Abstract
This chapter serves as an introduction to the content and context of A.J. Ayer’s Language, Truth and Logic. It argues that Ayer’s book did more than just misrepresent some of the theses of the Vienna Circle, but on the contrary, provided fresh insights into some of the debates among its members. While the influence of Ayer’s book is undeniable, this chapter invites readers to reevaluate their knowledge about Ayer’s work by reexamining his place and role in the history of analytic philosophy.
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Notes
- 1.
This work was supported by the MTA Lendület Morals and Science Research Group, by the MTA Premium Postdoctoral Scholarship, and finally, by the “Empiricism and atomism in the twentieth-century Anglo-Saxon philosophy” NKFIH project (124970). I am grateful to Thomas Uebel, Andreas Vrahimis and an anonymous referee for the helpful comments on the previous version. All page references to Language, Truth and Logic below are to the second edition of 1946 see Ayer (1936/1946), abbreviated in the text as “LTL.”
- 2.
- 3.
In 1935, after he had won a new scholarship, Ayer still complained to Otto Neurath that “at Oxford, where I work, metaphysics still predominates. I feel very isolated there, and have even been made to suffer economically for my views.” A.J. Ayer to Otto Neurath, December 31, 1935 (ONN). As we shall see below in Sect. 1.2.2, according to some scholars, metaphysics was not at all the dominant approach and field of study in the 1930s. Nevertheless, it may be true that Oxford was a rather conservative place marked by adherence to old ways of thinking, often based on the readings of the Greats. As Ryle (1971, 5) recalled, after H.H. Price had demonstrated the value of what was happening at Cambridge (Moore, Russell, Wittgenstein), “Oxford’s hermetically conserved atmosphere began to smell stuffy even to ourselves.”
- 4.
A similar discussion group evolved in the mid-1920s in Berlin. Hans Reichenbach, who is often considered its leader, claimed that what distinguished the Berlin Group from the Viennese one was that it kept close watch of the sciences, in contrast to the latter’s philosophical inclination towards general ideas. As a result, Reichenbach tended to refer to the unfolding movement in Berlin as “logical empiricism” and to the Viennese one as “logical positivism.” For the philosophical and general significance of these terms, see Uebel (2013).
- 5.
The precise nature and scope of the protocol-sentence debate (especially Schlick’s conception) is still under discussion, but for an up-to-date presentation, see Uebel (2007). As Thomas Uebel argues in his chapter in this volume, after the publication of LTL, Ayer again sided with Schlick and developed a foundationalist conception, based on the correspondence theory of truth (see also László Kocsis’ chapter below).
- 6.
Ayer’s third paper, “On Particulars and Universals,” did not consider the Vienna Circle explicitly, except for a quick note at the end of the paper, which is concerned with structure and not with content (Ayer 1933c, 62). In fact, the paper mentions only Frank Ramsey and Russell. Thus, seemingly, Ayer at first tried to adapt himself to the regular British scene, given that his “Atomic Propositions” focused on atomic facts, the main question of the so-called Cambridge School, which Susan Stebbing had discussed in some detail.
- 7.
In 1936, the very first critical review of LTL claimed that “the whole book proves much less than either the dust-cover or his own first paragraph appear to assume” (Tomlin 1936, 202, original emphasis).
- 8.
Ayer seemingly does not differentiate between verification as a criterion of meaningfulness, and verification as a certain form of theory which determines the meaning of a proposition. Hans-Johann Glock’s chapter in this volume takes up verification in detail.
- 9.
Before LTL, Margaret MacDonald (1934) tried to clarify the issue of verification by pointing out that determining the truth and falsity of a proposition first requires an understanding of the proposition in question (contrary to Schlick’s famous doctrine that to understand the meaning of a proposition is to indicate the ways in which the proposition will be verified). In 1934, an entire symposium was devoted to questions of verification (Stebbing et al. 1934), and verification was also at stake for Max Black (1934) and for W.T. Stace (1935) who—in their replies to Ayer (1934a)—were critical of some of the details while supporting the intuitive core of the verification idea. After the publication of LTL, Gilbert Ryle (1936) wrote a shorter critical article. Stace’s (1935) paper became quite influential, with Ayer (1936a) producing a reply immediately after the publication of LTL, which was in turn followed by Alfred Sidgwick’s (1936) response. In 1937, A.C. Ewing (1937) published another paper on verification and meaninglessness, to which Sidgwick (1937) replied, followed by Ewing’s (1938) counter-reply. Verification was the topic of two more technical papers by Morris Lazerowitz’s (1937, 1939), Bertrand Russell (1937) devoted his presidential address at the Aristotelian Society to verification and Ayer’s friend, Isaiah Berlin (1938) also wrote about the topic. Finally, there were two further substantial events, John Wisdom’s 50-page essay (1938) and another symposium (Mackinnon et al. 1945) right before the second edition of LTL. As can be gleaned from this list, verification was a hot topic in England for many years, even after the Viennese logical empiricists had left it behind, first for confirmation and later for more technical and logical issues.
- 10.
Recently, Pelletier and Linsky (2018) and Uebel (2019) have considered verificationism in the context of logical empiricism. In the introduction to the second edition, Ayer tried to refine the idea of verification, but as is well-known, Alonzo Church’s (1949) review of that edition put the final nail in LTL’s coffin, at least regarding verification. In the 1980s, Crispin Wright (1986) reformulated the principle and rejected Church’s counterexamples. Ayer (1992, 302) later accepted Wright’s proposal, though the debate did not end with that.
- 11.
