A History of Philosophy | 77 A.J. Ayer — Language, Truth and Logic

you have with you I hope aja language truth and logic and would you therefore turn to the first chapter which begins on page 33 yeah we should perhaps observe that the introduction was some let's see the introduction to the first edition was in 1935 and the introduction to this edition the much longer initial introduction that runs up to page 26 was 10 years later in 46 and in that 10 years ayah had been exposed to all sorts of criticism including the beginnings of the ordinary language tradition that we've referred to looking at more in detail and so this edition then while the the text itself is from 35 comes to us with certain changes introduced in the introduction which softened somewhat the hard-nosed scientific positivism that comes through in the body of the text but it's the body of the text the first edition that historically has been so tremendously influential and which popularized the logical positivist or logical empiricist as it's sometimes called movement in the middle decades of this century chapter 1 on the elimination of metaphysics sets the stage and it's plain that that has to come first in as much as pretty well every other topic taken up in subsequent chapters hinges on that elimination of metaphysics after all without metaphysics the function of philosophy has changed the nature of philosophical analysis is not going to be such that it's telling us about a reality beyond experience the a priori does not tell us about reality simply tautological and truth and probability can be taken in a phenomena list rather than a realist sense and ethics does not tell us about objective moral order in reality nor does theology tell us about the metaphysical entity known as God so that the elimination of metaphysics is if you like not only the title of the first chapter but it's the underlying thesis that runs through the entirety of the book now you may say to yourself well curious that he eliminated metaphysics because we have been having a course on contemporary metaphysics here we are just a few days decades later on and metaphysics seems to be alive and well what happened well two things one we commented on last time the critique of the verifiability criterion of meaning on the basis of which metaphysics was declared a meaning less and with that criterion disposed of the people can now do metaphysics again in good philosophical conscience but the second reason is that people began to rethink what do we mean by metaphysics what is the essential nature of metaphysics and you can see the point if you look on page 33 you know the first sentence of the second paragraph at the understanding of metaphysics that he has he says we may begin by criticizing the metaphysical thesis that philosophy affords us knowledge of a reality transcending the world of common sense and science world of science and common sense now you've been reading Whitehead who is twentieth-century metaphysician par excellence and he is not interested in realities transcending the world of science and common sense Whitehead is concerned as to whether the entities that science theorize is about and that ordinary experience or common sense encounters whether these are properly understood for Whitehead metaphysics is not about some transcendent reality but is about the reality encountered in science and common sense and he just wants to make sure that we have the best science possible don't engage in mistaken contras fallacy of misplaced concreteness so in effect whiteheads view is that metaphysics is a speculative system that grows out of and incorporates proper scientific concepts and concrete experience it's a speculative system that intends to engage in extrapolation generalization from what we know to encompass the whole and so he develops his conceptualization of an event based on both ordinary experience and science and then generalizes that everything that exists is of the nature of an event so described God included so a different conception of metaphysics and one I think Whitehead would say which runs back all the way through modern history and back even into the Greeks but that's not the only conception of metaphysics which developed there was in addition to that a conception of metaphysics adapted from the medieval way of analogy the many evils you remember with their hierarchy of being talked of analogical predication there are degrees of being and the various properties and there was in the nineteen forties a book published by Dorothy Emmett quite influential a book by Dorothy Emmett called the nature of metaphysical thinking which suggested that metaphysics is an attempt to work with a co-ordinating analogy a coordinating analogy drawn from ordinary experience similarly there was a book by Steven pepper called world hypothesis also published in the early 1940s in which he talked of root metaphors which are developed into metaphysical schemes conceptual schemes so that what you have here is the notion of an all-embracing conceptual scheme as metaphysics and all a bracing steam which is able to unify everything by virtue of some coordinating analogy or some metaphor which runs through the whole field so that pepper would say for instance and the pepper would say that the conception of an organism ik model is a root metaphor Emmet would say it's a coordinating analogy a mechanistic med of physic has the mechanistic root metaphor coordinating an allergy you'll see the form and matter duality in Greek metaphysics drawn if you like from a work of art a form in the manner provides another root metaphor coordinating analogy so what you have then is a conceptual scheme a based on some such conceptual eight spinning off from the