- Length
- 176 pagesPenguin, from the second edition of 1946
- Reading
- OpenWritten for a general reader and readable without preparation
- Availability
- Many editionsIn print in several competing editions
Language, Truth and Logic
A hundred and seventy pages by a twenty-five-year-old announcing the end of metaphysics, written with a confidence that made it the most read philosophy book in Britain for a generation. Its author spent the rest of his life conceding that the arguments do not work.
- Date
- 1936
- Author
- A. J. Ayer
- Region
- Oxford and Vienna
- Language
- English
Where it stands in the argument
- Position
- Reply — Answers a named earlier work
- Form
- Treatise
- Method
- Analytic — Clarification of language and logical form
- Transmission
- Continuous — Copied and read without a break in its own language
- Standing
- Refuted — Its central claim is generally held to have failed
- Years back to what it answers
- 33 years
The most widely read work of logical positivism in English, and the one whose author said late in life that nearly all of it was wrong.
What the book says
A short, fast and deliberately provocative book announcing that most of philosophy is literally without meaning. The instrument is the verification principle: a statement is meaningful only if it is either analytic - true by the meanings of its terms, like a statement of logic or mathematics, and therefore empty of factual content - or empirically verifiable, in the sense that some possible observation would count for or against it. Everything else is not false but nonsensical. Applied without mercy, the principle disposes of metaphysics entirely: claims about a transcendent reality, about the absolute, about substance behind appearances, all fail. Theology goes too, and Ayer is careful to say that this makes him neither an atheist nor an agnostic, since both positions treat the claim that God exists as one that could be true. Ethics is handled by the chapter that made the book notorious: moral statements express feelings and seek to arouse them in others, so saying that stealing is wrong adds no factual content to saying that someone stole, only a tone of disapproval. The last chapters treat the self, other minds and the proper business of philosophy, which is analysis.
What it argues
That the meaningfulness of a statement is settled by how it could be established, and that this criterion clears the ground of everything philosophy had traditionally claimed. Analytic statements are certain because they say nothing about the world; empirical statements say something and are always provisional; and there is no third category, so any sentence purporting to state a fact beyond possible experience is not making a false claim but no claim. The consequences are pursued without softening. Philosophy is not a source of speculative truth but an activity of analysis, clarifying the logic of the language used elsewhere. The self is a logical construction out of sense-experiences. And moral and aesthetic judgements, having no verification conditions, are expressions of feeling rather than descriptions.
What it answered
Principia Ethica 1903G. E. Moore
Moore on the indefinability of good, the British idealists whom Oxford still taught, and the whole metaphysical tradition. Ayer's real service was as a translator: the Vienna Circle wrote in German, in technical detail, in journals nobody outside read, and he put the programme into short, aggressive English that an undergraduate could follow. That is why the book was so influential and why its critics complain that it made the position easier to attack than the originals were.
What answered it
Everyone, including Ayer. The verification principle proved impossible to formulate: every version either excluded ordinary scientific laws, which no finite set of observations verifies, or admitted any sentence whatever through a logical loophole. Ayer revised it in the 1946 introduction and the revision was refuted too. The deeper problem was self-application: the principle is neither analytic nor empirically verifiable, so by its own test it is meaningless. Emotivism was pressed and refined by Stevenson and Hare and then largely abandoned. Asked in a television interview late in life what he now saw as the book's main defect, Ayer answered that nearly all of it was false.
How it argues
By stating a criterion and applying it hard, with speed and no hedging. The prose is clear, brisk and slightly contemptuous, and the arguments are compressed to the point where objections that had been dealt with carefully in Vienna are settled here in a paragraph. This is the source of both its reach and its vulnerability: a reader can follow every step, which means a reader can also see exactly where each step is doubtful.
The moment
Ayer went to Vienna in 1932 on his tutor's advice, sat in on Schlick's circle, and came back to Oxford to write the book in his early twenties. It arrived into a British philosophy still dominated by idealism and was received as an act of demolition. His later career - professorships at London and Oxford, a public presence on radio and television - made him the best-known philosopher in Britain, and the book stayed in print continuously.
How it travelled
Into the general educated culture. It was the book through which most English speakers encountered logical positivism, was read far outside philosophy, and shaped a widely held popular picture of what a meaningful statement is - one that persists in public argument long after professionals abandoned it. Within philosophy its influence was intense and short: by the 1950s the programme was in retreat before Quine, the later Wittgenstein and ordinary-language philosophy.
The strongest objection
That the verification principle cannot pass its own test. It is not true by definition, since its denial is not a contradiction; and no observation could establish or refute it, since it is a claim about what makes claims meaningful. So by its own account it is neither analytic nor empirical, and therefore meaningless. Ayer's reply, offered in the second edition, is that the principle is a definition or a proposal about how to use the word meaningful rather than a statement of fact - which saves it from self-refutation and costs it all its force, since a proposal can simply be declined. Every subsequent attempt to formulate the criterion precisely has failed for technical reasons independent of this, which is the second half of the objection.
Why read it
Because it is short, exhilarating and completely lucid, and because there is no better way to understand what logical positivism claimed or why it was so attractive. Read the 1946 introduction alongside the text; watching a philosopher retreat from his own book in real time is instructive in itself.
- First printed
- 1936
- First in English
- 1936
- Digitised
- No
The 1946 introduction retreats on several central points, including the formulation of the verification principle itself, which Ayer had already had to revise once because the first version admitted every sentence whatever.
Written in English. In copyright.
Where it stands
Refuted, and this section says so plainly - it is one of very few entries given that standing. The book is read now as a historical document, as an unusually clear statement of a position worth understanding, and as a case study in how a criterion can be at once enormously productive and unformulable.
On quoting this book
In copyright. Nothing is quoted.
Contested
Whether Ayer's version is a fair representation of the Vienna Circle or a simplification that made the position more vulnerable is argued, and Carnap's own formulations are considerably more careful. Whether any version of the verification principle can be stated is a technical question with a long negative literature. Whether emotivism survives in the more sophisticated expressivist forms developed since the 1980s, or whether those are a different theory, is disputed. And Ayer's late remark that nearly all of it was false is often quoted without the rest of his answer, in which he said the book had asked the right questions.