Untitled Flashcards Set

Ayer was a logical positivist who argued for the verification principle, that for language to be meaningful it must be analytic (true by definition) or empirically verifiable.

Language is empirically verifiable if we know how to find out whether it is true or false. This includes things that we can’t verify now but at least know how to verify in principle. E.g. ‘there are mountains on the far side of the moon’. In Ayer’s time they had not seen the dark side of the moon, but they knew in principle how they could verify what was there.

For Ayer, verification is ‘weak’ verification – when we have evidence that points to something probably being true or false. We can never have ‘strong’ verification, where we can absolutely prove for certain whether something is true or false. Ayer is an empiricist who accepts that knowledge is at best probabilistic.

The idea is that for words to be meaningful, they must be about something in reality, otherwise you aren’t talking about reality.

‘God’ is a metaphysical term about something beyond the empirical world. There is no way to verify it, therefore it and all religious language is meaningless.

Ayer says he’s not even an atheist. An atheist says they do not believe in God – but that is still to use the word ‘God’ as if it had meaning. So Ayer says we can’t even do that.