Visit to download the full and correct content document: https://ebookmass.com/product/the-historical-and-philosophical-significance-of-ayerslanguage-truth-and-logic-1st-edition-adam-tamas-tuboly/
The Historical and Philosophical Significance of Ayer’s Language, Truth and Logic
Edited by Adam Tamas TubolyMichael Beaney
University Aberdeen, Scotland
Humboldt University Berlin
Berlin, Germany
Series Editor: University of Aberdeen, Scotland, Humboldt University Berlin, Berlin,Germany.
Editorial Board
Claudio de Almeida, Pontifical Catholic University at Porto Alegre, Brazil
Maria Baghramian, University College Dublin, Ireland
Thomas Baldwin, University of York, England
Stewart Candlish, University of Western Australia
Chen Bo, Peking University, China
Jonathan Dancy, University of Reading, England
José Ferreirós, University of Seville, Spain
Michael Friedman, Stanford University, USA
Gottfried Gabriel, University of Jena, Germany
Juliet Floyd, Boston University, USA
Hanjo Glock, University of Zurich, Switzerland
Nicholas Griffin, McMaster University, Canada
Leila Haaparanta, University of Tampere, Finland
Peter Hylton, University of Illinois, USA
Jiang Yi, Beijing Normal University, China
Javier Legris, National Academy of Sciences of Buenos Aires, Argentina
Cheryl Misak, University of Toronto, Canada
Nenad Miscevic, University of Maribor, Slovenia, and Central European University, Budapest
Volker Peckhaus, University of Paderborn, Germany
Eva Picardi, University of Bologna, Italy
Erich Reck, University of California at Riverside, USA
Peter Simons, Trinity College, Dublin
Thomas Uebel, University of Manchester, England.
More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14867
Adam Tamas Tuboly EditorEditor
Adam Tamas TubolyInstitute of Philosophy, Hungarian Academy of Sciences
Budapest, Hungary
Institute of Transdisciplinary Discoveries, Medical School
University of Pécs, Pécs, Hungary
ISSN 2634-5994
History of Analytic Philosophy
ISBN 978-3-030-50883-8
ISSN 2634-6001 (electronic)
ISBN 978-3-030-50884-5 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-50884-5
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Cover illustration: ilbusca / Getty Images
This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
To Gabó, Sára, and Róza LillaDuring the first half of the twentieth century analytic philosophy gradually established itself as the dominant tradition in the English-speaking world, and over the last few decades it has taken firm root in many other parts of the world. There has been increasing debate over just what ‘analytic philosophy’ means, as the movement has ramified into the complex tradition that we know today, but the influence of the concerns, ideas and methods of early analytic philosophy on contemporary thought is indisputable. All this has led to greater self-consciousness among analytic philosophers about the nature and origins of their tradition, and scholarly interest in its historical development and philosophical foundations has blossomed in recent years, with the result that history of analytic philosophy is now recognized as a major field of philosophy in its own right.
The main aim of the series in which this book appears, the first series of its kind, is to create a venue for work on the history of analytic philosophy, consolidating the area as a major field of philosophy and promoting further research and debate. The ‘history of analytic philosophy’ is understood broadly, as covering the period from the last three decades of the nineteenth century to the start of the twenty-first century, beginning with the work of Frege, Russell, Moore and Wittgenstein, who are generally regarded as its main founders, and the influences upon them, and going right up to the most recent developments. In allowing the ‘history’
to extend to the present, the aim is to encourage engagement with contemporary debates in philosophy, for example, in showing how the concerns of early analytic philosophy relate to current concerns. In focusing on analytic philosophy, the aim is not to exclude comparisons with other—earlier or contemporary—traditions, or consideration of figures or themes that some might regard as marginal to the analytic tradition but which also throw light on analytic philosophy. Indeed, a further aim of the series is to deepen our understanding of the broader context in which analytic philosophy developed, by looking, for example, at the roots of analytic philosophy in neo-Kantianism or British idealism, or the connections between analytic philosophy and phenomenology, or discussing the work of philosophers who were important in the development of analytic philosophy but who are now often forgotten.
This volume, edited by Adam Tamas Tuboly, illustrates very well the range of work that is now being done in history of analytic philosophy, even when the focus is on one particular philosopher, and indeed, on just one text. A. J. Ayer (1910–1989) is one of the key figures in the second generation of analytic philosophers and is often credited with introducing logical positivism into British philosophy, thereby shaking up some of the established traditions in Britain, especially at Oxford. The canonical text, in this regard, is his Language, Truth and Logic, first published in 1936, with a second, revised edition appearing in 1946.
