In the world of the arts, the remarkable fact
has very often been noted that what we still think of as modern painting and modern music and
modern poetry & the modern novel all developed, roughly speaking, simultaneously. They all
got going in the early years of this century and first became fashionable in about the
1920s. And in all the arts, modernism has had some strikingly similar consequences.
For instance, in each of the arts, there was a turning away from the un-self-conscious
depiction of the world, or of experience, and a turning in on itself. Art actually became
its own subject matter. That's to say, it became familiar for, say, the subject of a poem
to be the process of writing a poem or the difficulties of being a poet. Ditto with plays
and novels and later even films. Music and painting, too, in their different ways, exhibited
the same concern with their own innards and very often turned them into their own subject
matter and put them on display. In all the arts too--and perhaps this is related to
the last point--there was a disintegration of traditional forms, a tendency to build
new structures & to build them out of small, carefully shaped fragments. I'm emphasizing
this because all this is true, and with remarkable exactitude, of philosophy as well, a fact
which illustrates how deeply embedded the development of philosophy is in the cultural
matrix of its time. Modern philosophy can be said to have started in 1903 with the breakaway
of G.E. Moore and Bertrand Russell from the idealism which had dominated the 19th century.
And then after the pioneering work of Russell-- followed by that of Wittgenstein, who was a pupil
of Russell--there developed in the 1920s in Austria the first fully-fledged school devoted to the
new philosophy, a school which was known as the Vienna Circle. To the philosophy they
developed they gave the name logical positivism. And for a long time afterwards, that label
was attached to modern philosophy generally in the minds of very many laymen. The person
who introduced logical positivism into England was A. J. Ayer, and his is the name that
has been chiefly associated with it ever since in this country. He did so in a still very
famous & widely read book called Language, Truth & Logic, which he published in January
1936, when he was only 25. It's very much a young man's book, explosively written, and
it's still the best short guide to the central doctrines of logical positivism. The aggressiveness
of that book was typical of the movement as a whole. They self-consciously organized themselves
like a political party, with regular meetings and publications and international congresses, and
they propagated their doctrines with missionary zeal. If we look at the question of what they
were fighting against so passionately & why, I think that will provide us with the clearest
starting point for our consideration of logical positivism. And then we'll be in
a better position to go on and examine their own doctrines. Professor Ayer, what was it
that the logical positivists were campaigning so passionately against? Well, primarily they
were against metaphysics, what they called metaphysics. And that was any suggestion that
there might be a world going beyond the ordinary world of science & common sense, the world
revealed to us by our senses. Already Kant, at the end of the 18th century, had said it was
impossible to have any knowledge of anything that wasn't in the realm of possible sense
experience. But these Viennese people went further. They said that any statement that wasn't
either a formal statement, like a statement of logic or mathematics, or one that was empirically
testable was simply nonsensical. And so they cut away, therefore, all metaphysics in that
sense. And this had some further implications. It was, for example, obviously a condemnation
of any theology and any notion of there being a transcendent God. And this, although they
were themselves not politically conscious-- with one exception. There was one of them who
was, and only one, a man called Otto Neurath--- had political implications because there was
in Vienna at that time a rather bitter struggle between the Socialists and a right-wing clerical
party headed by Dollfuss. And the opposition of the Vienna Circle was in part a political act,
even though they weren't themselves primarily concerned with politics. Now, you mentioned
one of them by name, Otto Neurath. Since we're going to be talking about this circle of people,
I think it'll be helpful if we get clear who the main individuals were. Who were they?
