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‘Viennese Bombshells’: Reactions to Language, Truth and Logic from Ayer’s Philosophical Contemporaries

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The Historical and Philosophical Significance of Ayer’s Language, Truth and Logic

Part of the book series: History of Analytic Philosophy ((History of Analytic Philosophy))

Abstract

In this chapter I consider the ways in which some of those who were philosophically active at the time of the publication of Language, Truth and Logic (LTL) reacted to the ideas that Ayer was propounding. My particular focus will be on issues relating to the study of language and its role in analytic philosophy. I concentrate on the work of three philosophers: J.L. Austin, Arne Naess and L. Susan Stebbing. Their reactions offer an interesting set of comparisons because they exemplify a significant range of philosophical attitudes to the study of language. Although there are similarities in how all three responded to Language, Truth and Logic, there are also striking differences in the conclusions they drew from their readings of Ayer’s book and the approaches to language they took in their own subsequent work. These different approaches remain pertinent to the philosophy of language and also to various different branches of present-day linguistics.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    I presented the ideas in this chapter at the conference on “The Historical and Philosophical Significance of Ayer’s Language, Truth and Logic” at the Department of Sociology, University of Pécs, Hungary, in September 2018. I am grateful to my fellow delegates at that conference for their helpful and supportive discussion. I am also extremely grateful to Adam Tamas Tuboly and to an anonymous referee for their insightful and valuable comments on the first draft of this chapter. They helped me to improve it a great deal; those faults that remain are of course entirely my own. All page references to Language, Truth and Logic below are to the second edition of 1946; see Ayer (1936/1946), noted in the text as “LTL”.

  2. 2.

    See Sally Parker-Ryan’s chapter for further discussion.

  3. 3.

    See Adam Tamas Tuboly’s introductory chapter to this volume for more information of the immediate reception of LTL.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of English, University of Liverpool, Liverpool, UK

    Siobhan Chapman

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Correspondence to Siobhan Chapman .

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  1. Institute of Philosophy, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Budapest, Hungary

    Adam Tamas Tuboly

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Chapman, S. (2021). ‘Viennese Bombshells’: Reactions to Language, Truth and Logic from Ayer’s Philosophical Contemporaries. In: Tuboly, A.T. (eds) The Historical and Philosophical Significance of Ayer’s Language, Truth and Logic. History of Analytic Philosophy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-50884-5_3

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