Abstract
This essay takes the position, consistent with Ayer’s own retrospective judgments, that the philosophical significance of Language, Truth and Logic (LTL) was minimal at best, and that its real significance was socio-historical. LTL stands as one of the most influential expressions of an overzealous and simplistic scientism that swept through Western culture in the first half of the twentieth century. This scientism played a crucial role in problematizing the West’s relationship to truth in ways that contributed to the eventual emergence of “post-truth” culture, with its “post-truth politics.” This in turn made possible the disastrous results of recent votes and elections in Britain and, above all, in the United States. In short, LTL’s real significance resides in the role it played as a sophisticated and successful bit of propaganda for an ideology that played a crucial role in loosing Western culture from its moral and epistemic moorings.
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Notes
- 1.
I wish to thank Adam Tamas Tuboly and an anonymous reviewer for very helpful comments on earlier drafts of this essay. 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.
If one takes philosophical significance to be more about articulating novel ideas that stimulate further philosophical efforts than about getting things right, then LTL could be said to have great philosophical significance. I find such a view unsatisfactory because it confuses means with ends. For most of philosophy’s history, the attainment of knowledge was taken either to be, or at least to be central to, its main objective. Knowledge, in turn, was understood to be the accurate (i.e., true) representation of some fraction—or perhaps the whole—of reality. I take this traditional view to be normative for the discipline. Consequently, I see philosophical significance, in the primary and unqualified sense of the term, as having to do with the attainment, through philosophizing, of more or better knowledge—that is, in getting things substantially right—for only in such attainment is the objective of philosophy achieved. By contrast, stimuli to philosophizing—from the Pythia’s words about Socrates, to Aristotle’s “wonder,” to the puzzling statements of certain British Idealists that drove G.E. Moore to philosophize—are better construed as means to philosophical ends than as attainments of those ends. Clearly, such phenomena bear some significance for philosophy, and one might call this “philosophical significance” in some sense. But not in the primary sense. So at most, LTL could have “philosophical significance” in this secondary sense; however, even this affirmation must be tempered by a sober estimation of LTL’s deficiencies. As we shall see, Ayer’s positivism caught-on not because of its plausibility, but because of its usefulness in challenging certain traditional views and the unnecessarily restrictive or oppressive social practices they supported. In fact, LTL got things so thoroughly wrong that, within a few decades of its publication (after its social usefulness was exhausted), no serious defenders of Ayer’s positivism remained. Such a work can only be seen as seriously philosophically deficient, precisely because the ideas advanced therein were not very plausible candidates for knowledge. The case of LTL is very unlike those of, say, the key works of Plato and Aristotle, whose central ideas in metaphysics and ethics, at least, have proven incredibly resilient despite millennia of criticism.
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- 4.
There is a widely shared view among scholars of Logical Positivism that LTL oversimplifies positivism so much that it is really more a distortion than an expression of the positivist position. And, of course, merely speaking of “the positivist position” involves a certain amount of oversimplification, as there was always considerable diversity of opinion among leading positivist thinkers, such as those associated with the Vienna Circle. It should also be said that most of these thinkers had deep moral convictions and did not think their views about the limits of knowledge posed any problem for maintaining and promoting those convictions. Nonetheless, this essay and this book are concerned specifically with the historical and philosophical significance of LTL. Consequently, it is specifically the significance of LTL and its version of positivism that are in focus here. Whether a more sophisticated version of positivism would have had different cultural consequences had it, instead of Ayer’s, captured the popular mind, is an interesting question, but not one we shall pursue here.
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- 6.
“Confirms” is meant to include both cases in which Ayer makes an assertion and cases in which he affirms an assertion made by Magee.
- 7.
The paper, no longer extant, was read at a meeting of the Jowett Society. Cf. Rogers (1999, 73).
- 8.
Largely forgotten today, in the 1940s Joad was one of Britain’s leading public intellectuals. Head of philosophy and psychology at the University of London’s Birkbeck College, he wrote numerous books for the educated public and was a frequent contributor to the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC)’s Brains Trust program from 1941 to 1947. Presumably, due to his having spent the 1930s outside of Oxford, Joad seems unaware of the immediate impact LTL had had on student culture there.