Well, the chief person, the leader of the circle, the official leader of the circle, was a man
called Moritz Schlick, who was originally a German, and he came to the Vienna at
the age of about 40 in the early 1920s, in his early 40s. And he had, like most of them,
or many of them, had been trained originally as a physicist and was interested mainly
in the philosophy of physics. And in fact, one of the leading traits of the circle is the
extreme reverence for the natural sciences. And Schlick was their chairman, and he
took up his chair in Vienna in the middle '20s and started organizing the circle I think
almost from the moment he arrived there. Then the next most important person was another
German, called Rudolf Carnap, and he had been a pupil of the great German logician Frege,
he'd been a pupil of Frege in Jena. And he came to Vienna a few years after Schlick
in the late 1920s and, in fact, left Vienna in the early '30s for Prague, but was still a
very powerful influence in the movement. He was chief contributor to their journal, it
was a journal called Erkenntnis. The third person was a man I've already mentioned called
Neurath, I think he was an Austrian. But he was the most active of them politically and in
fact did have some post in the revolutionary Spartacus government in Munich after the First
World War. And he was very nearly a Marxist. He wanted to combine positivism & Marxism,
and it was he who was mainly conscious of it as a political movement. He wanted to organize
it politically. Now, it's obvious from what you said that this was a radically revolutionary
movement. I mean, they were destructive of established ideas in religion, destructive of
established ideas in politics, and above all, destructive of established ideas in the German
philosophical tradition. And I suppose that the two main scalpels that they used to tear
away what they regarded as all that diseased or dead intellectual tissue were logic and
science, hence the name logical positivism. Indeed. It wasn't quite so novel as all that, it
was continuing an old previous Viennese tradition. There was a scientist and a philosopher of
science called Ernest Mach--he's the man against whom Lenin wrote his Materialism and Empirio-
Criticism--who flourished in Vienna at the end of the 19th century. He was a professor in Prague from
about the 1860s onward, then came to Vienna. And it was he who took the view of science
that, for example, Schlick also took, that it must deal in the last resort simply with
human sensation. Since all our knowledge of scientific facts comes through our senses,
then, Mach reasoned that in the last resort, science must simply be a description of sensation.
And this the Viennese people took over. And of course, they were following an old empiricist tradition.
Although they didn't themselves know or care much about the history of philosophy,
what they said was very like what was said by the Scottish philosopher David Hume in
the 18th century. To that extent, they weren't all that novel, they weren't all that the
revolutionary. What was so revolutionary was in a sense their fervor and their seeing
this as putting philosophy on a new road. They thought here at last we've now discovered
what philosophy's going to be, it's going to be the handmaiden of science. It wasn't so
much that they used science in their philosophy as that they thought that the whole field
of knowledge was taken up by science. I mean, science describes the world, the only world
there is -- this world, the world of things around us and so on--and this is what science
describes. And there isn't any other domain for philosophy to occupy itself with. Now
what can it do? All it can do is analyze and criticize the theories, the concepts of science.
This is how science came in. Logic came in as supplying them with a tool. Logic had remained
pretty much stagnant since the days of Aristotle, and then at the beginning of the 19th century, it
took a move forward. There were some precursors, there were Boole and De Morgan. But the real
jump came at the end of the 19th century with Frege in Germany, and as you yourself said
earlier, Russell and Whitehead in England. And this generalized logic more widely than
had been done. It didn't actually refute Aristotle, it just showed Aristotle's work is a little corner
of logic. But they had a much more wide-reaching, far-ranging logic which provided them with
a very powerful tool of analysis. It enabled them to express things much more precisely.
And since they were very interested in structures-- since they thought that science was largely
concerned with structure, with the relations between things--the development originally
by Schroder and Peirce in the 19th century and by Russell & Whitehead in the 20th
of a logic of relations gave them a tool, it gave them a tool of philosophical analysis.
