Language, Truth, and Logic by Alfred Jules Ayer Explore the Boundaries of Meaning and Truth in Language
What's it about?
Language, Truth, and Logic (1936) introduced the ideas of logical positivism to the UK and the English speaking world. It argues for principles of verification as a foundation for meaning, and logic for the expression of meaningful statements about the world.
In the early decades of the twentieth century, a small circle of science-trained philosophers gathered in Vienna under the unofficial chairmanship of physicist Moritz Schlick. They discussed the possibility of philosophy as a tool to express verifiable truth in language, beyond the ethical and metaphysical questions of the past. Their aim was to find truth in the age of science, and craft philosophy that was grounded in verifiable observations, not an idealized world beyond this one.
In November of 1932, A. J. Ayer, a young British philosopher, spent a year with this revolutionary circle and absorbed their radical tenets. Embracing logic as the language of science, and truth as grounded in observable facts, the young philosopher found nonsense everywhere in language. On his return to England he wrote Language, Truth, and Logic, a concise and sometimes brutal book that tests the foundations of this nonsense and, finding those foundations wanting, attempts to redefine knowledge for the modern age.
This lesson explores these ideas, showing their profound impact on contemporary philosophy. Though they have long since been challenged – and often refuted – their legacy remains powerful in contemporary thought, scientific reasoning, and modern culture.
Since the time of the ancient Greeks, philosophy in Western cultures has long been occupied with explaining the universe – why things are the way they are, despite the seeming lack of rhyme or reason. From Aristotle to Kant and beyond, this world was often explained by referencing another, be it an unseen realm of ideal forms, or a heavenly realm where truth and justice always reign.
But by the end of the nineteenth century, advances in science and technology were probing ever deeper into the mysteries of the universe. Telescopes and microscopes had made previously unseen worlds visible, and quantum physics probed the world of hidden forces shaping everything from photons to galaxies. More and more, the terms used to explain the world tended to be scientific, rather than philosophical or religious. The very fabric of traditional philosophy began to unravel.
This is when the logical positivists entered the scene. This school of philosophy could trace its roots back to the work of eighteenth-century philosopher-scientist David Hume, with influential late nineteenth-century thinkers like physicist and philosopher Ernst Mach also adding paving stones to the path leading up to the analytic turn in contemporary philosophy.
In many ways, their premise was extremely simple: there is no world beyond this one, and philosophy’s aim is to explain it. Since explaining the world was no longer the job of religion or metaphysics, but science, philosophy had to move with the times. But before setting aside centuries-long traditions of ethical and metaphysical inquiry and picking up the project of determining the meaning of life and how to live it, philosophers first had to look at the ways in which truth is expressed.
While Aristotle had explored logic as a possible vehicle for philosophical statements, the logical positivists thought logic was an invaluable tool for exploring the verifiable truth of statements, hence the word’s inclusion in their name.
But using logic to prove statements about the world to be either true (and thus verifiable through observation) or false (and thus unverifiable) cuts out entire spheres once considered philosophical. Certainly, logical positivists reject theology and religion outright, as these contradict the assertion that the world we see around us and experience through our senses is the only one that exists.
Further, logical positivism excludes ethics and morals from philosophical consideration. In fact, it reveals that all moral speech, from “violence is wrong” to “love is the answer” are essentially just statements of personal opinion, no more meaningful than a preference for wearing sweatpants instead of jeans.
The banishment of religion, ethics, and metaphysics from the realm of philosophy was met with both jubilant praise and resounding condemnation. To find out why, the next lesson dives into the analysis of language, and the search for truth that can be verified through observation, just like science.
With such a powerful emphasis on language in this new analytic philosophy, it is important to remember that language was almost taken for granted by earlier philosophers. In a BBC interview in the 1970s, Ayer himself spoke of earlier philosophers thinking of language as almost transparent – a neutral form of expression.
For logical positivism, nothing could be further from the truth. Humans can only understand the world through their senses, through observation and verification of phenomena. But what we can think, and how we think it, is determined entirely by language – and language is far from neutral.
So the first order of business was to investigate what can be said. In other words, what kinds of statements can be made and verified to be true, and what kinds of statements cannot be verified. For instance, “it’s raining outside!” is an easily verifiable statement – everyone can go outside and verify this as a fact.
