Michael Lacewing

The project of logical positivism

VERIFICATION AND METAPHYSICS
In the 1930s, a school of philosophy arose called logical positivism. Like much
philosophy, it was concerned with the foundations and possibility of knowledge, but
approached the subject through the limitations of meaning. Much impressed by the
logical analysis of language developed by Russell and the early Wittgenstein, and by the
achievements of science, logical positivists developed a criterion for meaningful
statements, called the principle of verification, that enabled them to reject as nonsense
many traditional philosophical debates. In response to what they saw as the excesses of
Hegelian idealism and the schools of thought it had spawned, they wanted to return
philosophy once more to being the underlabourer of the sciences (Locke).
In his book Language, Truth and Logic, A J Ayer defends this view. The principle of
verification states that a statement only has meaning if it is either analytic or empirically
verifiable. An analytic statement is true (or false) just in virtue of the meanings of the
words. For instance, a bachelor is an unmarried man is analytically true, while a square
has three sides is analytically false. A statement is empirically verifiable if empirical
evidence would go towards establishing that the statement is true or false. For example,
if I say the moon is made of green cheese, we can check this by scientific investigation.
If I say the universe has 600 trillion planets, we cant check this by scientific
investigation in practice, but we can do so in principle. We know how to show whether it
is true or false, so it is verifiable even though we cant actually verify it.
Why think these are the only two possibilities for meaning? Metaphysicians, after all, will
reject the bald statement that metaphysics must be founded on the experience of the
senses. Ayer accepts this. Given that we should accept outright that empirical hypotheses
are meaningful, the debate is, then, over the a priori. As the a priori/a posteriori
distinction is exhaustive (theres no third alternative), he seeks to show that all a priori
truths are in fact analytic. And this argument is completed by showing that the purported
statements of metaphysics, if not analytic, are literally meaningless.
Strengths of verification
Some logical positivists originally wanted to say that verification must be conclusive, that
a statement must be possible to prove true or false. However, this is far too strong, as
Ayer argues; empirical hypotheses are only ever more or less probable, never completely
certain. So he weakened the claim to verification requires that empirical evidence can
raise or reduce the probability that a statement is true.
All statements about what is unobservable, therefore, must be translatable into
statements that can be observed in order to be meaningful. This applies as much in
science as anywhere. Claims about electrons, for instance, are translatable into what is
observable in laboratory conditions. This, Ayer goes on to argue, must in fact be an
analytic truth, i.e. this is what statements about electrons mean, if they are to mean
anything at all. By contrast, metaphysical claims, such as claims about the Absolute or

God or values, cannot be translated into claims about anything observable, and so are, in
fact, meaningless (or more accurately literally meaningless they may have other
functions).
Statements about the past provide an interesting case. They are, now, impossible to
prove; should they be taken to mean that there is something we can now experience that
is relevant to their truth? This would be odd, since the core of the claim is that
something was the case, not that it is now. So Ayer argues that claims about the past are
claims that certain observations would have been possible or occurred under certain
conditions. This claim as to what someone would or could experience isnt unusual: I
make such a claim when I say what the back of my head looks like when no one is
standing behind me.
Philosophy, then, doesnt give us knowledge of a reality that transcends the investigations
of science or is closed to commonsense. It is not a source of speculative truth. The
function of philosophy is, instead, to bring to light the presuppositions of science and
our everyday claims; in particular, to show what criteria are used to determine the truth
of these claims. It does not, however, justify or establish scientific or common-sense
beliefs that requires empirical enquiry (but, pace Descartes, Plato, and indeed Hume,
nothing more).
RULING THINGS OUT
Ethics
Amongst the claims ruled out as meaningless by the principle of verification are
statements about right and wrong. If I say murder is wrong, this is not analytic, nor can
any empirical investigation show this. We can show that murder causes grief and pain, or
that it is often done out of anger. But we cannot demonstrate, in the same way, that it is
wrong. Moral judgements are neither true nor false, because they do not actually state
anything.
If ethical statements dont state truths, and are therefore literally meaningless, what do
they do? Ayer argued that ethical judgements express feelings:
If I say to someone, You acted wrongly in stealing that moneyI am simply
evincing my moral disapproval of it. It is as if I had said, You stole that money, in
a peculiar tone of horror. (p. 142)

Moral judgements express our feelings of approval or disapproval. Feelings are not
cognitions of value, and value does not exist independently of our feelings.
One of the most powerful objections to emotivism, as this theory became known, is that
it seems to entail an unsatisfactory view of ethical discussion. If I say abortion is wrong
and you say abortion is right, I am just expressing my disapproval of it and you are
expressing your approval. Im just saying Boo! to abortion and youre saying Hurrah!
for abortion. This is just like cheering for our own team there is no discussion, no
reasoning, going on at all. Even worse, emotivism claims that we are trying to influence
other peoples feelings and actions. But trying to influence people without reasoning is
just a form of manipulation.