This is what happened. While I try to take your point about Mach being a precursor of
the logical positivist movement, it is true, isn't it, that in addition to there being a new
logic at the turn of the century, there was also a new science. I mean, dramatically
personified above all by Einstein, but there was this enormous breakthrough, a thought
system of ideas which had started with Newton and which had been accepted as incorrigible
fact by most of the Western world for nearly 300 years. This was beginning to break down
under the influence of Einstein & the new physics. And surely that must have had an enormous
impact on what they--Well, this had a very important--it was a very important stimulus
to them because, in fact, Einstein had been affected by Mach. In fact, I heard it from his
own mouth that he owed a great deal to Mach. And they saw Einstein's work in the
theory of relativity, and also they saw the new quantum theory, as a vindication of their
approach, because what Einstein had done-- anyhow, as they interpreted him--was to say
there's no...you can't attach any sense to something like simultaneity unless you consider
how statements about simultaneity are verified. That is to say that what is meant by talking of
things being simultaneous depends upon how simultaneity is actually determined in observation.
And they saw this as a great vindication within science of their philosophical approach. Similarly
with quantum theory/ The fact that in quantum theory no meaning is attached to a particle
simultaneously having a precise velocity and a precise position, because this can't be
tested, because if you measure the velocity it distorts the position, if you measure the
position, it distorts the velocity. Therefore, the science attached no meaning to this. They said
this is a proof that what scientific concepts mean is determined by how they're verified, and
this is what we're saying. And so this gave them an enormous stimulus. They said,
well, science is on our side, we're interpreting science properly. And, they were, as I said,
Carnap and Schlick were originally physicists. Neurath was a sociologist. So in other words,
now we're getting at what the revolutionary nature of their work consisted in. That
they were applying the new logic and the new science to traditional methods of
thought, and breaking these methods down under the impact of the new methods.
Is that so? Well, yes what they wanted to say was that the old philosophical problems
were either senseless or else capable of being solved by purely logical techniques. Now what
were the doctrines, the main doctrines, that they developed in the course of doing this?
Well, there were three, really. First, everything hinged on the so-called principal of verifiability,
which was put succinctly by Schlick as: The meaning of a proposition is its method
of verification. And this is slightly vague as it's there expressed, and we've labored ever
since to somehow make it precise, and never wholly successfully. But it had two consequences.
One was that anything that couldn't be empirically verified, verified by sense observation, was
meaningless. I've already referred to this. And secondly, it was interrupted by Schlick--later
it got loosened, but in the early days by Schlick-- as entailing that what a proposition meant
could be described by saying what would verify it. And so, you get a reduction of all statements
to statements about statements of immediate observation. This was the first point, which
had both a negative and a positive side: The negative was excluding metaphysics,
positive as showing a way of now analyzing what sort of statements were significant.
Then they held--this they got partly from Wittgenstein, but there is evidence that Schlick
discovered this on his own--that the propositions of logic and mathematics, necessarily true
statements, were what Wittgenstein called tautologies. They said the same thing
over again, as it were. I mean, they were-- They merely unpacked the content of what
was already there...like saying all bachelors are unmarried men or all brothers are male, that
all logic & mathematics simply was what Kant had called analytic--that's to say, as you
put it, unpacking the content of what you've already said. And then the third main thing
was about philosophy itself. They thought that philosophy must consist in what Wittgenstein
and Schlick called an activity of elucidation. I mean, I think there was a saying of Wittgenstein,
which was quoted again by Schlick, that philosophy's not a doctrine but an activity. It doesn't
issue in a body of true or false propositions because this is covered by the sciences,
but simply is the activity of clarifying, analyzing, and in certain cases, exposing nonsense. I
mean, Wittgenstein, at the end of his famous book, The Tractatus, had said the right method
of philosophy is simply to wait until somebody says something metaphysical and then show
him it is nonsense. Which is a bit, of course, negative & discouraging for a philosopher.
Well now, taking the first of those three points first, I think it'll be fairly clear to
most people what's meant by the view that any statement about the world must make
some observable difference to something if it's true. Otherwise it's difficult to see how
it can have any application. Yes, yes. When you say that the meaning of a statement
consists in the method by which you verify it, I think that's probably not clear to some of
the people who are listening to this discussion. Can you explain that a bit? Yes, I can.