Other statements, like “all bachelors are unmarried men,” don’t need verification, because the statement itself contains a definition of the word bachelor. Thus it is self-referential and defines the condition of being a bachelor. These types of statements are particularly useful in science and mathematics to explain the meaning of terms within a given context.
Ayer would call sentences like “all bachelors are unmarried men” analytic statements, because the definition of the term is contained within the statement itself. He’d call exclamations like “it's raining outside!” synthetic statements – or those observations about the world that can be verified externally by the senses.
But then we arrive at what Ayer would call meaningless statements – things like, “the universe is love” or “time is an illusion.” Since they refer to ideas and concepts beyond the physical world, these sentences cannot be verified by observation or experiment. Therefore, they are meaningless.
And it gets even more complicated in the category of emotional statements. For Ayer and the other logical positivists, these are statements like “kindness is good” or “violence is wrong,” which aren’t claiming to say anything that can be verified about the world. Any moral speech, like “love thy neighbor,” falls into the realm of emotion, not truth.
You might remember when Star Trek’s Mr. Spock quoted the utilitarian belief that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few before nobly sacrificing himself. This act may have seemed to reflect his logical nature. But in logical positivism this is a purely emotional statement, with no verifiable meaning at all.
Then there are the tautologies, or statements that are self-referential, and true by their logical form alone. Like “all circles are round” or “it is what it is.” These somewhat overlap with analytic statements, because tautologies can be verified by logical analysis alone. But they don’t say anything new about the world.
The classification of statements from the previous chapter hinged quite a bit on whether or not a statement was either self-referential or self-defining, like a tautology or an analytic statement, or unverifiable, like emotional or meaningless statements. But does that mean everything stated as fact needs external corroboration?
This is where Ayer offers something else: performative statements. For instance, “I now pronounce you man and wife” is a performative statement. It accomplishes something just by being uttered. It doesn’t verify something about the world; it changes something. Same with a statement like, “I promise to buy you dinner,” because within the statement is an outcome that can be verified or not. If you got dinner, the statement was true. If you never did, then the statement was untrue. But the promise itself links it to a real-world outcome.
And there are other emotional utterances, too. These are things saying, “Ugh! Mondays!” Or, “Oh no! My report is late!” These utterances have meaning, and, though non-verbal, like a sigh or an exclamation, they make the emotional content clear: someone hates Mondays or someone’s report is late. These don’t need external verification, because they simply express emotional content that cannot be verified externally, as it only exists internally.
So while logical positivism is concerned with truth, there is recognition of emotions, opinions, or preferences in statements. These do not make claims about the world, and thus cannot be verified. But that doesn’t make them meaningless – it just limits the meaning to a particular person. However, this means that they have no place in the philosophy of logical positivism, which is meant to describe the external world.
It is important to note that when these ideas were first published, they met with very little response from the philosophical world. It wasn’t until the second printing, in 1946, that the ideas took hold across the UK and gained notoriety in philosophical circles. But by then there were already considerable challenges brewing.
Perhaps the most resounding critique came from philosopher Willard Quine, who challenged the idea that analytic or synthetic statements were different at all, because analysis itself isn’t perfect. Like poetry, even analytic statements can be changed through the use of metaphor or synonyms. In other words, language is tricky despite the desire of logical positivists to give statements a fixed meaning.
But perhaps the most devastating critique wasn’t really a critique at all. In 1921, Ludwig Wittgenstein, an Austrian philosopher, had published a short work called the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, which, along with the writings of his teacher Bertrand Russell, had greatly influenced the logical positivist. Later, in the 1950s, Wittgenstein refuted some of his own foundational premises in a work called Philosophical Investigations. This dealt a blow to logical positivism.
While Tractatus had pursued the foundations of truth in language and inspired analytic philosophy itself, Philosophical Investigations found that there was no fixed truth undergirding language. Language grows, changes, and morphs with use through context. In other words, language isn’t a formal system – it’s a game.
