The Great Philosophers: Ayer

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OSWALD

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HANFLING

Ayer

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GREAT PHILOSOPHERS

Consulting Editors Ray Monk and Frederic Raphael

Oswald Hanfling

A.J. AVER Analysing What We Mean

PHCENIX

A PHOENIX PAPERBACK First published in Great Britain in 1997 by Phoenix, a division of the Orion Publishing Group Ltd Orion House 5 Upper Saint Martin's Lane London, WC2H 9EA Copyright © Oswald Hanfling 1997 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted iii any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. Oswald Hanfling has asserted his moral right to be identified as the author of this work. A catalogue reference is available from the British Library ISBN 0 753 80182 5 Typeset by Deltatype Ltd, Birkenhead, Merseyside Printed in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, St Ives pic

A.j. AVER Analysing What We Mean

'T^he trouble with philosophy, it is sometimes said, is JL that nothing ever gets settled. Questions posed by the ancient Greeks are still being asked today and there seems to be no agreement as to the right answers. Whether, or to what extent, these complaints are justified will depend on what the purpose of philosophy is taken to be. But one may feel that there is something radically wrong with the whole enterprise and that, if only one could put one's finger on the flaw, the subject could be transformed, or replaced by something more fruitful. Such a view was expressed by Ayer in the opening sentences of Language, Truth and Logic, together with a confident belief that he had found the flaw: The traditional disputes of philosophers are, for the most part, as unwarranted as they are unfruitful. The surest way to end them is to establish beyond question what should be the purpose and method of philosophical inquiry. And this is by no means so difficult a task as the history of philosophy would lead one to suppose. (LTL 45) What did Ayer mean by 'the traditional disputes of philosophers'? What is philosophy? According to at least one influential understanding, it is a quest for transcendent truths, beyond the reach of ordinary or scientific

inquiry. This conception of philosophy was one of the main targets of Ayer's critique. We may begin by criticizing the metaphysical thesis that philosophy affords us knowledge of a reality transcending the world of science and common sense ... One way of attacking a metaphysician who claimed to have [such] knowledge ... would be to inquire from what premises his propositions were deduced. Must he not begin, as other men do, with the evidence of his senses? ... [But] surely, from empirical premises nothing ... super-empirical can legitimately be inferred. (LTL45-6) 'The function of philosophy', he declared, 'is wholly critical'; 'it is an activity of analysis'; and the idea that philosophy is 'a search for first principles' was a 'superstition from which we are freed by the abandonment of metaphysics' (LTL 37, 62). With these and similar assertions the young Ayer embarked on a course of discussion that was designed to shake the philosophical^ establishment. As we shall see, and as Ayer would later be thefirstto admit, the book has many flaws; but few would deny that it was, and remains, a major contribution to philosophy. One may also be impressed, and indeed astonished, by its sheer virtuosity and the extent of its coverage - all the more so in view of the youthfulness of its author.

A 'SUCCES DE SCANDALE' /T A

began writing Language, Truth and Logicf, Ayer reported later, 'in the Christmas vacation of 1933-4

and finished writing it in July 1935, three and a half months before my twenty-fifth birthday ... The book enjoyed an immediate succes de scandale.'^ A new edition appeared in 1946, after which it 'approached the status of a best seller', with new impressions appearing 'almost annually for the next twenty-five years'.^ Ayer produced many other important books, but LTL remains the work by which he is best known. In a television interview of 1979, Ayer was asked what he now saw as the main defects of his youthful work. 'I suppose', he replied, 'the most important of the defects was that nearly all of it was false.' This, like some of the claims in the book itself, was an exaggeration. It is true that already in the second edition he conceded that 'the questions with which [the book] deals are not in all respects so simple as it makes them apear';^ but the general approach of that book remained with him throughout his life, as will be illustrated below. The main change is that the confident, and often over-confident, style of the early book is replaced by a cautious, painstaking investigation of issues he had earlier disposed of too quickly and easily. LTL will be the basis of the present

