is a contradiction. It could be argued that unicorns do exist in some 'non-empirical' sense, 'but since there is no way of testing whether an object is real in this sense' to say that that fictitious objects have some sort of existence has no literal significance and is meaningless. This results from treating 'fictitious' as an attribute.

THE PURPOSE OF PHILOSOPHY

An implication of accepting the Verification principle renders academic disciplines such as Metaphysics, Theology, Ethics and even History meaningless. It also changes the purpose of the discipline of Philosophy.

This a key theme in Ayer's book. In the first chapter itself he remarks 'The most traditional disputes of philosophers are, for the most part, as unwarranted as they are unfruitful'. From here on we understand that Ayer wishes to create a system which addresses this 'The surest way to end them is to establish beyond question what should be the purpose and method of a philosophical enquiry'.

The positivists, including Ayer would have argued that the purpose and method of enquiry of Philosophy is to establish what statements are meaningful and to work with those. Anything else, especially Metaphysics, cannot be shown to be meaningful.

All of this looks impressive, and its appeal made it a major part of Philosophy for three decades. However, the theory was discredited and even Ayer later disavowed his famous work. What's wrong with it? Find out in part 2

ARISTOTLE: THE CREATOR OF SCIENCE?!

Significance of Aristotle 

Aristotle. In this picture his
palm points downwards
and his book 'ethics' is flat,
showing that reality is
within experience.

We all accept without further inquiry that Aristotle was a great Philosopher. Some may even know him because of his Metaphysics. But did you know that because of Aristotle, science was seen as important in the western world? Did you know that he introduced the idea scientific investigation? It was he who, unlike his teacher Plato, wished to gain knowledge from observing the world we live in, instead of looking beyond experience. 

Those who are keen to, observe the world to collect evidence. From this evidence, we can draw conclusions. We may have a hypothesis which could be corroborated or disproved by this evidence, or we may wish to answer a question such as 'What does the universe look like?' It was Aristotle who introduced this discipline to the western world. 

That science plays an important role in our life, few would question. Its basis and usefulness comes from the discipline of observation and the collection of evidence to answer questions. The significance of Aristotle's contribution in making this understood cannot be overstated.

Aristotle the scientist

In advocating the use of observation to reach a conclusion, Aristotle is considered the first western scientist. His entire approach is based on scientific evidence and observation. For him, it is by scientific method that we can work out what things should be, instead of looking out to some heavenly realm of perfection. He was an empiricist, that is someone who relies on experience to gain knowledge. He was the first person to show how truths can be established through scientific method and observation

Aristotle classified many types of animal and plant and considered that each member of different species of living things and every living thing shared a distinct nature. (In that sense he is the father of taxonomy) If something fulfilled its nature it was considered good, and it was considered defective if it did not

Influence of Aristotle  

There is no question that Aristotle's work had a very large impact on Philosophy. In particular, his view of the universe was accepted for thousands of years and combined with biblical teaching, some of Plato's teaching and Ptolemy of Alexandria's cosmology*, was the basis of Christian Philosophy until scholars such as Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo seriously challenged these views.

The idea that God is 'an unmoved mover' and exists outside time and space are also key ideas that theologians use to describe God. In the 13th century St Thomas Aquinas used the idea of Aristotle's God being an 'unmoved mover' as one of his 'five ways' to prove God's existence, with the idea of motion.

Finally, one more point that can be made from this discussion is the idea that if something fulfilled its nature it was considered good, and it was considered defective if it did not. This is the idea of privation, a physical lack of a quality. For instance, blindness is a privation of sight. It is not to be confused with absence. You might say that a horse having no wings is an absence, but a bird with no wings is a special kind of absence; you would say that this is a privation of flight.

The reason this idea is important is because when we consider the problem of evil**, many theologians use the idea the evil is a privation of good when defending the existence of God in theodicies (solutions to the problem of evil). The most famous scholar to do so is St Augustine of Hippo

The world is not a dance of the shadows

Plato argued that true reality lay beyond the limits of human experience, which he expressed in the analogy of the cave and in his theory of Forms

However, Aristotle rejected Plato's approach.

In particular, he argued that we must answer questions by starting from observation of our surroundings - we must look at the world as it really is. In doing so, we must collect evidence: if say, we wish to understand what makes a good person, we must study people. 

The Universe according to Aristotle

The Earth is at the centre of the universe.

He controversially held that the Earth is a sphere, as the shadow cast on the moon by the Earth would be different if it was flat, as it was believed then.The Earth was fixed with the stars, the sun and the moon revolving around it. Aristotle thought that the stars were fixed in circular rings that revolved around the Earth in perfect circles. 

It is important to understand that these ideas were accepted for over a thousand years. As history shows, although he was a scientist, his accepted views actually hindered scientific progress, because whenever scholars like Copernicus or Galileo tried to reject this view of the cosmos, they were often persecuted and dealt with harshly.

Aristotle's God

Whereas Plato argued that the 'Demiurge' creates the universe with pre-existing matter, Aristotle defines God differently. 

He argued that the universe is everlasting and has always existed. The Earth was the centre of the universe, and round the Earth, in forty concentric rings, were the stars. He believed that the circle was the perfect shape and therefore stars revolved in perfect, circular orbits. The first ring of stars was moved by the second ring, the second by the third and so on. The question is, what moves the fortieth ring? 

His answer was that God moved the fortieth ring. This God however did nothing: does not create the cosmos, does not keep the universe in existence, and does not intervene in its affairs. Even so, God causes the fortieth ring of stars to move!

God in a sense is the 'Great Attractor'. To explain how this works, we use an analogy provided by Fr. Gerry Hughes SJ. Imagine there is a room with a carpet and there is a cat at one side of the room and a bowl of milk is placed at the other. The milk does not move, yet the cat will go across the carpet to the milk.

This God is outside time and space and was not an object in the universe

Key terms: *In this cosmology the Earth is at the centre of the universe. It is surrounded by 10 glassy spheres on which the moving planets and the fixed starts were located. 7 of the Spheres were for the known heavenly bodies, an eight for the starts, the ninth which was invisible and moved the others, the final was the abode of the Gods. It was believed that they had circular orbits as circular motion was considered perfect.

**The problem of evil states that if God is all good and all powerful, then evil should not exist. If evil does exist, we must either accept that God is not all good, or all powerful or that he is non-existent. Solutions to the problems, Theodicies, attempt to resolve this inconsistency. 

Sources: 'Religion and Science' by Mel Thompson

              'The Thinkers Guide To God' by Peter Vardy and Julie Arliss