At the heart of Ayer’s philosophical project was a desire to establish a foundation for rational discourse. In order to do this, he classified statements according to their verifiability. He created a hierarchy of verification principles, which helped him determine how firmly rooted in empirical observation any statement might be.
For instance, the strong verification principle refers to statements that can be verified through direct observation. This might be something as simple as “it is sunny outside.” Such a statement can be verified by anyone looking out of the window. Even someone without sight could verify such a statement by stepping outside and feeling the sun on their skin.
Strong verification is essential to science, and thus a foundation for this philosophy. It includes statements like “all triangles have three sides,” which is a tautology, or self-referential statement. It also includes mathematical statements like “two plus two equals four,” or “the length of this shelf is thirty centimeters.”
Ayer later included a modified weak verification principle, which opens the door for unverified, but potentially verifiable, statements. This is critical for statements about historical facts, or things that haven’t yet been conclusively verified but may be verified in the future.
For instance, claiming that Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon in 46 BCE might not be verified, but archeologists or historians may verify it in the future. Claiming that climate change is causing the weather to become more extreme may not yet be verified conclusively, but a preponderance of evidence shows it may be one day soon.
Probabilistic statements, which make claims about the future based on past observations, can’t be verified by their very nature – but they’re essential in scientific discourse. Such statements include hypotheses, which make predictions about the universe and then set out to verify or falsify them.
This weak verification principle was necessary because strong verification just isn’t always possible in the real world. And philosophy, like science, can’t deal in absolutes. Even the simple observation, “it is sunny outside,” may be a hallucination. And statements like “this shelf is 30 centimeters long” depend on accurate measuring tools to be true.
In other words, the approach of logical positivists, while grounded in the observable world, left little space for the shades of gray found everywhere in science and in life. But through their efforts, they shone a light onto language itself as a vehicle for philosophy, and opened up conversations about language as an active force in shaping what we think, and what we can think. These conversations continue to this day.
Though the verification principles attempted to provide a neutral, transparent language for philosophical inquiry in logic, the results were met with considered backlash. Quine’s refutation of empiricism, and Wittgenstein’s embrace of language play notwithstanding, other thinkers were quick to point out that things weren’t quite as black and white as Ayer’s logical approach might indicate.
Philosopher of science Karl Popper, for instance, pointed out that verification wasn’t really the most important thing in science anyway. Falsifying a claim was far more important. Any universal claim could be easily falsified with just one direct instance that contradicts it. In other words, to get closer to the truth, proving something wrong is much more important than verifying it.
This became known as Popper’s falsification theory, and it made clear that science makes progress not by proving hypotheses but by disproving them. This makes verification of anything weak and conditional, despite Ayer’s category of strong verification based on empirical evidence.
And pioneering mathematician Kurt Gödel published work five years before Ayer’s that essentially refuted the idea that logic could ever be complete in finding a set of principles that governed everything. Known collectively as Gödel’s incompleteness theorems, they set out to prove the limitations of logic itself. They claimed that any formal system, like logic, would always be incomplete, because there would always be things in the world that could be neither verified or falsified.
These philosophical and mathematical refutations were echoed by ethical and moral philosophers, who had been effectively excised from philosophy in Ayer’s work. Many, including ethicist Philippa Foot, argued that while ethics and morals couldn’t be verified or falsified under any circumstances, that didn’t make them meaningless.
Ultimately, the legacy of logical positivism is the interdisciplinary conversation it opened up about meaning and truth, and how we express those in language. And as Gödel’s theorems predicted, it’s likely that this conversation will never be complete.
The main takeaway of this lesson to Language, Truth, and Logic by A. J. Ayer is this:
Logical positivism aimed to ground philosophy in verifiable, scientific truth. It classified statements into analytic, or self-defining; synthetic, or empirically verifiable; and meaningless, or unverifiable. It relegated ethical and metaphysical claims to the realm of emotion rather than fact. The principle of verification, both in strong and weak forms, became central to determining meaningful statements. While influential, these ideas faced significant challenges, particularly in their treatment of ethics and the nature of language itself. Logical positivism's legacy persists in emphasizing clarity, empirical verification, and the analysis of language in philosophical and scientific discourse.
Okay, that’s it for this lesson. We hope you enjoyed it. If you can, please take the time to leave us a rating – we always appreciate your feedback. See you in the next lesson.