book, but from time to time we shall move forward to related discussions in later works. The writing of LTL came about in a rather accidental way. In 1931, Ayer tells us, he was given two terms leave of absence from his tutorship at Oxford. I proposed to spend them in Cambridge, leaming from Wittgenstein, but [my former tutor] Gilbert Ryle persuaded me to go to Vienna instead. He had met Moritz Schlick, the leader of the group of philosophers and scientists ... who entitled themselves the Vienna Circle, at some international congress ... and thought that it would be a good thing if I could discover what work was going forward under his auspices. For my part I had become engaged to be married and thought that Vienna would be a nice place in which to spend a honeymoon. I was married to Renee Lees on 25 November 1932 and we went almost immediately to Vienna.^ He rapidly learned enough German to enable him to attend the meetings of the Circle. To anyone acquainted with the philosophy of the Vienna Circle, its influence on Ayer will be quickly apparent. This is true both of its ideas, which included 'the elimination of metaphysics', and of the boldness of its style. But Ayer was also deeply influenced by the British empiricist tradition of Locke, Berkeley and Hume. (His appeal to 'empirical premises' and 'the evidence of the senses' is a sign of this.) There was, however, an important

difference between the new empiricism and that of previous philosophers: the new empiricism was about meaning rather than knowledge. The charge against 'the metaphysician' was not merely that his claims were unsupported by suitable premises: it was that they were meaningless, because they failed to satisfy certain conditions that must be satisfied if a statement is to have meaning. The new philosophy became known as 'logical empiricism' or, more commonly, 'logical positivism'. The first has the advantage of indicating the affinity with the empiricism of Locke, Berkeley and Hume, whose influence is apparent in Ayer's work; while the qualification 'logical' indicates the distinctive concern with logical analysis.

THE CRITERION OF VERIFIABILITY hat not all words or sentences are meaningful is

T

obvious if we consider such examples as the nonsense

rhymes of Edward Lear. But a sentence may be nonsens-

ical in less obvious ways. This is so, according to Ayer, in the case of claims about a super-empirical reality. But what criterion, if any, is there for distinguishing sense from nonsense? Ayer's reply to this question was one of the most prominent features of his book. He gave it as follows: The criterion which we use to test the genuineness of

apparent statements of fact is the criterion of verifiability. We say that a sentence is factually significant to any given person, if, and only if, he knows how to verify the proposition which it purports to express - that is, if he knows what observations would lead him, under certain conditions, to accept the proposition as being true, or reject it as being false. If, on the other hand, the putative proposition is of such a character that the assumption of its truth, or falsehood, is consistent with any assumption whatsoever concerning the nature of his future experience, then, as far as he is concerned, it is ... a mere pseudo-proposition. The sentence expressing it may be emotionally significant to him; but it is not literally significant. And with regard to questions the procedure is the same. We inquire in every case what observations would lead us to answer the question, one way or the other; and, if none can be discovered, we must conclude that the sentence under consideration does not, as far as we are concerned, express a genuine question, however strongly its grammatical appearance may suggest that it does. (LTL48)\ The criterion of vetifiability should be distinguished from the 'verification principle' of the Vienna Circle: 'The meaning of a statement is the method of its verification.' The criterion provides an answer to the question 'When is a statement meaningful?' or 'What kinds of statement are meaningful?', while the principle is a claim about what meaning consists in: it is an answer to the question 'What 8

