A. J. Ayer
(1910 – 1989)
English philosopher and leading representative of logical positivism. He was particularly influenced by Hume, the philosophers of the Vienna school and Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico- Philosophicus (1921). Ayer followed the tradition of the Vienna school and importantly contributed to the movement with his seminal work: Language, Truth and Logic (1936).
In the work, he presented the verification principle as a theory of meaning. It is a form or radical empiricism, according to which a statement is meaningful only if:
— it expresses a truth that ca be verified empirically (ie. through the senses)
— it expresses truths of logic (analytic statements that are true by definition)
—> Hence, religious and metaphysical statements such as “God exists” or “Truth is good” are neither true, nor false, but meaningless because they cannot be empirically verified.
—> Truth is a criterion according to which propositions can be validated, but is in itself not a quality or relation. Truth and falsehood only refer to the assertion or denial of a proposition.
For Ayer, philosophy is not a metaphysical or transcendental concern that aims to find truths about the nature of ultimate reality. Instead, he emphasizes that philosophy should concern itself with the analysis of the logical relations of propositions. According to his verification principle, transcendent concepts such as “truth”, “justice” and “virtue” are essentially meaningless.
Similarly, ethical and aesthetic judgements are not objective and cannot be proven as true or false. They are not analytic and have no objective validity, hence, they have no literal or factual meaning. However, according to Ayer, both ethical and aesthetic statements are emotive, that is, they express feeling.
He presented a meta-ethical view called emotivism, which claims that ethical views and propositions represent emotional attitudes, and partly commands.
— For example, saying that “stealing is wrong” is only expressing a negative attitude towards the act of stealing, rather than stating an intrinsic truth/judgement about the act.
— Or, saying that “being kind to strangers is good”, is similarly expressing positive feelings towards acts of kindness.
— Because these statements express positive or negative feelings, Ayer thought that in doing so, they also contain a prescriptive element, that is, such expressions are encouraging or discouraging others to share those feelings and behave accordingly.