Blog Post: The Century-Long Strawmanning of AJ Ayer

This blog post still needs some work, but something has long bothered me about how AJ Ayer’s philosophy is often presented, and I have tried to put it into words.

——

When I was a teenager, one of my favourite books was AJ Ayer’s Language, Truth, and Logic. I was intensely interested in philosophy (and still am), but was conscious of the need to separate “good” philosophy from “bad” philosophy. I was sceptical of metaphysical wanderings about noumena that never seemed to find purchase in the phenomenal world that we all have to live in, and AJ Ayer’s book seemed to be at least a sketched answer to this problem.

I have moved on from Ayer’s thought for a variety of reasons that I won’t go into here. But I also think that Ayer may be one of the most caricatured thinkers of the 20th century. First I’ll go through the presentation of him that I often see given, and then I’ll show why I disagree with it, and think it makes a Straw-Ayer. I don’t particularly enjoy calling people out, and will not name any names. Partly this is because I think it is unhelpful, and partly because I would not blame anyone for believing this characterisation of Ayer, since by a game of telephone it has ended up almost everywhere. I’ve also now seen it so many times that to single anyone in particular out for it would be unfair.

To hear many people on the subject, Ayer believed something like this. Any meaningful statement is either verifiable, or true by definition. So take a statement like “2+2=4”. This is both true and meaningful because it is part of the definition of “2” and “+”, that 2+2 does in fact equal 4. “2+2=5” is also meaningful, but false, because it is false by definition. The statement “my desk is made of wood” is meaningful and true because I can check it by observing my desk, and seeing if it behaves as wood would under various conditions. The statement “my desk is made of marzipan” is meaningful but false, because it can be falsified.

So far, so good, but then people tend to say something like this:

“So for Ayer, most language is completely meaningless. Poetry, artistic language, and the like is totally without meaning. This restrictive definition of “meaningful” also means Ayer cannot account for the meaning of words like “Hello” or “Goodbye”. Thus, Ayer’s ideas about language were doomed from the start, and not just wrong, but obviously so”

This characterisation even made it into my Philosophy A-Level, where the following critique is made of Ayer’s view:

“Ayer’s claim that “a statement is only meaningful if it is analytic or empirically verifiable” is itself neither an analytic truth or empirically verifiable! Therefore, according to its own criteria, the verification principle is meaningless.”

The trouble is that all of this leaves out the word that Ayer uses before “meaningful” or “meaningless” in Language, Truth, and Logic. And that word is “factually”. Ayer is not talking about linguistic meaning tout court. He is talking about factual meaning. To quote him directly:

“The criterion which we use to test the genuineness of apparent statements of fact is the criterion of verifiability. We say that a sentence is factually significant to any given person, if, and only if, he knows how to verify the proposition which it purports to express – that is, if he knows what observations would lead him, under certain conditions, to accept the proposition as being true, or reject it as being false.”

This is his statement of the verification principle in chapter 1 of Language, Truth, and Logic. And it does not in any sense rule out other ideas of significance that are not concerned with facts. Likewise, this is how he discusses tautologies (statements that are true by definition like “2+2=4”):

“When we say that analytic propositions are devoid of factual content, and consequently that they say nothing, we are not suggesting that they are senseless in the way that metaphysical utterances are senseless. For, although they give us no information about any empirical situation, they do enlighten us by illustrating the way in which we use certain symbols.”

So when Ayer describes unverifiable statements as not factually significant, it is worth noting that he also thinks analytic and tautological propositions are not factually significant.

There is a broader idea of meaning that Ayer sometimes uses, called “literal significance” which appears to encompass both factual significance and the kind of significance that Ayer applies to analytic statements. This is what he denies to metaphysics.

“Our charge against the metaphysician is not that he attempts to employ the understanding in a field where it cannot profitably venture, but that he produces sentences which fail to conform to the conditions under which alone a sentence can be literally significant.”

But what is that term “senseless” that Ayer uses? Is that what people refer to when they say Ayer thought all meaning is either analytic or verifiable? Does Ayer think that poetry and the like is “senseless” or “nonsense”. Well, in one sense, yes. But it is far more complicated than that. For instance, here he is talking about fiction directly:

“The view that the metaphysician is to be reckoned among the poets appears to rest on the assumption that both talk nonsense. But this assumption is false... one is primarily concerned with the expression of true propositions, the other with the creation of a work of art…a work of art is not necessarily the worse for the fact that all the propositions comprising it are literally false. But to say that many literary works are largely composed of falsehoods, is not to say that they are composed of pseudo-propositions. It is, in fact, very rare for a literary artist to produce sentences which have no literal meaning. And where this does occur, the sentences are carefully chosen for their rhythm and balance. If the author writes nonsense, it is because he considers it most suitable for bringing about the effects for which his writing is designed.”

