Language, truth and logic

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The 1936 publication " Language, Truth and Logic " by Alfred Jules Ayer deals with a number of central philosophical complexes of questions on the basis of logical empiricism . The work is still considered to be one of his most important program fonts. The focus is on the criticism of metaphysics , which disregards the rules of meaningful use of language.

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Ayer's main interest is the property of metaphysical statements. He differentiates between sentences , statements and propositions . A statement is “what sentences express” (14), what two sentences that can be translated into one another have in common (11f.). Statements can be meaningful or meaningless. Proposition are meaningful statements. They are characterized by the fact that they can at least in principle be verified . This property can be shown by analytical and empirical statements. According to Ayer, the verification principle can be defined as follows:

"In a simple formula it would say that a sentence is scientifically meaningful only if the proposition expressed by it is either analytically or empirically verifiable" (9f.).

Analytical propositions refer to "the structure of language" (92) and its rules inherited by convention. Empirical propositions have “a real or possible perception” as their content (17) and are therefore at least in principle verifiable. According to Ayer, metaphysical statements represent neither analytical nor empirical propositions. They pretend that they “relate to a 'reality' which transcends the limits of all possible sensory experience” (42). Ayer does not deny that metaphysical statements can relate to inner feelings; the reference to a "transcendent being" makes their verification fundamentally impossible:

“If someone claims to see God only to claim that he is experiencing a particular kind of perceptual content, then we do not deny for a moment that his claim may be true. Usually, however, when someone says that he is seeing God, he not only says that he is experiencing a religious feeling, but also that there is a transcendent being as the object of this feeling ” (158).

For Ayer, the psychological basis of metaphysical statements is to be sought in the “superstition” that “every word or every phrase that can be the grammatical subject of a sentence must correspond to a real being somewhere” (55). Ayer gives as examples the concept of “nothing” and the reality of “general concepts” (55). The therapeutic means offered by Ayer represents the logical analysis of the sentences. The aim of this is to “transform sentences about material things into sentences about perceptual contents” (83). For example B. "the symbol 'table' can be defined in terms of certain symbols [..] which stand for content of perception - not expressly, but in their use" (82).

According to Ayer, logical and mathematical statements have the status of necessary and generally valid truth, since they cannot be refuted by any sensory experience. Ayer attributes this "necessity" to psychological reasons:

“They simply register our willingness to use words in a certain way. We cannot deny it without breaking the conventions that are implicit in our denial itself and thus falling into contradiction. And that is the only reason they are necessary ” (110).

According to Ayer, empirical propositions are always hypothetical; they can never "be shown to be necessary and universal" (94). The so-called “basic propositions” are an exception. They are characterized by “the fact that they relate exclusively to a single content of experience” (15). They are just verified by the “occurrence of the experience to which they relate”.

With regard to ethical issues, Ayer advocates an emotivism . Moral propositions can therefore be understood neither as analytical nor as empirical propositions. Rather, they serve to express feelings or attitudes of the speaker and are intended to arouse feelings in others in order to trigger actions:

“The presence of an ethical symbol in a proposition adds nothing to its actual content. So when I say to someone, 'You did wrong by stealing the money,' I am no longer pretending to have simply said, 'You stole the money'. In adding that this act was wrong, I am making no further statement about it. I am only showing my moral disapproval of this act. It is as if I wrote 'You stole the money' with a particular tone of horror or with the addition of a few special exclamation marks. The tone of voice or exclamation marks add nothing to the meaning of the sentence. They only serve to indicate that his expression is accompanied by certain feelings of the speaker ” (141).

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