In fact, Ayer claims in LTL that there are no genuine philosophical propositions given that sentences in philosophy cannot be true or false. They are not about the everyday usage of words (in which case they would be empirical sentences), but about classes or types of expressions and thus their purpose is merely clarificatory. Nonetheless, in his new introduction (LTL, 26), Ayer claims that—contrary to the opinion of the Vienna Circle as he conceived it—philosophy does, after all, have its own special propositions, which are either true or false.
- 12.
In fact, a substantial part of the chapter on the nature of analysis is devoted to one example, namely to the problem of how we can define material beings in terms of sense-contents (LTL, 63–68). Ayer tries to point out that talking about material things often conveys the idea that we are dealing with a metaphysical (ontological) problem, when, in fact, this is a linguistic issue of definitions in use. What is thus at stake here is how to translate (or reduce) material-things talk to sense-contents talk, a program which is entirely consistent with Carnap’s approach from the mid-1930s, especially as it was presented in Logical Syntax of Language (1934/1937) where he argued that in the (only philosophically acceptable) formal mode of speech, we are not talking about actual numbers, material things, and so on, but about number-words and thing-words.
- 13.
Ayer’s relation to ordinary language philosophy is the subject of the chapter by Siobhan Chapman and Sally Parker-Ryan. What is rather more surprising is that Ayer did not account for all the alternative conceptions that were explicitly in use by British philosophers. There is no mention of Stebbing, Wisdom, or Duncan-Jones, who were known as the “Cambridge School of Analysis.” The reason might be that around the time of writing LTL, Ayer dismissed the notion of “atomic facts,” writing elsewhere that “I cannot help regarding this conception as a relic of metaphysical realism” (Ayer 1936b, 58). Interestingly, in 1992, Ayer noted that the approach of LTL “was closer to that of the Cambridge School of Analysis than that of the Vienna Circle” (Ayer 1992, 301).
- 14.
In the year LTL was published, Ayer took part in a symposium on “Truth by Convention” where he presented a much more detailed discussion and the context of his views on logic and analyticity (e.g. that a priori propositions about language are linguistic rules). In fact, he even discussed Quine’s brand-new paper, “Truth by Convention,” and tried to disprove his arguments about the circularity of logical conventionalism. See Ayer et al. (1936). In this volume, Nicole Rathgeb takes up the topic of analyticity and logic. On pages 16–18 of the new introduction (1936/1946), Ayer revised some elements of his earlier account.
- 15.
On Ayer’s unique mixed theory of truth, see László Kocsis’ chapter in this volume.
- 16.
C.E.M. Joad and Giles Romilly argued that Ayer’s book captivated the minds of students and helped to fill a moral vacuum in which Fascist students could wield the book as their philosophical Bible by appealing to the erosion of absolute moral values. On these problems, see Aaron Preston’s chapter in this volume and Tuboly (2020b). On Ayer’s ethical views and some of their historical parallels, see Krisztián Pete’s chapter in this volume. It should be noted that while Ayer did not revise his ethical views in the new introduction, he did concede that the theory was “very summary,” and that readers should turn to C.L. Stevenson’s relevant writings for details (LTL, 20). On Ayer, Stevenson and ethics in logical empiricism, see Capps (2017).
- 17.
Some of this literature (also that concerning solipsism) is discussed in Thomas Uebel’s chapter. The fact that John Wisdom devoted numerous papers in Mind to the problem of other minds in the early 1940s, which were later republished as a monograph, indicates the relevance of the problem; see Wisdom (1952).
- 18.
Gergely Ambrus and Thomas Uebel’s chapter discusses Ayer’s treatment of other minds, and they also show how Ayer changed his fundamental views about philosophy, analysis, other minds and phenomenalism between 1936 (LTL) and 1940 (Foundations of Empirical Knowledge).
- 19.
Carnap’s German paper, “Die physikalische Sprache als Universalsprache der Wissenschaft” was translated into English by Max Black as “The Unity of Science,” with a new introduction by Carnap (1934), but it did not reach the mainstream in a similar fashion as LTL did.
- 20.
Later in the introduction to his collected volume on Logical Positivism, Ayer (1959, 4) devoted some passages to the manifesto, though the question of depth remained unnoticed. Nonetheless, for the significance of how Carnap and Neurath developed a socio-politically sensitive conception above the depths on the intersubjective surface of discourse, see Uebel (2020).
- 21.
Waismann is also quite underrated in the history of logical empiricism. Presumably, this will soon change, see Makovec and Shapiro (2019).
- 22.
One shall take notice of the fact that even though Ayer’s (1959) introduction to Logical Positivism still contains many oversimplifications, it is a way better and more detailed (both philosophically and historically) introduction to the Vienna Circle than LTL ever was.
- 23.
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- 25.
Ayer also noted later that “language qua language has never been a great passion of mine. This make me temperamentally closer to Russell than to anybody else, and probably rather a freak at Oxford” (Mehta 1965, 73). Though he had in mind here the characteristic movement of the 1950s in England, namely ordinary language philosophy, it is still remarkable how Ayer tried to make connection to Russell, for whom (somehow in contrast to the Circle) linguistic analysis always had a worldly (one might say, ontological) turn.
- 26.
This line of argument is developed in more details by Andreas Vrahimis in the volume.
- 27.
Especially as Ayer himself argued in LTL (136–137) that Hume’s and Mach’s atomistic sense-data theories are wrong, and a more holistic approach is required. It is a further question of course whether Ayer is right about Hume and Mach (presumably not), and how his views became associated with the ahistorical Hume without further restriction.
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Tuboly, A.T. (2021). Introduction: From Spying to Canonizing—Ayer and His Language, Truth and Logic. 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_1
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