is meaning?' The criterion is, however, dedudhle from the principle. If meaning is identified with method of verification, then it follows that if there is no method of verification - if the statement is not verifiable - then it must be devoid of meaning. There is, however, no entailment in the other direction, so that one may put forward the criterion without commitment to the principle. This was the case with Ayer, though his terminology is not always consistent (he sometimes referred to his criterion as 'the principle of verification'). The verification principle, as advocated by members of the Vienna Circle, calls for separate discussion, but this will not be our concern. The first question that may occur to one on reading the above passage from Ayer is why, or whether, one should accept his criterion. That there is a connection between meaning and verification would hardly be doubted. A good way of finding out what, if anything, a person means by a given statement is, indeed, to ask what 'would lead him ... to accept [it] as being true, or reject it as being false'. And if the answer is 'Nothing', then we might perhaps conclude that, as far as he is concerned, the statement is meaningless. But is this necessarily so? One of those who refused to accept the criterion was Father Copleston, who held certain religious beliefs that would hot satisfy it. In a debate broadcast in 1949, Ayer tried to persuade Copleston of the error of his position. He invented the word 'drogulus' for this purpose. Suppose I say, 'There's a drogulus over there' and you

say ... 'What's a drogulus?' Well, I say, 'I can't describe what a drogulus is, because it's not the sort of thing you can see or touch, it has no physical effects of any kind, but it's a disembodied being.' And you say, 'Well how am I to tell if it's there or not?' and I say, 'There's no way of telling. Everything's just the same if it's there or it's not there. But the fact is it's there. There's a drogulus there standing just behind you, spiritually behind you.' Does that make sense? (ML 41-2) But Copleston stood his ground against this barrage. Given that 'drogulus' means a disembodied spirit, he replied, he would say that the statement offered by Ayer was 'either true or false, whether one can verify it or not'. The artificial 'drogulus', taken in isolation, may indeed strike one as meaningless; but Copleston, in picking up the phrase 'disembodied spirit', was appealing to a wider discourse which may be thought to give it meaning. A similar point may be made about one of Ayer's examples of metaphysics in LTL: 'The Absolute enters into, but is itself incapable of, evolution and progress' (LTL 49). 'One cannot', he commented, 'conceive of an observation which would enable one to determine' whether this is true; and until the author of the statement 'makes us understand how the proposition that he wishes to express would be verified, he fails to communicate anything to us'. Now a reader confronted by that example might indeed regard it as meaningless. But would this be for the reason given by Ayer? Ayer had taken the example 'at random' from a work by F.H. Bradley, without any 10

reference to the arguments in which it was embedded; but perhaps it would not seem meaningless to someone who had read those arguments - even if it failed to satisfy Ayer's criterion. In 1946 there appeared a second edition of Ayer's book, with a substantial introduction in which he modified several of its main tenets. In the following extract he conceded that metaphysics cannot be disposed of as easily as he had thought; butfirsthe addressed the fundamental question about the status of his criterion: what reason is there for accepting it? Is it true to what we actually mean by 'meaning'? In putting forward the principle of verificatiorr as a criterion of meaning, I do not overlook the fact that the word 'meaning' is commonly used in a variety of senses, and I do not wish to deny that in some of these senses a statement may properly be said to be meaningful even though it is neither analytic nor empirically verifiable. I should, however, claim that there was at least one proper use of the word 'meaning' in which it would be incorrect to say that a statement was meaningful unless it satisfied the principle of verification; and I have, perhaps tendentiously, used the expression 'literal meaning' to distinguish this use from the others ... Furthermore, I suggest that it is only if it is literally meaningful, in this sense, that a statement can properly be said to be either true or false. Thus, while I wish the principle of verification itself to be regarded, not as an empirical hypothesis, 11

but as a definition, it is not supposed to be entirely arbitrary. It is indeed open to anyone to adopt a different criterion of meaning and so to produce an alternative definition which may very well correspond to one of the ways in which the word 'meaning' is commonly used. And if a statement satisfied such a criterion, there is, no doubt, some proper use of the word 'understanding' in which it would be capable of being understood. Nevertheless, I think that, unless it satisfied the principle of verification, it would not be capable of being understood in the sense in which either scientific hypotheses or common-sense statements are habitually understood. I confess, however, that it now seems to me unlikely that any metaphysidan would yield to a claim of this kind; and although I should still defend the use of the criterion of verifiability as a methodological principle, I realize that for the effective elimination of metaphysics it needs to be supported by detailed analyses of particular metaphysical arguments.