VP Evaluation Flashcards
What is the first strength of Ayer’s VP?
P: The VP is straightforward in what it demands.
E: Meaningful statements are either true by definition (tautologies), or verifiable by sense experience.
E: It brackets out all questions of emotion, focusing only on the facts.
What is a counter to the first strength of the VP?
P: The VP may be straightforward, but this doesn’t mean it is right. By focusing only on facts, the VP effectively rules out a lot of language as meaningless.
E: For example moral statements, aesthetic statements, historical statements and religious statements.
E: But few people would dismiss these statements as meaningless. The VP dismisses anything that involves the human engagement in the world.
L: Human engagement is at least as important as matters of verifiable fact.
What is the VP’s second strength?
P: The VP is in line with science and the scientific method because it demands that we observe the world empirically.
Counter to VP’s second strength
There are two problems with saying that the VP is in line with science:
1) Much of science deals with entities that cannot be directly observed, such as quarks, so their existence could not be verified with the VP.
2) Science does not work exclusively through verification. According to Karl Popper, it works through falsification.
What is the VP’s third strength?
The VP demands a sense of reality in what we say about the world.
The VP points out a major problem with religious language- that people make religious statements without trying to justify them at all. There surely needs to be some justification in what we say about the world,
Ayer quote to support strength three?
‘The Absolute enters into, but is itself incapable of, evolution and progress.’ - F.H. Bradley.
Ayer comments that Bradley has made an utterance ‘which has no literal significance even for himself.’
Counter to VP third strength
Religion does make a very clear proposition about God and the universe.
For example, Aquinas’ argument from contingency explains God as the first cause. This is a reasonable hypothesis based on our own observations and logic, that infinite regress is logically impossible.
Weakness: Swinburne’s toy box
Swinburne argues that there are statements which no-one knows how to verify but are still meaningless.
For example, toys that come out of the cupboard when no one is around and dance, and then return without a trace.
No observation could ever establish its truth, but it is not meaningful.