notion of analogical thinking that was developed in other ways in the Middle Ages there is a third conception of metaphysics which grew out of the ordinary language movement that we'll be exploring as a conceptual map work and that's represented by Ian Ramsey who taught at Oxford the notion of conceptual map work he has a book called prospect for metaphysics published also in the 1940s prospect for metaphysics conceptual map work that that is to say charting the ways in which in ordinary language we do talk of the whole of reality in certain please attention to the use of the word I the use of the word I as a unifying point in talking about one's experience and suggests that in similar fashion the word god of functions as a unifier of discourse a unifier of conceptualization in any theistic scheme so the emphasis I think it's fair to say in all three of these approaches is on conceptual schemes conceptual schemes rather than on a deductive system of a foundationalist sort like Descartes Spinoza attempted you'll see you'll find that a repudiates that sort of deductive system build in metaphysics and he repudiates the notion of a reality that transcends the appearances with which science and common sense deal as in the Hegelian tradition reality and appearance so the more modest notion of the conceptual scheme now I referred you to page 33 yeah and notice that at the very bottom of that page he rejects the idea that we are endowed with a Faculty of intellectual intuition which would enable us to identify some Descartes type first axioms he repudiates that and on page 35 he states the criterion of verifiability in the middle of the page a sentence is factually significant to a given person if and only if he knows how to verify the proposition it purports to express that is if he knows what observations would lead him to accept the proposition as being true or rejected as being false the question isn't whether it's true or false but whether it is capable of being verified or falsified does it have cognitive mean is it factually significant does it refer to that's the criteria and if you'll look at page 38 you notice he talks about a weaker since a verification the question must be asked about any putative statement effect is not would any observations make its truth or false at certain but now that's what we called weak verification rather than strong verification okay is it at all amenable to any kind of support from empirical data the whipping boys that he has in mind appear on page 34 rare at the beginning of the middle paragraph he refers Kant who condemned transcendent metaphysics on different grounds and at the bottom of the page he refers to Bradley who you remember I had a metaphysic in his major work called appearance and reality their very title of which is what is anathema to a ax well any any comment they are that first chapter I think comes very clearly into focus I might say that some positivists went even one step beyond a into asking why it is if metaphysical statements effectually meaningless so that some people have persisted in making metaphysical statements and there are two writers of particular interest in that regard one is an American Morris and Lazar alit's who taught at Smith College and in a book of his called the structure of metaphysics trying to say that this is the product of some psychopathology that is to say the subconscious is projecting worlds which emotionally it cannot live without and there is one individual j/o wisdom incidentally not the John wisdom of importance later in ordinary language stuff but his brother Jo wisdom who wrote a book called now the title serves me the psychoanalysis of George Berkeley's philosophy in which he I was going to say argued I think asserted would be the better that as a result of his own posthumous analysis of Berkeley he had a pathological aversion to dirt and excretion and for that reason had to deny the pendant reality of any such thing this seems to me to be a rather pathetic kind of scientific attempt to explain metaphysics because however would that be amenable to verification or falsification you say it's a sort of self refuting thing for a positive is to do but curious and interest any comment question chapter one okay chapter 2 the function and philosophy the function of philosophy and at the very beginning you begin to see where he's heading he starts among these superstitions notice he cannot avoid the ad hominem it's not very scientific word superstition is an emotionally loaded thing among the superstitions from which we are freed by the abandonment of metaphysics is the view that the business of the Philosopher's is to construct a deductive system in rejecting this we're not suggesting philosophers can dispense with deductive reasoning but contesting the right to posit first principles and then offer them and their consequences as a complete picture of reality so there's the farewell to Descartes Spinoza and company instead on 47 right across from there the last paragraph begins now let's say pick pardon on 48 is what I want 40 years yes the little paragraph in the middle of 48 with the overthrow of speculative philosophy were in a position to see that the function of philosophy is wholly critical in what exactly does it's critical activity consists in the early part of the century I think I mentioned this before the tendency was to say that philosophy had two functions the speculative and critical the speculative function being the development of metaphysical systems and the critical function being the criticism of arguments and increasingly the analysis of concepts and the on things that philosophers say so the development of analytic philosophy it rustled the word company it was simply