Originally, it was thought by Schlick and by Mach before him--& possibly also by Wittgenstein,
though it's not quite clear what Wittgenstein's atomic elementary statements are meant to
be--that you could translate out all statements into statements about sense data, about immediate
data of observation. And this was never actually achieved, and clearly runs into very great
difficulties, for instance, in the case of universal propositions, propositions saying
"all ravens are black", I mean, "all gases expand when heated", because the range covered by the
"all" might be infinite, and of course if it's infinite, then you couldn't possibly translate out.
And so, they then were roped into a rather desperate expedients. Schlick actually said
that statements of this kind weren't propositions at all, but rules, simply rules getting from
one particular statement--this is the raven, to this is black, and so on--rules of inference.
And then there were other difficulties. Clearly it seemed perfectly clear that if you
take very high-level, abstract scientific propositions about atoms, electrons, nuclei,
and so on, to try and write this out in terms of sensations, in terms of blues and browns
and warm feelings of warmth & so on, it simply doesn't work. And for various reasons, then,
the principle got weakened, and the idea that you could translate out became given up. And all
that was required was that these propositions which should be significant should be confirmable
by sense observation. And this meant that their meaning remained sort of partially undetermined.
It was thought that they got meaning from the cases where they were, in fact, confirmed,
where the tests could be carried out, and the rest was left rather vague. Also, this
original view led to very implausible views for talk about the past, because statements
about the past were equated with the evidence we could now get for them. So, saying Caesar
crossed the Rubicon was held actually to mean if I look up in some sort of history book,
I will see it written. Or if I go and dig, I will find such-and-such relics and so on.
And actually, I actually put forward this view in Language, Truth, and logic, now it seems
desperately implausible to me. And again, there was difficulty about other minds, of course.
If I say that you're feeling such and such, I can only observe your behavior. And in the
early days, the Viennese wanted to say that all those statements meant was statements
about people's behavior. That again became doubted. So I think that the verification principle
in its strong form really didn't last very long. We're covering a lot of ground very fast, let me recapitulate, just to make sure that
we've got things absolutely clear up to this point. According to what we might call the
strong version of logical positivism, all meaningful statements were of two kinds.
Either they were empirical statements about the world, in which case they must make some observable
difference to something and therefore must be verifiable if they're to be meaningful--it
doesn't mean to say they're necessarily true, because we might then try to verify them
and find that they're not true. Certainly! But it must be possible for them to
be true and therefore possible for them to be verified if they are to have to any meaning.
That's one lot of statements, empirical statements. Or they must be about mathematics or logic,
in which case they are purely self-referential. The true ones unpack what is already in the
premises, the false ones are self-contradictions. This right? And if a statement is of neither
of these two kinds, then it's meaningless. And with that as a kind of weapon, they
were able to chuck overboard whole areas of traditional discourse, not only in religion
and not only in politics, but also in philosophy and no doubt, all other areas of life. Now,
one query that occurs to one straightaway is this: If we make moral judgments or value
judgments or aesthetic judgments, it seems pretty clear that these are neither statements
about the world nor are they tautologies. Now, that must have been obvious to the
logical positivists from the start, how did they deal with this? Well, it wasn't obvious to them
that they weren't statements about the world. There's quite a long tradition in ethics which makes
ethical statements what is called naturalistic, that is, statements about what or is not conducive
to satisfaction of human desires or to the furtherance of human happiness and so on.
