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