Language, Truth, and Logic (1936) introduced the ideas of logical positivism to the UK and the English speaking world. It argues for principles of verification as a foundation for meaning, and logic for the expression of meaningful statements about the world.
In the early decades of the twentieth century, a small circle of science-trained philosophers gathered in Vienna under the unofficial chairmanship of physicist Moritz Schlick. They discussed the possibility of philosophy as a tool to express verifiable truth in language, beyond the ethical and metaphysical questions of the past. Their aim was to find truth in the age of science, and craft philosophy that was grounded in verifiable observations, not an idealized world beyond this one.
In November of 1932, A. J. Ayer, a young British philosopher, spent a year with this revolutionary circle and absorbed their radical tenets. Embracing logic as the language of science, and truth as grounded in observable facts, the young philosopher found nonsense everywhere in language. On his return to England he wrote Language, Truth, and Logic, a concise and sometimes brutal book that tests the foundations of this nonsense and, finding those foundations wanting, attempts to redefine knowledge for the modern age.
This lesson explores these ideas, showing their profound impact on contemporary philosophy. Though they have long since been challenged – and often refuted – their legacy remains powerful in contemporary thought, scientific reasoning, and modern culture.
Since the time of the ancient Greeks, philosophy in Western cultures has long been occupied with explaining the universe – why things are the way they are, despite the seeming lack of rhyme or reason. From Aristotle to Kant and beyond, this world was often explained by referencing another, be it an unseen realm of ideal forms, or a heavenly realm where truth and justice always reign.
But by the end of the nineteenth century, advances in science and technology were probing ever deeper into the mysteries of the universe. Telescopes and microscopes had made previously unseen worlds visible, and quantum physics probed the world of hidden forces shaping everything from photons to galaxies. More and more, the terms used to explain the world tended to be scientific, rather than philosophical or religious. The very fabric of traditional philosophy began to unravel.
This is when the logical positivists entered the scene. This school of philosophy could trace its roots back to the work of eighteenth-century philosopher-scientist David Hume, with influential late nineteenth-century thinkers like physicist and philosopher Ernst Mach also adding paving stones to the path leading up to the analytic turn in contemporary philosophy.
In many ways, their premise was extremely simple: there is no world beyond this one, and philosophy’s aim is to explain it. Since explaining the world was no longer the job of religion or metaphysics, but science, philosophy had to move with the times. But before setting aside centuries-long traditions of ethical and metaphysical inquiry and picking up the project of determining the meaning of life and how to live it, philosophers first had to look at the ways in which truth is expressed.
While Aristotle had explored logic as a possible vehicle for philosophical statements, the logical positivists thought logic was an invaluable tool for exploring the verifiable truth of statements, hence the word’s inclusion in their name.
But using logic to prove statements about the world to be either true (and thus verifiable through observation) or false (and thus unverifiable) cuts out entire spheres once considered philosophical. Certainly, logical positivists reject theology and religion outright, as these contradict the assertion that the world we see around us and experience through our senses is the only one that exists.
Further, logical positivism excludes ethics and morals from philosophical consideration. In fact, it reveals that all moral speech, from “violence is wrong” to “love is the answer” are essentially just statements of personal opinion, no more meaningful than a preference for wearing sweatpants instead of jeans.
The banishment of religion, ethics, and metaphysics from the realm of philosophy was met with both jubilant praise and resounding condemnation. To find out why, the next lesson dives into the analysis of language, and the search for truth that can be verified through observation, just like science.
With such a powerful emphasis on language in this new analytic philosophy, it is important to remember that language was almost taken for granted by earlier philosophers. In a BBC interview in the 1970s, Ayer himself spoke of earlier philosophers thinking of language as almost transparent – a neutral form of expression.
For logical positivism, nothing could be further from the truth. Humans can only understand the world through their senses, through observation and verification of phenomena. But what we can think, and how we think it, is determined entirely by language – and language is far from neutral.
So the first order of business was to investigate what can be said. In other words, what kinds of statements can be made and verified to be true, and what kinds of statements cannot be verified. For instance, “it’s raining outside!” is an easily verifiable statement – everyone can go outside and verify this as a fact.