As the contributions to this volume show, most of the ideas and doctrines of the book have not stood the test of time. Indeed, even Ayer himself later admitted that almost all the details were incorrect, the only thing that he continued to endorse being the ‘spirit’ in which it was written. The errors are themselves instructive, however; recognizing them can lead to refinements of the ideas or doctrines or their replacement by better ones, and a deeper understanding, generally, of the philosophical problems addressed. Claims he made about analyticity, linguistic analysis, the problem of other minds and verificationism, for example, are critically examined and insightfully elucidated in Parts II, III and IV of this volume.
If we are to understand the historical significance of Ayer’s book, though, then we have to do more than critically engage with particular ideas and doctrines, however central they may be to either Ayer’s book
itself or the philosophical traditions in which debate about them played an important role. The first three chapters and the final chapter offer discussion of the wider historical context in which the significance of Language, Truth and Logic can be appreciated. The first three chapters shed light on the genesis and immediate reception of the book, helping to explain its influence despite the simplifications and errors that are plainly present. The last chapter places the book in the much wider context of social and political developments over the last 100 years, developments that have led to the world crisis that we are now in as I write, with the rise of right-wing populism and threats to democracy itself, the culture of ‘fake news’ and ‘alternative facts’, and the coronavirus disease of 2019 (COVID-19) health crisis that has revealed all sorts of social and political failings and fractures in the attempts that countries across the world have made to respond to it. Adopting the term from Dallas Willard, Aaron Preston argues that it is ‘the disappearance of moral knowledge’ that has played a major role in our current world crisis, and he identifies the crude positivism of Ayer’s Language, Truth and Logic as contributing to that disappearance. Whether or not one agrees with all the details of Preston’s own account, it demonstrates the importance of revisiting the canonical texts of analytic philosophy, even if they are now seen to contain errors or to have been part of a superseded or discredited tradition.
As a field of philosophy, then, history of analytic philosophy covers everything from the most focused critical examination of particular arguments in the writings of analytic philosophers to the widest-angled view of the relevant historical context, and from attempts to understand what exactly a philosopher meant or was doing in a given passage to reassessments of their work and its significance in the light of our current concerns and perspectives. This volume offers fine examples of the full range of these approaches, demonstrating the maturity that the relatively new field of history of philosophy has now reached and the contribution that it now makes to wider social and political debates.
Berlin, Germany
Michael Beaney June 2020
Gergely Ambrus is an assistant professor at the Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest. He works primarily on the philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, and the history of analytic philosophy. Among his interests are metaphysics and the philosophy of science. Several of his articles on the Vienna Circle and the philosophy of mind, especially on Herbert Feigl and Béla Juhos, have appeared in journals and books.
Siobhan Chapman is a professor at the Department of English, University of Liverpool. She mainly works on pragmatics, philosophy of language, history of analytic philosophy and pragmatic stylistics. She has published numerous articles and books on the questions of language, among others Language and Empiricism: After the Vienna Circle (2006, Palgrave), Paul Grice, Philosopher and Linguist (2005, Palgrave), and Susan Stebbing and the Language of Common Sense (2013, Palgrave).
Hans-Johann Glock is a professor and head of the philosophy department at the University of Zurich. He works on the philosophy of language and animals, Ludwig Wittgenstein and the history of analytic philosophy. He is editor of A Companion to Wittgenstein (2017) and Wittgenstein and Analytic Philosophy: Essays for P. M. S. Hacker (2009), and author of What Is Analytic Philosophy? (2008).
László Kocsis is an assistant professor at the Department of Philosophy, University of Pécs. He is mainly interested in metaphysics, theories of truth and truth making, but works also on the history of analytic philosophy. His monograph and anthology on truth has appeared in Hungarian in 2017 and 2018.
Sally Parker-Ryan is an adjunct lecturer at the Department of Philosophy, SMU, Dedman College of Humanities and Sciences. She works mainly in the metaphilosophical area of methodology, with a focus on defending Ordinary Language Philosophy as an overlooked and underestimated approach to understanding what we are doing, when we do philosophy. Her papers on the role, methodology, and history of Ordinary Language Philosophy have appeared in many publications.
Krisztián Pete is an assistant professor at the Department of Philosophy, University of Pécs. He is mainly interested in the philosophy of language (Grice and pragmatic theories), informal logic, and early modern philosophy (Hume, Berkeley). He defended his PhD thesis on the critical appreciation of Grice’s philosophy of language and works now on various articles about Berkeley’s philosophy.
Aaron Preston is an associate professor at Valparaiso University. His research interests include ancient philosophy, moral philosophy, philosophy of religion and the history of analytic philosophy. He published a monograph about analytic philosophy (Analytic Philosophy: History of an Illusion, 2010), and edited Analytic Philosophy: An Interpretive History (2017).
