Ayer's Verification Principle Flashcards
What group of philosophers criticised religious language?
The logical positivists. They were concerned with the relationship between the use of language and knowledge. They regarded non-cognitive, or fact-free, statements as meaningless statements.
What did Wittgenstein suggest about language?
In his ‘Trachatus’, Wittgenstein suggested that meaningful language is connected with things we know from our senses. This idea was used to challenge religion: how can religious language link with sense experience?
Ayer quote about non-cognitive statements
‘Whereof we cannot know, we cannot speak’
VP: What does verification mean?
Verification means checking a statement to see if it is true.
VP: Ayer quote on unverifiable statements
‘A statement which cannot be conclusively verified is simply devoid of meaning.’
VP: What are the only two types of statements that verificationists seem to be meaningful?
1) Analytic propositions
2) Synthetic propositions
What is an analytic proposition?
Propositions which are true by definition, because this is required by the definition of the words used, e.g., a circle is not a square.
What is a synthetic proposition?
Propositions which are true by confirmation of the senses, e.g., I can see that the sky is blue.
What did Ayer think about religious claims?
They are non-cognitive and impossible to verify, so they are meaningless. This is not to say they are false, only that they cannot tell us anything at all.
Example of a religious statement?
‘God is loving and powerful.’
-Not analytically verifiable since God is not even confirmed to exist.
-Not synthetically verifiable because we cannot attribute the love in the world to God.
Therefore, Ayer would say it is meaningless.
Ayer quote on God
‘No sentence which describes the nature of a transcendent God can possess any literal significance.’
What gives a statement meaning?
A statement is meaningful if it corresponds to the way things are in the world; our experience.
What is a problem of verification?
How much can we really verify? For example, historical claims cannot be verified synthetically or analytically.
Historical problem of VP: Example
For example, we cannot verify if King Harold really died at the battle of Hastings. We can look at historical records, but we cannot observe the battle ourselves, or subject the hypothesis to new testing. Perhaps a lot of what we take for knowledge defies strict verification.
Ayer’s counter to problem of verification
Ayer developed the ‘Weak Verification Principle.’
Instead of checking every bit of knowledge with our senses, he suggested that we might know things by setting up sensible standards for evidence, for example eye-witness accounts and multiple sources.