stressing and further developing the tools the critical functions of philosophy it's the speculative function of metaphysics that is now being discarded by the logical positivists leaving only the critical function and he maintains that this function is one of the age-old functions certainly Socrates dialogues engage in a great deal of analysis criticism similarly too with people like Descartes at least and meditation one and David Hume the manual can't after all he labelled his a critical philosophy and so forth so he picks up several examples in on page 49 it's the problem of induction the problem of induction which has of course been root historically in there being some metaphysical stability some metaphysical or the Aristotelian kind of metaphysical order initially but in the empiricists from Hume onwards was problematic because you couldn't know about such metaphysical order and reality well at the very top of page 50 they are calls it a fictitious problem because if the quest for metaphysical understanding is a pseudo function of philosophy then the problem of not being able to gain such is a fictitious problem it's not really a logical problem for philosophers at all we can continue to engage in inductive reasoning for the simple reason that it seems to work for scientific purposes what more do we want there's a dose here of pragmatic justification for the purposes of science and common sense we don't need the purposes of metaphysical systems with logical certainty that's irrelevant so he he makes that knowledge of reality is simply not the concern of science it's not the concern of science and so on page 57 the paragraph in the middle of the page sums up what he takes to be the function the propositions of philosophy he says are not factual this is 57 the center paragraph the propositions of philosophy are not factual but linguistic in character that is they don't describe the behavior of physical or mental objects but they express definitions and the logical consequences of definitions so we may say that philosophy with its propositions is a department of logic the characteristic mark of a purely logical inquiry is it's concerned with the formal consequences of definitions not with empirical fact so he's going to tell us that there are no factual philosophical propositions there are no factual philosophical propositions remember his delineation two kinds of cognitive cognitively meaningful propositions analytic and synthetic the synthetic of the factual the analytic of a form okay the asserting and justifying formulating of factual propositions is the big business of the empirical sciences so that philosophies propositions have to be analytic formal ones they were dealing that is to say with definitions and the logical consequences of those definitions philosophy then has only one function the analytic function the analytic function the soda in the the question becomes so what is the nature of philosophical analysis and that is the topic of quest earth chapter 3 chapter 3 now here look if you would at page 60 page 60 the bottom of the page the end of the complete paragraph for the philosopher as we've already said is primarily concerned with the provision not of explicit definitions dictionaries do that but of definitions in use definitions in use we define a symbol in use not by saying that it is synonymous with some other symbol definitions give you all sorts of synonyms but by showing how the sentence is in which it significantly occurs that is meaningfully used okay could be translated into equivalent sentences the logically equivalent which contain neither the defini end of the thing which is to be defined nor any of the synonyms into which it would be defined now a good illustration of this process is provided by Bertrand Russell's theory of definite descriptions and I mentioned this without labeling it that way when we were talking about Russell there used his example the present King of France is bald or I think I use this one as well the author Lee the author of Waverly is Scott Sir Walter Scott here I notice a ax does not say the author of Waverly was Scott but was scotch Scottish well Sir Walter Scott was Scottish but his point is that the sentence a sentence like that the author of Waverly was Scotch is equivalent to the following and here's Russell's the theory of definite descriptions that is to say just how do you analyze a statement like the author of Waverly was Scotch you want to analyze it into its logical constituents one person and one person only wrote way more and that person was scotch now you see by opening up the logical meaning of the sentence you now have statements that are more readily accessible to empirical verification or falsification let's say as point by this exercise of logical analysis what you are doing is asking yourself is this statement a factual to the a factually meaningful statement or is it not you see and if it is then you can refer it to whoever's appropriate business it is to determine its factuality presumably to the literary critic it's not the business of the philosopher to ascertain truth but only by careful logical analysis to determine who can ascertain truth to ask is it meaningful empirically meaningful well look again on page 64 and a further example that he gives at the bottom of that page the new paragraph he talks of the problem of giving an actual rule for translating sentences here's this business of logical analysis by finding a logical equivalent sentence which is more amenable to empirical verification the problem of translating sentences about a material body into sentences about sense data sense contents which may be called the problem of the reduction of material things to sense contents now this is