Nicole Rathgeb is a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Hertfordshire. She works on philosophical methodology, the philosophy of language and the philosophy of mind. She has published an article on the purpose of conceptual analysis, and a monograph on Ordinary Language Philosophy is forthcoming.
Adam Tamas Tuboly is a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Philosophy, Hungarian Academy of Sciences and research fellow at the Institute of Transdisciplinary Discoveries, Medical School, University of Pécs. He works on the history of logical empiricism and the philosophy
of the modalities. He edited numerous volumes at Bloomsbury, Routledge, Springer, and SUNY Press.
Thomas Uebel is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Manchester, England. He is the author of Overcoming Logical Positivism from Within (1992), Vernunftkritik und Wissenschaft (Springer, 2000), Empiricism at the Crossroads (2007), and co-author of Otto Neurath: Philosophy Between Science and Politics (1996), editor of Rediscovering the Forgotten Vienna Circle (1991), and coeditor of Otto Neurath: Economic Writings. Selections 1904–1945 (2004).
Andreas Vrahimis works at the Department of Classical Studies and Philosophy, University of Cyprus. His research focuses on the analyticcontinental divide from various perspectives. Besides numerous articles, he has authored Encounters Between Analytic and Continental Philosophy (Palgrave, 2013).
The American pragmatist-naturalist-logical empiricist philosopher Ernest Nagel spent a year in Europe, after which he wrote, in a remarkable twopart essay, that “it was reported to me that in England some of the older men were dumbfounded and scandalized when, at a public meeting, a brilliant young adherent of the Wiener Kreis threatened them with early extinction since ‘the armies of Cambridge and Vienna were already upon them’” (Nagel 1936a, 9).1 Putting together other pieces of the puzzle,
1 This work was supported by the MTA Lendület Morals and Science Research Group, by the MTA Premium Postdoctoral Scholarship, and finally, by the “Empiricism and atomism in the twentiethcentury Anglo-Saxon philosophy” NKFIH project (124970). I am grateful to Thomas Uebel, Andreas Vrahimis and an anonymous referee for the helpful comments on the previous version.
A. T. Tuboly (*)
Institute of Philosophy, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Budapest, Hungary
Institute of Transdisciplinary Discoveries, Medical School, University of Pécs, Pécs, Hungary
© The Author(s) 2021
A. T. Tuboly (ed.), The Historical and Philosophical Significance of Ayer’s Language, Truth and Logic, History of Analytic Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-50884-5_1
Ben Rogers (1999, 104) identified Nagel’s reported warlord as Alfred Jules Ayer (1910–1989), known to many in the Oxford and London social circles as “Freddie Ayer.”
Though it had its antecedents in periodicals and conferences, when it came out in January 1936, Ayer’s short, dense, and vigorous book, Language, Truth and Logic (“LTL”) nevertheless shocked the British philosophical community. Published by Victor Gollancz Ltd. (at that time known by many for its leftist books), LTL was written by a young, 25-year-old philosopher, a fact that was reflected in many different ways in the book’s pages. It was filled with fresh ideas and precise argumentations; all of them put forward aggressively and sometimes without sufficiently taking the wider context and the boring details of the views of others into account. His enthusiasm helped Ayer in overcoming some of the dusty academic conventions about being modest, moderate, and respectful even toward those who hold contrary opinions—or as Ayer liked to call them, “enemies.” Nonetheless, it is hard to underestimate LTL’s pivotal role in early and mid-century British philosophical debates and in the history of twentieth-century analytic philosophy more generally.2
Ayer’s work was praised and damned equally, and readers often described the book and its author in extreme terms: “a combination of immaturity, loose thinking and wholly unwarranted cocksureness; […] mental anarchy” (Tomlin 1936, 217); “hypnotic clarity” (Warnock, G.J. 1958, 43); “a bombshell” (Warnock, M. 1960, 79); the “enfant terrible of Oxford philosophy” (Grice 1986, 48); “a bestseller […], a dazzling and revolutionary work” (Medawar 1988, 53); “the last Bible of British Nonconformity” (Wollheim 1991, 23); and “the most wicked man in Oxford” (quoted in Rogers 1999, 125). Nonetheless, perhaps the most appealing compliment from within the British scene came from Bertrand Russell (1947, 71) who wrote, in his review of the second
All page references to Language, Truth and Logic below are to the second edition of 1946 see Ayer (1936/1946), abbreviated in the text as “LTL.”