And this is the route that, for example, Schlick took. He wrote a book, rather a good book,
called Ethical Questions, Fragen der Ethik, in which he put forward the doctrine that
what ethics is about is what human beings want and how their wants are to be satisfied,
roughly a form of utilitarianism. This is possible. Now other people--Carnap, for instance,
and also myself--took a different view. We took the view that ethical statements
were much more like commands. I mean, not true or false, but--I developed what's called
the emotive theory, that ethical statements were expressions of feeling. Carnap took the
view that they're more like imperatives. So ethics is brought in therefore in one of two ways:
either in a naturalistic way, as being about what's conducive to human happiness, which
then is a scientific matter of fact, it's a matter of psychology and sociology & so on. Or being
treated as not indeed metaphysical nonsense, but as being not fact-stating, either imperative or
emotive. Now, when they used the verification principle like a sort of Ockam's razor--I mean,
slashing about right and left, and getting rid of all sorts of things--what difference
did this make to the philosophical outlook of the people who were influenced by it? Because
it did have an enormous effect on the way people saw the world and the way they saw
philosophy. Well, one effect it had was one you were mentioning in your opening remarks, that
it made philosophers very much more self-conscious about what they were doing. I mean, they had
to justify their own activity. On the assumption that the natural sciences took up the field,
as it were, you then had to find a place for philosophy. Philosophy wasn't, as it were,
allowed to be a competitor with them. And then people became much more self-conscious
about what philosophers were about. And, on the whole, the Vienna Circle wasn't the
only influence, there was also the influence of people like G. E. Moore in England, who were
defending rather similar views for very different reasons. Moore believed, for instance, that
propositions of common sense were certainly true and so on, and it could be shown this
could extend also to the sciences; each domain had its own criteria. Through the influence
of the circle and through the influence of people like Moore, philosophers came to think that
their function could be only that of analysis. And then, the question arose, what analysis
was, how it was practiced, what were its methods, what were the criteria, etc, etc.
So that, in fact, under this stimulus, the techniques of analysis reached a
degree of sophistication far greater than they'd ever reached before. That, I think,
is so. Would it be a not unreasonable simplification to say this, that they thought that the job
of finding out about the world and describing the world was the task of science. That's right.
So, all the various sciences were doing that. And therefore, it wasn't the task of
philosophy to find out about the world or explain our--Yes. Well, I mean, it couldn't,
as it were. No. There wasn't any space for it to occupy. So the task of philosophy, in fact, was to refine the methods of science, to clarify
the concepts being used, to clarify the methods of argument being used, & perhaps most importantly
of all, to separate out the legitimate methods of argument available to science from the
illegitimate methods of argument. That's right. You could put it in a technical way by saying
that philosophy then came to be seen as a second-order subject; the first-order being
talking about the world, the second-order being talking about talking about the world.
Talk about talk. I think that's Gilbert Rye's expression that philosophy came to be seen
as talk about talk. Yes, yes. And now we're talking about talk about talk, this brings
us onto the whole area of language. Yes. One striking feature of logical positivism was
that it brought a wholly new emphasis to bear on the importance of language in philosophy.
I have a quotation here from Bertrand Russell, from his book My Philosophical Development,
and it's very striking in this context, because he tells about how until he was in his mid 40s--
and it's important to remember that by that time, he'd done nearly all the work for which he's
now most recognized. All the important work-- He said this, that until that time,
he, and now I'm quoting, had thought of language as transparent.
That is to say as a medium which could be employed without paying attention to it. Now,
I should think it's almost certainly true that virtually all philosophers until this century
took a similar view. They didn't actually turn in upon themselves & examine the
medium of thought and expression, language, they used it un-self-consciously as if you didn't
have to pay attention to it, you could simply use it about the world. Now the logical positivists
took an entirely different approach to language from that, didn't they? Yes, I think this
is right. You could say that the interest in language starts very early, even with Socrates
who went around asking his fellow citizens: What is justice? What is knowledge? What
is perception? And so on. What is courage? But he didn't see these as verbal questions,
I think Plato saw them as questions about the nature of abstract entities he thought of as
being real. They weren't seen as verbal questions --although in retrospect, one can see them
as having been questions about meanings, at least. I think that it probably does start
only at the beginning of this century, this extremely conscious preoccupation with language.