Ayer thought this objection partly false, partly true. It is false because emotivists claim
that there is a lot more to ethical discussion the facts. When arguing over animal rights,
say, we are constantly drawing facts to each others attention. I point out how much
animals suffer in factory farms. You point out how much more sophisticated human
beings are than animals. And so on. In fact, says Ayer, all the discussion is about the
facts. If we both agree on the facts, but still disagree morally, there is no more discussion
that can take place. And this is why the objection is true but not an objection. When all
the facts are in, there is nothing left to discuss.
Emotivists since Ayer have added another layer. The attitudes and feelings we express in
our moral judgements dont occur in isolation. If I disapprove of an action, practically
speaking, I must also have similar feelings about similar actions, or my feelings will not
provide consistent guidance about how to live. Moral disagreement, then, can be about
the relations between different feelings that we have. For example, deciding whether
abortion is right or wrong is complicated because there are many feelings involved,
sympathy towards the mother, sympathy towards the foetus, feelings about human life,
death, and parenthood. It is difficult to work out how these feelings can all be acted
upon, and that is why people disagree.
But we may still object that a sense of peoples rationality in weighing up which feelings or
attitudes to give up, which to keep, is still missing. We have no sense of one set of
attitudes being part of a better life than any other. Ayer will respond that the idea of one
life being better than another is itself an expression of feeling; hence we may still talk
this way. Nothing that was ever available in the first place has been lost.
Religion
God exists, and so all other talk of God, also falls foul of the verification principle,
claims Ayer. Despite the best attempts of the ontological argument, we cannot prove
God exists from a priori premises using deduction alone. So God exists is not
analytically true. Therefore, to be meaningful, God exists must be empirically verifiable.
Ayer argues it is not. If a statement is an empirical hypothesis, it predicts our experience
will be different depending on whether it is true or false. But this isnt true of God
exists. It rules nothing empirical in and it rules nothing out. So it is meaningless.
We can object that many people do think that God exists has empirical content. For
example, the teleological argument argues that the design of the universe is evidence for
the existence of God. And on the other hand, the problem of evil takes the existence and
extent of suffering to be evidence against the existence of God. Ayer doesnt explicitly
discuss these responses, but the spirit of his response is perhaps captured by Anthony
Flew, who argues that God exists is only an empirical hypothesis if we can think of
experiences that could lead to belief or disbelief in God; most peoples belief in God
and so their assertion that God exists isnt open to this kind of disconfirmation (the
religious believers response to the problem of evil is not normally to accept that it
decreases the probability that God exists, but rather that it increases the probability that
we dont understand Gods plans).
John Hick argues that even if we cant verify the existence of God in this life, that
doesnt mean religious language is meaningless. He develops the idea of eschatological
verification, whereby experiences of God in the afterlife would establish the truth of the
existence of God. In arguing that talk of God is meaningless, Ayer overlooked possible
experiences of life after death. Ayer might respond that the only way that talk of life after

death makes sense is if there are experiences we can relate it to now. If so, Hick could
reply that invoking the counterfactual what we would experience after our death, if
anything is as legitimate as invoking counterfactuals about the past.
Some philosophers argue that religious language attempts to capture something of
religious experience, although it is inexpressible in literal terms. Ayer responds that
whatever religious experiences reveal, they cannot be said to reveal any facts. Facts are
the content of statements that purport to be intelligible and can be expressed literally. If
talk of God is non-empirical, it is literally unintelligible, hence meaningless.
REJECTING THE VERIFICATION PRINCIPLE
The verification principle has since been rejected by philosophers as an inadequate
account of what it is for a statement to have meaning. A first famous objection is that it
renders universal statements, such as All swans are white meaningless because
although you could prove this false, no experience will prove it true (there might always
be a swan out there somewhere which isnt white).
This, though, is dealt with by Ayers weakening of verification to only require experience
to support or reduce the probability of a claim. And, in his discussion of induction, he
argues that it is rational to believe, not as a certainty, but as a probability that grows with
the range of experience we have, that what we havent experienced will conform to what
we have. It is irrational to expect a proof.
The main difficulty with logical positivism is that according to the principle of
verification, the principle of verification itself is meaningless. The claim that a statement
only has meaning if it is analytic or can be verified empirically is not analytic and cannot
be verified empirically. But if the principle of verification is meaningless, then what it
claims cannot be true. So it does not give us any reason to believe that the claims of
ethics are meaningless.
Ayer claims, in his Introduction to the second edition, that the principle is intended as a
definition, not an empirical hypothesis about meaning, though not an arbitrary one. In
other words, it is intended to reflect upon and clarify our understanding of meaningful
uses of words. Since we do use the term meaningful in a variety of ways, he wishes only
to focus on literal meaning. Ayer accepts that the verification principle isnt obviously
an accurate criterion of literal meaning, but that is why he provides arguments in
specific cases ethics, religion, a priori knowledge which support it. But to this, any
philosopher may respond by rejecting both his specific arguments and the verification
principle wholesale. It would seem, then, that the verification principle is only as certain
as the arguments that are intended to exemplify the consequences of its application. If
we do not find those convincing, the principle provides no independent support.
However, verificationism opens up a question: are statements about God and values
meaningful, and if so, how? It seems clear that not all language consists of making
statements about how the world is. Are religious and ethical language like statements of
science, or do they serve some other human purpose? One problem with thinking that
they make statements about the world is that these statements refer to things (God,
values) that we cannot see or experience via the senses. Should we think that moral and
mystical intuition is a type of experience of a supernatural or metaphysical world? Or
are they not experiences of the world at all? The debate about verification becomes a

debate about naturalism, and how human beings and their capacities for knowledge fit
into the scientific image of the world.