A.J. Ayer, Language, Truth, and Logic | Examples of Philosophical Nonsense | Philosophy Core Concept

hi this is dr. Gregory Sadler I'm a professor of philosophy and the president and founder of an educational consulting company called reason IO where we put philosophy into practice I've studied and taught philosophy for over 20 years and I find that many people run into difficulties reading classic philosophical texts sometimes it's the way things are said or how the text is structured but the concepts themselves are not always that complicated and that's where I come in to help students and lifelong learners I've been producing longer lecture videos and posting them to youtube many viewers say they find them useful what you're currently watching is part of a new series of shorter videos each of them focused on one core concept from an important philosophical text I hope you find it useful as well towards the end of chapter one of his work language truth and logic a Jair is going to discuss a general way in his view how metaphysical propositions or assertions or claims wind up getting made and remember that for air generally metaphysical is going to be not a good thing I actually technically can't say it's good or bad because in his view metaphysical assertions are actually meaningless or nonsense they fail the criterion of verifiability and they're not actually tautologies either things that are logically necessary because of the structure of our language so they're going to be problematic and it part of his goal is to try to show that that these really don't say anything or assert anything and you know after doing that he says that what we want to do is to show how metaphysical assertions or propositions or statements come to be made what is going on when we're doing this and the general idea is that we're seduced by some of the strange quirks of our language so that we take as he says we postulate real nonexistent entities which are resulting from the superstition that there must be real entities corresponding to grammatical subjects so because we name something and talk about it in language we assume there must be something corresponding to it and we are thereby being misled or seduced by some of the features of our very own language another way of Plenty framing us this is a linguistic problem rather than an actual metaphysical problem so one of the prime examples that he uses is referencing Martin Heidegger 'he's famous statement that the nothing nothing's you know das nicht nicked it which has been attacked by the logical positivists as not just meaningless but a great example of Heidegger's jobs you know obfuscation of language and his messiness and and perhaps even being totally misled himself in thinking that in talking about nothing we're actually talking about anything I mean to be fair Heidegger does very carefully say nothing isn't something but you could still make the the criticism that what's going on here is mistaking the fact that we have a name or a word for something even if it's a really weird one like a privat of nothing and thinking that it must correspond to if not something at least you know something out there in a different sense that we could attribute things to or say something about and in to be fair and Heidegger's work that nothing does some work right particularly in what is metaphysics so that that's an interesting example that air is bringing up another that I think is a little bit easier to relate to if we think about the history of philosophy is this question about the reality of universals you know what is booked miss you know this is a book what is the essence of being a book is it a property that all books have in common or is it perhaps a platonic form or is it an idea in the mind of God or is it some sort of thing in this book itself there's a lot of different versions of the problem of universals and air is saying listen there really shouldn't be any problem of universals because universals don't have reality as entities we just think that they do because we're seduced once again by our grammar the fact that we can talk about universals we can say books do certain things you know books are wonderful right Reading Is Fundamental what is this reading that you're talking about is it all of the acts of reading combined is it some sort of substantive so those are the sorts of things that that air has in mind and he says that the general problem is that we assume that because we can predicate something of a subject that that subject is therefore an entity and it exists in some way so a prime example of this he talks about it at great length is substance and he mentions he talked about this a little bit earlier he says that it happens to be the case that we cannot in our language he means English of course but we could think of pretty much all the indo-european languages right we cannot refer to the sensible properties of a thing without introducing a word or phrase which appears to stand for the thing itself as opposed to anything which may be said about it let's take it as an example book right so this book is black and white and pinkish in in color it is a short book it is in fact an old book as you could tell if you're looking at it it is written in English these are all properties of book but we could say well there's a book and then it has those properties first you have a book a subject and then you have all of these things like Aristotle would call accidents right or qualities or you know pick whatever other thing you know you want to say about it and the book can be we can say the book is in space over here or the book is now smacking me in the head all these different things we can we can predicated on it the book smells like old books hey all those sorts of things so says that that we've got this idea of the thing that underlies the sensible properties why do we assume that because our language leads us into thinking that but our language is seducing us leading us astray he says we use the term substance to refer to the thing itself we can do that in a generic sense and talk about substance so like you know the substance of this or the substance of this chalkboard the substance of my tie the substance of my own flesh and we can talk about each of those individual substances as well what they are says we use the term substance to refer to the thing