Wittgenstein and Russell, at the beginning of the century, were interested in the relation
between language and the world. This was the great problem of Wittgenstein, the problem
which the Tractatus was meant to be an answer to. And of course, he ended by saying it couldn't
be described but only shown. But the intense preoccupation of philosophers with the way that language functions perhaps begins only in quite a late period, after the last war. It leads philosophers
into a situation where as soon as anyone makes an assertion of any kind about the world,
what you then do is examine the assertion and you get straightaway into the examination
of statements, the analysis of propositions, an analysis of the relation of the terms of
the proposition to each other, its logical form, so on and so forth. And philosophy can
soon seem to become, on that basis, about language. And indeed, it would be true to
say, wouldn't it, that a lot of non-philosophers have acquired the view that philosophers are
only concerned with language--and sometimes this is put disparagingly--that they're only
playing with words. Can you give some explanation of why that sort of prejudice against philosophy,
which is very widespread, is misplaced? Well, a great deal of philosophy certainly is about
language, in as far as it distinguishes between different types of utterance and analyzes
certain types of expression. I think the main--I mean, I would make no apology for this. But
beyond that, I think the answer I would give is that the distinction between being about
language and being about the world isn't all that sharp, because the world is the world
as we describe it. The world is the world as it figures in our system of concepts. And
in exploring our system of concepts, you are at the same time exploring the world. Let's
take an example. Suppose now one is interested in the question of causality. And we certainly
believe that causality is something that happens in the world. I'm bitten by the Anopheles
mosquito, I get malaria, and so on. One thing causes another. And one could put it by saying:
"What is causality?" and this is a perfectly respectable, important traditional philosophical
question. You can also put it by saying, "How do we analyze causal statements? What do we
mean by saying one thing causes another?" And in fact, although you look as though
you're posing a purely linguistic question, you're answering exactly the same questions philosophers
have always posed, only putting it in a different form, and we think--or most philosophy--a
rather clearer form. Now the point is that I think that there was a time--I think the
fashion has passed, it happened about 20 years ago and came to be known as the philosophy of the
Oxford School, mainly through the work of particular philosopher called John Austin, it wasn't universal
even then--when philosophers were a bit inclined to start using it for its own sake, without
seeing it as a means of solving any problems. And this, I think, is still dry.
That did become arid... But I think mostly now, when people try to
investigate the meanings of words, it's just because these are concepts they're studying,
which do play an important part in our description of what we think the world is really very like.
Well, I think that what you've just said really boils down to saying that the investigation
of our use of language and our use of concepts is an investigation of the structure of the
world. Yes. Yes. The world as experienced by human beings. There's an obvious relationship
between what you just said there and Wittgenstein's and the logical positivists' doctrine that
philosophy, the proper task of philosophy, consists not in formulating doctrines about
the activity of analysis. Yes, yes. That philosophy ought to be analysis. Certainly, yes. And
the organon of science. Yes, yes. Now this, it seems to me, had enormous influence on
the educated layman. I went up to Oxford as an undergraduate during the years after the
war, and people who were not studying philosophy at all seem to me to have come very much
under the influence of some of these doctrines. In particular, if one tried to make an assertion
of any kind about any subject, nothing to do with philosophy, one was immediately pinned
against the wall by people who said to you: "How would you go about verifying that statement?"
Or "What exactly do you mean by that? What kind of an answer do you want to that question?"
Are you conscious of that having been so? I think I was partly responsible for that,
yes. [LAUGHTER] Now, coming to your responsibility for this, I think it would be
interesting at this stage to come to your connection with the movement. You described
who the main people in Vienna were, you've talked about what some of their central doctrines
were. Now, you are well-known as the figure who introduced these doctrines into England--where
they have, I must say, had an enormous influence ever since, right up to and including this
day. How did you come to do that? Well, I was up at Oxford in--I came up in '29, took
my schools in 1932. And I was at Christchurch, a pupil of Gilbert Ryle's, and when I took my
schools I was appointed a lecturer at Christchurch and given a few months leave of absence.