the main philosophical part of the traditional problem of perception and I think about that for a moment the problem of perception which is raised by Plato in the Republic and the fairy teetus about the reliability of sense perception in telling us about the real nature of physical things the problem of perception is posed by Locke's representational theory and the correspondence between primary and secondary quality sensations on the one hand material object on the other our primary qualities qualities of an object as Locke thought or are they purely subjective as Burghley thought okay that's the kind of thing and in the realist idealist debate of the 1910s and the 1920s remember when we were talking about GE more GE Moore was unclear about the relationship between sense data that we're directly aware of and the material object are the since date are the qualities of surface patches on a material object or are the sense qualities rather simply that the subjective ideas which we ascribe to a material object and it seems that the whole realist idealists to debate the realist phenomena list debate of those days hinged on the theory of since data will be coming back to that later on but he is saying that really the only philosophical significance to the thing is the question of whether logic weather since datum statements are the logical equivalent of material object statements or is the some left over in a material object statement that is not reducible to sense datum statements well there's this one notion involved in a material object statement of what you can call spatial occupancy this space is taken as a spatial occupancy well is that contained within since datum statements about color size shape or not and so you find that one of the debates which grows out of the positivist approach is whether the reduction of material objects physical objects two sinks datum statements can ever be complete okay now there are some of the early positivists like sh wick moritz schlick who said yes it can be and so he's inclined to be a physicalist in the sense that our knowledge of since data is a knowledge of physical objects but on the other hand air is not so sure he's not so sure there seems to be some untranslatable ingredient in the language about material objects so he comes out more as a phenomenal he does make reference at one point to they need to have Austin Civ statements austin's if statements are ones empirical sense datum statements they are ones which are so self-evident as to be absolutely certain and he denies that there could be any such whereas some of the other logical positivists believe that the were our stinks if statement since datum statements that are absolutely soaked after all you might suppose that a sense datum statement about a caller you observe is absolutely certain but is it a once you consider all the observation conditions that go into observing a color observation conditions about the light in which you're seeing things and so on and so forth he does later on come down to the view and he mentions this in that long introduction that there are certain basic statements that we can appeal to that are much more sure than many others basic statements but still not the absolute certainty of the ostensive statements now this business of analyzing material object statements into sense datum statements illustrates what becomes for many philosophical concerns a much larger issue because as the mind-body question came under discussion using these tools the question was what was whether mental state statements are translatable without remainder into brain state statements that is to say whether you can adopt a physicalist interpretation of mind now this after the taboo about metaphysics is lifted becomes very significant because the attempt of the eliminative materialism etherealist who wants to eliminate mount is not only to eliminate a metaphysical entity called mind but also to eliminate any language about mind because mental state language he thinks can be translatable without remainder into physical state language including brain states whereas others will say this one dimension that is lost in that mental state language is an i language rather than an it language and the self referentiality of the i language of mental states is what is lost incidentally if you've read any of the writings of Donald McKay in cka why the English brain scientist and philosopher also an evangelical his books have been published by University Press and circulated quite widely Donal Makai as a brain scientist used this technique in criticizing purely materialistic interpretations of human nature maintaining that physical state language omits the eye language the eyes states of mental state language I remember talking with him one time we were both of us speaking at conferences to different conferences which happened to meet in the same facility and so we gravitated to each other at dinner time for three nights running and had a three stages the philosophical dialogue accordingly largely about this issue and I destroying I'd sat in on one of his presentations and was trying to suggest to him that all he was doing was saying that we can understand human nature if we use physical state brain state language and mental state language but that's not saying anything about the nature of mind that's just using empirical language Fira call data language you're not doing anything to the mind-body problem you're not saying anything about the existence of mind to which he responded eventually after we'd worked through this that on the other well how would I say it what would I have to go on all I've got is what the Bible says an empirical data and the Bible doesn't say anything explicitly about