Other statements, like “all bachelors are unmarried men,” don’t need verification, because the statement itself contains a definition of the word bachelor. Thus it is self-referential and defines the condition of being a bachelor. These types of statements are particularly useful in science and mathematics to explain the meaning of terms within a given context.
Ayer would call sentences like “all bachelors are unmarried men” analytic statements, because the definition of the term is contained within the statement itself. He’d call exclamations like “it's raining outside!” synthetic statements – or those observations about the world that can be verified externally by the senses.
But then we arrive at what Ayer would call meaningless statements – things like, “the universe is love” or “time is an illusion.” Since they refer to ideas and concepts beyond the physical world, these sentences cannot be verified by observation or experiment. Therefore, they are meaningless.
And it gets even more complicated in the category of emotional statements. For Ayer and the other logical positivists, these are statements like “kindness is good” or “violence is wrong,” which aren’t claiming to say anything that can be verified about the world. Any moral speech, like “love thy neighbor,” falls into the realm of emotion, not truth.
You might remember when Star Trek’s Mr. Spock quoted the utilitarian belief that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few before nobly sacrificing himself. This act may have seemed to reflect his logical nature. But in logical positivism this is a purely emotional statement, with no verifiable meaning at all.
Then there are the tautologies, or statements that are self-referential, and true by their logical form alone. Like “all circles are round” or “it is what it is.” These somewhat overlap with analytic statements, because tautologies can be verified by logical analysis alone. But they don’t say anything new about the world.
The classification of statements from the previous chapter hinged quite a bit on whether or not a statement was either self-referential or self-defining, like a tautology or an analytic statement, or unverifiable, like emotional or meaningless statements. But does that mean everything stated as fact needs external corroboration?
This is where Ayer offers something else: performative statements. For instance, “I now pronounce you man and wife” is a performative statement. It accomplishes something just by being uttered. It doesn’t verify something about the world; it changes something. Same with a statement like, “I promise to buy you dinner,” because within the statement is an outcome that can be verified or not. If you got dinner, the statement was true. If you never did, then the statement was untrue. But the promise itself links it to a real-world outcome.
And there are other emotional utterances, too. These are things saying, “Ugh! Mondays!” Or, “Oh no! My report is late!” These utterances have meaning, and, though non-verbal, like a sigh or an exclamation, they make the emotional content clear: someone hates Mondays or someone’s report is late. These don’t need external verification, because they simply express emotional content that cannot be verified externally, as it only exists internally.
So while logical positivism is concerned with truth, there is recognition of emotions, opinions, or preferences in statements. These do not make claims about the world, and thus cannot be verified. But that doesn’t make them meaningless – it just limits the meaning to a particular person. However, this means that they have no place in the philosophy of logical positivism, which is meant to describe the external world.
It is important to note that when these ideas were first published, they met with very little response from the philosophical world. It wasn’t until the second printing, in 1946, that the ideas took hold across the UK and gained notoriety in philosophical circles. But by then there were already considerable challenges brewing.
Perhaps the most resounding critique came from philosopher Willard Quine, who challenged the idea that analytic or synthetic statements were different at all, because analysis itself isn’t perfect. Like poetry, even analytic statements can be changed through the use of metaphor or synonyms. In other words, language is tricky despite the desire of logical positivists to give statements a fixed meaning.
But perhaps the most devastating critique wasn’t really a critique at all. In 1921, Ludwig Wittgenstein, an Austrian philosopher, had published a short work called the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, which, along with the writings of his teacher Bertrand Russell, had greatly influenced the logical positivist. Later, in the 1950s, Wittgenstein refuted some of his own foundational premises in a work called Philosophical Investigations. This dealt a blow to logical positivism.
While Tractatus had pursued the foundations of truth in language and inspired analytic philosophy itself, Philosophical Investigations found that there was no fixed truth undergirding language. Language grows, changes, and morphs with use through context. In other words, language isn’t a formal system – it’s a game.
At the heart of Ayer’s philosophical project was a desire to establish a foundation for rational discourse. In order to do this, he classified statements according to their verifiability. He created a hierarchy of verification principles, which helped him determine how firmly rooted in empirical observation any statement might be.