itself from the fact that we happen to employ a single word to refer to a thing and make that word the grammatical subject of the sentences in which we refer to the sensible appearances of the thing says there's two mistakes that we make here one is thinking that it follows that the thing itself is a single and simple entity this book you know could be understood as an assemblage of pages for example and there's no more reason for us to focus on the book Ness the unity of this then there is on the parts of it I suppose or the different qualities the other thing he says is that there's no reason to think that a thing cannot be defined in terms of the totality of its appearances so there's no thing behind the appearances of this book this thing just is all those appearances the whiteness blackness pinkness the smell of the old book the all the you know multiple things with all these letters and underlining the qualities that it has of length and depth and breadth and all of those things the sound that it makes when I smack it on the stool all of these things are the book there is nothing beyond it so you might think about you know dick Hurtz famous you know piece of wax example where he looks at the thing in terms of its qualities and then he brings the wax close to the fire uses all of its qualities are changing what what underlies it well it's the substance itself of the wax which is an extended thing air is saying we don't have to assume that our language leads us to think about that but we don't have to buy into that another example a little bit more abstract the metaphysical concept of being he says that our language has unfortunately in his view the same grammatical form used for existential and attributed propositions now what are existential and attributed propositions saying that the book is old is attributive you're saying this this object here has the property of a Jinnah so it is a certain you know time period of age or it's from a certain period or whatever however we're going to construe being old right we don't have to have a perfect understanding in order to make this work to say the book is or the book exists that's an existential statement did you see the difference between the two for one you're asserting that something has existence that it is in being for the other you're saying how it is what what sort of attributes what sort of properties what sort of observations we can make of it now you can observe that something exists and you can also observe that something exists in a certain way that it has properties right so he says here that simpler and clearer instance in the way in which a consideration of grammar leads to metaphysics is the case of the metaphysical concept of being the origin of our temptation to raise questions about capital b-being about which no conceivable experience would enable to answer lies in the fact that in our language sentences which expressing existential propositions and sentences which express attributive propositions may be of the same grammatical form so he uses an example here that leads us a little bit of astray but we'll come back to the being itself in a sec the sentences martyrs exist and martyrs suffer illustrates this different saying martyrs exist existential statement saying martyrs suffer attributive statement they're both grammatically quite similar they're a noun followed by an intransitive verb the fact that they have grammatically the same appearance leads one he says to assume that they are of the same logical type now what about being as such can we actually talk about being as such it depends on what you mean by talk yes we can we could say being exists we can string those terms together because we have the verb you know to be turned into a gerund right being or we could we could do it with other things as well we could say to be exists or we could come up with all sorts of other things the beingness of beings or whatever we want grammatically we can do that in terms of whether we're saying something meaningful ere would say it's a whole different issue saying being exists is not the same thing as asserting that the book exists the book is an actual thing right it could exist or I couldn't destroy it now no longer exists you have to ask yourself what what is actually meant by being how would you empirically verify this sort of thing and the answer is from the perspective air is working out you can't so really you're just saying nonsense in talking about being existing or being loving us or any other thing that you might say about being the last one that he talks about is fictional things and he uses an example of you so when we say things like dogs are faithful and unicorns are fictitious we're again being misled by grammar were thinking that he says there's an assumption that these are the same logical type so when we say that things are fictitious like unicorns we are asserting that they have this property of being fictitious and you could say well wait a second how the hell can you assert a property of something if it doesn't exist you can't say the book is black if the book isn't black well you can I mean the books in Sherlock Holmes study are presumably bound in leather and have all sorts of different rich colors or something like that Sherlock Holmes is taller than Watson Sherlock Holmes doesn't exist and his apartment at whatever Baker Street never presumably existed I know there might have been some model that it was drawn from by Arthur Conan Doyle but he's a fictional character is he not so how is it how does it work for fictional things ear says that our grammar misleads us into this assumption that fictitious things are real in some non empirical mode and heir says well there isn't any non empirical mode of being real that's what it means to be real we're being once again misled by the way our language works so these are all examples in ayres view of how metaphysics gets generated out of not paying close enough attention to how our language works and important distinctions that we might want to draw about our language you

Channel: Gregory B. Sadler

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Keywords: Lecture, Lesson, Talk, Education, Sadler, Philosophy, Learning, Reason

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Length: 15min 24sec (924 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 02 2019