And I thought I'd go to Cambridge to study under Wittgenstein, but Gilbert Ryle said,
no, don't do that, go to Vienna Instead. He happened to meet Schlick at a congress--I
think it was in Oxford, also--two years before, and he'd had half an hour's conversation with
him and thought that he was interesting, and got the impression something was going
on in Vienna. I think he'd also perhaps read some of the articles they'd produced. So he
said to me, why not go to Vienna, find out what's happening there. We know roughly what
Wittgenstein's doing at Cambridge, we don't know what's happening in Vienna, you'll come
back and go there and find out and tell us. Well, I didn't speak very much German,
had hardly any German at that time, but I thought I probably could learn enough just
to follow what was going on. And so I went with a letter of introduction to Schlick from
Gilbert. And Schlick--and now in retrospect, it was astonishing at the time, seemed to be
quite natural, but said, come and join the Circle, and so I did. And the only other foreigner
allowed in was Quine, the American philosopher, famous American philosopher. We were there
together. This was in, what? I went to Vienna in November '32 and stayed until the spring
of '33. And you were in your very early 20s? I was in my--yes, I was just--let me think.
Yes, I was--no, I was younger than that. I must have been just 23 years. No, 22. I
was 22, just 22. And I sat, then, and I didn't contribute, my German wasn't good enough,
and it was mainly debates between Schlick and Neurath at that time. On and on and on
and on the discussion went, and I sat and listened. And then came back to England
very full of all this. I wrote a paper in Mind called "Demonstration of the Impossibility
or Metaphysics," which is simply borrowed from the verification principle. And then Isaiah
Berlin said to me--we used to meet regularly and talk philosophy together--he said, you're
so full of this, why not write a book about it? And I said, why not? And so I sat down and
in 18 months wrote Language, Truth, and Logic. And I wrote it when I was 24 and it was
published when I was just 25. Were you astounded by the explosive consequences?
Well, it didn't have all that great a success at the beginning. It had [INAUDIBLE]. The
older philosophers at Oxford were absolutely outraged by it, and in fact, it was very
hard for me to get a teaching job at Oxford. In fact, I didn't get one, and for the while was
a research fellow. It was only after the war, when it got reprinted, that it had this
enormous success and--I suppose already before the war, when it first came out, it
did impress the younger people. They were very excited by it, because they did see some
liberation. You see, Oxford philosophy, for a while, was terribly sterile. There were some
old men who were only interested in the history of philosophy, only interested in repeating
what Plato had said, and trying to put down anyone saying anything new. And Language, Truth,
and Logic, [INAUDIBLE], with this huge [mind?] put under these people, did seem to the younger
people as a liberation. They did feel they could breathe. And in that way, it had big
historical effect. And I'd like to hear you say something about the influence you think
it had outside philosophy. It seems to me to have had obvious effects not only in science
and logic and philosophy but in things like literary criticism or in history and so on.
It probably had less effect within science than, for example, the work of Karl Popper.
His Logic of Scientific Discoveries came out in the German edition about the same time,
a year or so earlier. I think probably it appealed more to the scientists themselves.
But even, even with Language, Truth, and Logic, the scientists felt that this was all right.
I mean, they were told that they were, after all, the most important people. [LAUGHTER]
And they liked that. They didn't have to worry about the philosopher standing over them,
saying, oh, you mustn't say that. Not that they ever had worried much, but it was nice
to be told that what they were doing was really the fundamental thing. It's not only your book
but the whole movement which your book is about, logical positivism. What do you think
the influence of that was on other fields of activity? I think there was a great
emphasis on clarity and a great opposition to what might be called wooliness. There was
a kind of injunction to look at the facts, to see things as they are, to get rid of humbug.