For instance, the strong verification principle refers to statements that can be verified through direct observation. This might be something as simple as “it is sunny outside.” Such a statement can be verified by anyone looking out of the window. Even someone without sight could verify such a statement by stepping outside and feeling the sun on their skin.
Strong verification is essential to science, and thus a foundation for this philosophy. It includes statements like “all triangles have three sides,” which is a tautology, or self-referential statement. It also includes mathematical statements like “two plus two equals four,” or “the length of this shelf is thirty centimeters.”
Ayer later included a modified weak verification principle, which opens the door for unverified, but potentially verifiable, statements. This is critical for statements about historical facts, or things that haven’t yet been conclusively verified but may be verified in the future.
For instance, claiming that Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon in 46 BCE might not be verified, but archeologists or historians may verify it in the future. Claiming that climate change is causing the weather to become more extreme may not yet be verified conclusively, but a preponderance of evidence shows it may be one day soon.
Probabilistic statements, which make claims about the future based on past observations, can’t be verified by their very nature – but they’re essential in scientific discourse. Such statements include hypotheses, which make predictions about the universe and then set out to verify or falsify them.
This weak verification principle was necessary because strong verification just isn’t always possible in the real world. And philosophy, like science, can’t deal in absolutes. Even the simple observation, “it is sunny outside,” may be a hallucination. And statements like “this shelf is 30 centimeters long” depend on accurate measuring tools to be true.
In other words, the approach of logical positivists, while grounded in the observable world, left little space for the shades of gray found everywhere in science and in life. But through their efforts, they shone a light onto language itself as a vehicle for philosophy, and opened up conversations about language as an active force in shaping what we think, and what we can think. These conversations continue to this day.
Though the verification principles attempted to provide a neutral, transparent language for philosophical inquiry in logic, the results were met with considered backlash. Quine’s refutation of empiricism, and Wittgenstein’s embrace of language play notwithstanding, other thinkers were quick to point out that things weren’t quite as black and white as Ayer’s logical approach might indicate.
Philosopher of science Karl Popper, for instance, pointed out that verification wasn’t really the most important thing in science anyway. Falsifying a claim was far more important. Any universal claim could be easily falsified with just one direct instance that contradicts it. In other words, to get closer to the truth, proving something wrong is much more important than verifying it.
This became known as Popper’s falsification theory, and it made clear that science makes progress not by proving hypotheses but by disproving them. This makes verification of anything weak and conditional, despite Ayer’s category of strong verification based on empirical evidence.
And pioneering mathematician Kurt Gödel published work five years before Ayer’s that essentially refuted the idea that logic could ever be complete in finding a set of principles that governed everything. Known collectively as Gödel’s incompleteness theorems, they set out to prove the limitations of logic itself. They claimed that any formal system, like logic, would always be incomplete, because there would always be things in the world that could be neither verified or falsified.
These philosophical and mathematical refutations were echoed by ethical and moral philosophers, who had been effectively excised from philosophy in Ayer’s work. Many, including ethicist Philippa Foot, argued that while ethics and morals couldn’t be verified or falsified under any circumstances, that didn’t make them meaningless.
Ultimately, the legacy of logical positivism is the interdisciplinary conversation it opened up about meaning and truth, and how we express those in language. And as Gödel’s theorems predicted, it’s likely that this conversation will never be complete.
The main takeaway of this lesson to Language, Truth, and Logic by A. J. Ayer is this:
Logical positivism aimed to ground philosophy in verifiable, scientific truth. It classified statements into analytic, or self-defining; synthetic, or empirically verifiable; and meaningless, or unverifiable. It relegated ethical and metaphysical claims to the realm of emotion rather than fact. The principle of verification, both in strong and weak forms, became central to determining meaningful statements. While influential, these ideas faced significant challenges, particularly in their treatment of ethics and the nature of language itself. Logical positivism's legacy persists in emphasizing clarity, empirical verification, and the analysis of language in philosophical and scientific discourse.
Okay, that’s it for this lesson. We hope you enjoyed it. If you can, please take the time to leave us a rating – we always appreciate your feedback. See you in the next lesson.
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