the existence of a metaphysical entity called mind or soul I said well what about a metaphysical assertion some metaphysical conceptualization and he leaned back and said metaphysical and then the penny dropped you mean you're operating with the empirical verifiability criteria yeah he was a positivist hehe wanted as an empirical scientist to stick with ether empirical data or Biblical data get it and he was therefore stuck about handling metaphysical questions never involved in certain Christian beliefs he was a remarkable individual and I think one of the real losses was that he died of cancer just a couple of years ago a man who was still publishing and doing some first-rate to work Donald McCoy you may have seen his book the clockwork you know those things of that sort all right now where does he get this conception of analysis working for logical equivalency look at page 70 his concluding remark incidentally look at the footnote on page 70 footnote 1 this ground for saying the philosopher is always concerned with an artificial language that's the ideal language tradition but the thing I want is the last lines there it's to be remarked the process of analyzing a language is facilitated if it's possible to use for the classification of its forms an artificial system of symbols whose structure is known the best-known example is the so-called system of logistics symbolic logic employed by Russell and Whitehead in principia mathematica so you get a much more precise logical analysis equivalences if you translate it into symbolic logic well any questions there okay chapter four the chapter for the a priori and here take a look at page 75 page 75 where you notice the name of mill is spattered over these pages 74 and 75 because he's rejecting Mills theory of the a priori which is he points out at the top of 75 is that the propositions of logic and metaphysics take it back logic and mathematics have the same status as empirical hypotheses remember mill denied that there was any a pre or I at all the laws of logic or empirical generalizations as are mathematical propositions okay no to that he says a assay as we maintain that they are independent of experience in the sense that they don't don't own their validity to empirical verification we may come to discover them through an inductive process but once we've apprehended them we see that they are necessarily true the best way to substantiate this half way down the page in the new paragraph that the truths of logic and math are necessarily true is to examine cases and he goes on to do so and the point that he is making is that these truths are necessary because page 77 first paragraph about six lines in the principles of logic and mathematics are true universally simply because we never allow them to be anything else the reason for this is we cannot abandon them without contradicting ourselves that's the whole definition of a necessary truth one whose contradictory is self-contradictory we cannot abandon them without contradicting ourselves without sinning against the rules that govern the use of language making our utterances self stultifying in other words the truth of logic and mathematics our analytic propositions origins and as tautologies they are not true of anything they're just useful to autologous that we employ every time we use language and try to use words you nificantly rather than equivocal so at the bottom of 78 he makes the point that if a proposition is analytic when its validity depends solely on the definition of the symbols it contains definition you see and synthetic when its validity is determined by the facts of experience as so philosophy is concerned with definitions and what follows by definitions follows from definitions that is to say from logic and as a result philosophy on page 80 and 81 is treated as simply an application of logic an application of logic to language the application of the logic to language now I think it's fair to say that those first four chapters are really concerned with the machinery the mechanisms of logical positivism and what in terms of its methodology is distinctive chapters and obviously that's the tremendously important thing to get a hold of chapters five and six begin to get into more substantive issues chapter five talking of truth and probability one main thing I want to stress here it is that the question what is truth the problem of truth is really simply a problem of definition a problem of definition in use but when I say of a proposition that it's true what do I mean what's the logical equivalence and you'll find that his argument it is very simple that when I say P is true all I'm doing is asserting P it is true that the course is nearly ended what does it is true that ad doesn't add anything so the assertion of truth is not itself a cognitive statement I'm not asserting something in addition to the sentence it is rather what gets to be called a performative utterance the performative utterances one that performs another function you think when the minister says at the end of the marriage ceremony I now pronounce you man and wife he's not informing you about something what he's doing is performing a religious and civil function so it's a performative utterance between two philosophers PF strossen and Jael Austin became known as the Strawson Austin debate in which Strawson took took essentially a as view that all truth assertions of performative x' and austin said no you cannot translate the statement it is true that without loss into simply a performative utterance or put in another way the statement it is true that the course is nearly ended is not the logical equivalent of the translation of course it's nearly ended you see the thing that is left out in the