- 9.
- 10.
Oxonian was Churchill’s nephew, the journalist Giles Romilly, who had been a student in Oxford in the 1930s before becoming a war correspondent. On the history and context of Joad’s and Romilly’s charges, see Tuboly (2020).
- 11.
For a longer discussion of this background than I can give here, see the first section of Willard (2018, Ch. 4).
- 12.
Specifically, the principle of verification generalized physicist Percy Bridgman’s (1927) “operationalism.” Bridgman himself had doubts about operationalism’s applicability outside of physics, let alone as a general theory of meaning. See Nelson (2009, 63–64). But more generally the positivists presented themselves as promulgating a “scientific world-picture” the rudiments of which had been established by others. See Carnap et al. (1929/1973).
- 13.
Ayer’s biographer notes that, over its first three decades in print, LTL sold three times more copies in America (~300,000 copies) than in Britain (~100,000 copies). See Rogers (1999, 217).
- 14.
Anonymous (2018). “I am part of the resistance inside the Trump administration.” New York Times, Sept. 5, 2018. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/05/opinion/trump-white-house-anonymous-resistance.html
- 15.
- 16.
https://www.politifact.com/personalities/donald-trump/, accessed 8/13/2019. Trump’s truth scores have actually worsened by about 1% overall since I wrote the first draft of this paper in the summer of 2018.
- 17.
“Post Truth” is defined as “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.” As we shall see, it is no mere coincidence that emotion is named as the alternative to fact, for this is precisely the alternative supplied by emotivism. See also Gelfert (2018) and Dahms (2021).
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- 19.
See “The post-truth world: Yes, I’d lie to you.” The Economist, Sept 10, 2016; see also Mallinder (2018). Wikipedia’s entry on “Post-truth politics” includes a useful set of references to allegations of post-truth politics made in the media. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-truth_politics> All of these were accessed on 8/13/19.
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- 21.
In a speech given on Sept. 7, 2018 at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Full transcript available at: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/elections/2018/09/07/president-barack-obamas-speech-transcript-slamming-trump/1225554002/
- 22.
David Roberts, “Donald Trump and the rise of tribal epistemology,” Vox, May 19, 2017. https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/3/22/14762030/donald-trump-tribal-epistemology
- 23.
For a nuanced discussion of relativism, including the varieties Bloom has in focus, see Baghramian and Carter (2018).
- 24.
Again, many experts on logical positivism would insist that, like the “positivism” of LTL, this was a crude oversimplification of the true positivist vision.
- 25.
In this volume, other minds and philosophy of mind are discussed in more details by Gergely Ambrus and Thomas Uebel; analyticity is taken up by Nichole Rathgeb; verification is the subject of Hans-Johann Glock; finally, Ayer’s theory of truth is the topic of László Kocsis.
- 26.
“When the terms are completely neutralized [of emotion], we may say with tranquility that all moralists are propagandists, or that all propagandists are moralists.” See Stevenson (1944, 30, 113, original emphasis).
- 27.
This fact is fundamental to what Stefan Collini has called “the paradox at the heart of Ayer’s career as an intellectual: the authority of his public role rested on his professional identity as a philosopher, but his declared philosophical position was that philosophy could have little to say on the issues that were of public interest” (Collini 2006, 398). More pointedly, Ayer’s status as a public intellectual depended on the notion that, as a member of the professoriate, he could speak with intellectual authority on moral and political matters; however, by his own positivist principles, these were matters of subjective preference relative to which his status as a member of the professoriate gave him no special authority. Thus, Ayer quite self-consciously understood his role as a public intellectual to be that of a propagandist: as a philosopher, he had no special knowledge about how to live, but only “a certain advantage in putting [his opinions] persuasively” (Ayer 1947/1990, 16–17).
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Preston, A. (2021). Ayer’s Book of Errors and the Crises of Contemporary Western Culture. 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_11
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