So, Ayer takes no issue with poets using pseudo-propositions because their use of language is not aiming at truth in the way a scientist or metaphysician does. Ayer criticises metaphysicians because they are trying to produce literally significant propositions, and failing. He does not think the poet’s use of unverifiable language is “meaningless” in our ordinary sense of the word, since he says it brings about emotional effects. But he does not think it is literally significant, in that it produces no truth-apt propositions. Ayer is not trying to construct a grand theory of linguistic meaning. He is trying to separate the wheat from the chaff when it comes to language that is aimed at discovering truths.

Why does this matter? Well, partly because it got under my skin. But also because one of the most popular critiques of Ayer’s philosophy is much weaker once we get at what Ayer is actually trying to argue. Take that critique from the A-level philosophy course:

“Ayer’s claim that “a statement is only meaningful if it is analytic or empirically verifiable” is itself neither an analytic truth or empirically verifiable! Therefore, according to its own criteria, the verification principle is meaningless.”

Since this is on the A-level syllabus for philosophy in the UK, I have seen this critique given even by graduate students in philosophy. But, importantly, it rests on the misapprehension that Ayer is talking about all meaning, rather than just literally significant meaning.

I see no reason why Ayer cannot concede that the verification principle is not literally significant, and yet put it forward as a pragmatic regulative principle for philosophical inquiry. Indeed, if we look at the text, this is often what he does do. The very first line of chapter 1 establishes the prescriptive, rather than descriptive, nature of Ayer’s project:

“​​The traditional disputes of philosophers are, for the most part, as unwarranted as they are unfruitful. The surest way to end them is to establish beyond question what should be the purpose and method of a philosophical inquiry.”

This already suggests that Ayer is not talking about either an analytic truth or a matter of verification, but is making a pragmatic argument about what philosophy ought to concern itself with.

“The fruitlessness of attempting to transcend the limits of possible sense-experience will be deduced, not from a psychological hypothesis concerning the actual constitution of the human mind, but from the rule which determines the literal significance of language. Our charge against the metaphysician is not that he attempts to employ the understanding in a field where it cannot profitably venture, but that he produces sentences which fail to conform to the conditions under which alone a sentence can be literally significant. Nor are we ourselves obliged to talk nonsense in order to show that all sentences of a certain type are necessarily devoid of literal significance. We need only formulate the criterion which enables us to test whether a sentence expresses a genuine proposition about a matter of fact, and then point out that the sentences under consideration fail to satisfy it.”

Firstly, Ayer clarifies that metaphysics is undesirable because it is “fruitless”, and then suggests that the verification principle itself is put forward as an analytic argument (hence the use of the phrase “necessarily devoid of literal significance”). Then, Ayer defines “literal significance” along the lines of his verifiability criterion, and thus the actual proposition that “metaphysical statements are not literally significant” is a tautology within his philosophy.

But if tautologies are true by definition, then why should we care about Ayer’s criterion? Has he not just defined himself into correctness? Well, in one sense, yes, but in a broader sense, no. Ayer has crafted his definition of “literally significant” along the lines of what makes for fruitful inquiry. That is, while the actual propositions about literal significance in Language, Truth, and Logic, are tautological, they get their “bite” from their pragmatic utility.

This is a perfectly familiar type of argumentation often used in logic or mathematics. For example, take the idea of a “prime number”. All statements about prime numbers within mathematics are tautologies, but the motivation behind designating a group of numbers as “prime numbers” is pragmatic. These are the numbers into which all other numbers uniquely decompose. Similarly, Ayer’s of “literally significant” is justified by a pragmatic, empirical claim about what kinds of philosophical propositions are “fruitful” and which are “fruitless”. In turn, “fruitfulness” is cashed out in terms of whether you can make rational progress towards establishing the truth of the proposition.

But with all of this laid out, the classic critique of the verification principle is totally idle. The particular statements Ayer makes about metaphysics, ethics etc., as well as the verification principle itself, are tautological. The definitions are then pragmatically justified on the basis that it is a fruitful, pragmatic way of viewing philosophy.

None of this means that Ayer’s version of verificationism is philosophically salvageable. But we ought to critique it on its own terms, rather than attacking a straw version of it. And most tragically of all, by putting forward this caricatured version of Ayer, we do a disservice to the man himself and his work.