translation is the assertion that there is some extra linguistic state of affairs to which the statement the course is nearly ended is referring it's a way of referring to an extra linguistic something beyond the language an actual state of affairs Austin is in other words asserting a correspondence definition of truth okay so hey I got himself into hot water I'll be around with that one well he goes on to point out that in matters of verification and falsification all that's available is probability anyway but it's chapter 6 which is really the crux that you want to pay particular attention to the critique of ethics and theology all right you know his procedure what he's going to be doing is talking about the logical equivalent of ethical judgments the logical equivalent of ethical judgments and for that matter aesthetic judgments as well and in order to get at that he distinguishes four kinds of ethical utterances not on page 103 and note carefully for four kinds first this is six lines into the first complete paragraph on 103 first definitions of ethical terms they right means what is just thinks of that sort no you know what he thinks about definitions of ethical terms that they're analytic they're not true or false they're simply statement of how we're using language conventions second propositions describing the phenomena of moral experience I feel terrible about that well that's in psychologically interesting isn't it you see such description of the phenomena of moral experience our psychological descriptions or perhaps social descriptions society this society frowns on so there you've got psychological and sociological statements third exhortation to moral virtue chin up old [ __ ] relishes I'm after all but an exhortation to moral virtue is not a statement true or false it's an exhortation and encouragement has a different function fourth there are actual ethical judgments actual ethical judgments voting so-and-so in a game a would be morally irresponsible such-and-such is unjust moral judgments now what is their logical equivalent no in the case of definitions it's fine these are tautologies conventional tautologies phenomena of moral experience all right the sociologists can see if it's a true description of social attitudes exultation to moral virtue well there are various ways of doing that just a squeeze in the arm might do it just as well but ethical judgments yes II now remember if I say that such and such X is right good you see and right and good have to be defined well what sort of definitions well let's see supposing you have a utilitarian definition and he discusses that in the chapter but what this translates is then X is productive of Y consequences that's a sociological statement that a moral statement the utilitarian defines a moral term in non moral ways it reduces the moral to the non moral to sociological psychological things that can be observed and so utilitarianism does not make sense and moral judgments he agrees with GE Moore in rejecting the naturalistic fallacy defining the good in terms of any natural kind of property but in as much as any other definition deontological is a matter of convention to say X is right is saying no more than something like that in other words it is simply an emotivism an expression of emotion an expression of feeling distinguished emotivism from subjectivism he does the subjectivist ethic like that of David Hume defines the good on the right in terms of certain subjective feelings which people have really what the subjectivist is doing is translating moral statements into psychological statements but the emotivist is not translating moral statements into a statement at all because there are no moral statements to translate into some into psychological statements he's saying that a moral judgment like X is right X is God is not a judgment there's no meaningful predicate no factually meaningful predicate and consequently all you have is an emotive expression an exclamation exclamation you see an outburst it's like saying down but the don't gets to be more the hot Atari thing so in in this development of emotivism what he's doing is rejecting any empirical translation utilitarian subject to this sort he's rejecting any intrinsic intuitive conception of right like Kant seemed to assert he's saying there are no such things as moral judgments there is moral language but moral judgments I know more than emotive outposts well that was picked up by CL Stevenson who taught at Michigan in his book ethics and language and Stephenson added one more thing while ethical language is indeed emotive outburst it also has a rhetorical effect by telling you that something is right or wrong I'm engaged in some rhetorical act of persuasion and insofar as we have moral arguments we're not arguing about right or wrong we're just arguing about the facts of the case and then we use the rhetoric the emotive rhetoric on top of the facts of the case it's interesting to see the way in which certain public presentations do that do you remember the francis schaeffer film about abortion that showed all of the dolls lying around over the landscape and that's wrong notice there was no moral argument what the was was the bare facts that can be seen and the emotional rhetoric of a language I suspect they didn't realize what they were doing they were playing the positivist game an emotive aesthetic rather yeah too easy to do that and I think you'll notice that in election year you'll find a lot more right all right we didn't get to the religion part I'll pick up on that and use it this is the springboard to move on and talk about philosophy of religion since positivism

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Published: Tue Jun 16 2015