All this was very attractive to young people in any field. And it went with, I think, a general
reaction against Victorian hypocrisy, really. This was seen as stripping off--I mean,
it was the Han Andersen child [INAUDIBLE] would function everywhere, saying the emperor
has no clothes. There he is, parading around with these huge robes & so on [INAUDIBLE],
and in fact, the fellow's naked. And this notion, the fellow's naked, which the logical positivists
were taken to be saying, was very exciting for anyone in any subject. And of course,
that is enough in itself to explain the huge and passionate hostilities that were aroused
against it. Oh, indeed, indeed, yes, indeed. Authoritarian governments like the Communist
and Nazi governments banned it altogether. Oh, yes. Yes. Even liberals were discomfited
by it. Just a little, yes. Yes. They thought it was too iconoclastic. Yes. But now,
it must have had, actually, some real defects. What do you now, in retrospect, think that
the main shortcomings of the movement were? Well, I suppose most of the defects is
that nearly all of it was false. [LAUGHTER] I think you need to say a little more about
that. Well, perhaps that's being too harsh on it, but I think I still want to say that it
was true in spirit in a way, that the attitude was right. But if one goes through the details--
first of all, the verification principle never got itself properly formulated. I tried several
times, and it always let in either too little or too much. And to this day it hasn't
received a properly logically precise formulation. Then the reductionism just doesn't work.
You can't reduce statements--you can't even reduce ordinary, simple statements about
cigarette cases and glasses and ashtrays as statements about sense data, let alone more
abstract statements of science. So the really exciting, strict reductionism of Schlick &
the early Russell and so on doesn't work. And [INAUDIBLE] rather wishy-washy, which
almost nobody what dissent from, that a scientific hypothesis must have some relation to
observation. I mean, this is all that remains there. It seems to me at least very doubtful
whether statements of logic and mathematics are analytic in any interesting sense--the
whole analytic-synthetic distinction has been put in question by the work of recent philosophers,
like Quine. It no longer, I think--though I still want to maintain it in some form, it's no longer
so clear-cut as I once thought it was. And in some sense, obviously, statements of
mathematics are different from statements about the empirical world. But saying, as
I said, they're true by convention, I'm not at all sure this is right. Anyhow, it needs
a lot of defending. Again, the whole--I mean certainly in Language, Truth & Logic, the reduction
of statements about the past to statements about the future evidence for them is wrong. My
treatment of other minds was wrong. My treatment of ethics, I think, was still on the right lines,
though much to summary. So if you go in detail, very, very little survives. What survives is
a sort of general rightfulness of the approach, I think. Would you agree with me if I
tried to put it this way? That looking back on it, what seems to have been enormously
good about the achievement of logical positivism is almost entirely negative. That is
to say, it did clear away whole areas of hitherto plausible philosophizing which
were now seen through the lenses of the new logic and the new science, not
to be acceptable. So that whole traditional areas got, so to speak, cleared of lumber.
Yes. But it now looks as if all they actually succeeded in doing was clear the ground,
because what they tried to build on that ground that they cleared isn't standing up. Well, it's
a little more than this. It was very liberating. I think if perhaps we can go back to
something said not by a logical positivist, but by a pragmatist, William James--and of
course, pragmatism, which came earlier, is in many ways very akin to logical positivism. William
James had a phrase in which he asked for the cash value of statements. And I think this
is very important on the positive side. The early positivists went wrong in thinking that
we'd still maintain the gold standard, that if presented your notes, you could get gold
for them, which of course, you can't. There isn't enough gold and too many notes. But
nevertheless, there must be some backing to the currency. And this is, I think, what comes
out, that if someone makes an assertion, alright, perhaps you can't translate it into
observational terms, but still it's important to ask, for clarifying, how you would set
about testing it, what observations are relevant. This, I think, still holds good and is positive.
So former logical positivists like yourself--Yes? Although you now say that most of the detailed
doctrine is false, are still immensely influenced by that whole approach and are addressing
yourself to much the same questions, but in a more liberal, open sort of way. I would
say this is so, yes. Now, I'm a much older man, much more slowly, possibly--most
certainly with less brilliance, though there wasn't any brilliance before...
Perhaps more soundly, I hope perhaps I've learned something with the years.
Thank you very much, Professor Ayers.