2 Ayer is among those figures of the analytic tradition who were the subject of numerous volumes and Festschrifts. See MacDonald (1979), MacDonald and Wright (1986b), Gower (1987), Griffiths (1991), and Hahn (1992). A.
1 Introduction: From Spying to Canonizing—Ayer and His…
edition, that “I can give the sincerest praise possible, namely that I should like to have written it myself when young.”
As a long-time professor, first in London and then at Oxford, Ayer almost singlehandedly sowed the seeds of logical positivism in England— at least that’s how the story goes. LTL was popularly regarded as a succinct and elegant summary of the Vienna Circle’s philosophy. Recent historians of logical empiricism, however, have worried that its elegance and brevity were achieved at the cost of oversimplifying and distorting the actual positions endorsed by members of the Vienna Circle, resulting in a misleading portrait of logical empiricism.
With these diverse conceptions in mind, it is still not at all clear how LTL is to be regarded, and how its philosophical and historical significance is to be evaluated, both in its own right, and with regard to the dissemination of logical empiricism in Britain. This volume thus aims to reconsider the significance of Ayer’s LTL, both in historical and philosophical terms. Among the questions that need to be asked and discussed are the following: how did Ayer preserve or distort the views and conceptions of the logical empiricists, especially those of Otto Neurath and Rudolf Carnap? How are Ayer’s arguments different from those he aimed to reconstruct? How influential was LTL really, and what are the factors that explain its success in Britain and especially at Oxford? Besides the general chapters on the background and context of LTL, most chapters of this volume discuss particular aspects and themes of the book, such as verification, ethics, values, truth, other minds, and sense data.
After his 1932 graduation from Oxford, Ayer decided to leave behind the “metaphysical” atmosphere of his alma mater and hoped to continue his studies at Cambridge, where the new philosophies of Moore, Russell, and
especially Wittgenstein were then prevalent.3 Nonetheless, Ayer’s Christ Church tutor, Gilbert Ryle, did not support this idea. Since Wittgenstein was not officially discussed at Oxford, Ryle’s suggestion was a European tour. Ryle had met Moritz Schlick at the International Congress for Philosophy in Oxford two years before, and the Viennese-based philosopher made such an impact on him that he told Ayer to head directly to Vienna, where he was supposed to enroll at the university to attend Schlick’s lectures and participate in the meetings of the so-called Vienna Circle. In Ayer’s (1978, 121) recollection, Ryle argued that “by coming back with a report of their activities I should be not only benefiting myself but performing a public service.” Ayer thus became a British philosophical spy in Red Vienna.
The Vienna Circle was an interdisciplinary discussion group, which existed roughly from 1924 to 1936 at the University of Vienna, though outside of its official institutional structure. Every Thursday evening in term time (at least that is the appealing myth—in fact, meetings were often delayed and became quite irregular after 1932), philosophically inclined scientists and scientifically trained philosophers gathered at the library of the Mathematical Institute in order to discuss the relation between science, philosophy, and society. While these topics also occupied most nineteenth and early twentieth-century philosophers (it is enough to mention Ludwig Boltzmann, Ernst Mach, Hermann von Helmholtz, and most of the neo-Kantians, such as Hermann Cohen and Ernst Cassirer), much of the Vienna Circle’s originality came from its ability to integrate different philosophical approaches. In order to follow and interpret the latest developments in theoretical physics, members of the Circle therefore tried to combine the empiricism of Ernst Mach, Richard Avenarius, and Bertrand Russell with the conventionalism of
3 In 1935, after he had won a new scholarship, Ayer still complained to Otto Neurath that “at Oxford, where I work, metaphysics still predominates. I feel very isolated there, and have even been made to suffer economically for my views.” A.J. Ayer to Otto Neurath, December 31, 1935 (ONN). As we shall see below in Sect. 1.2.2, according to some scholars, metaphysics was not at all the dominant approach and field of study in the 1930s. Nevertheless, it may be true that Oxford was a rather conservative place marked by adherence to old ways of thinking, often based on the readings of the Greats. As Ryle (1971, 5) recalled, after H.H. Price had demonstrated the value of what was happening at Cambridge (Moore, Russell, Wittgenstein), “Oxford’s hermetically conserved atmosphere began to smell stuffy even to ourselves.”
1 Introduction: From Spying to Canonizing—Ayer and His…
Pierre Duhem and Henri Poincaré, as well as with the new logicomathematical devices of Russell and Wittgenstein.
Besides theoretical physics, the members of the Circle displayed a great diversity of scientific training and interest. Felix Kaufmann was a legal expert; Otto Neurath, an economist and sociologist; Edgar Zilsel, a historian; Karl Menger and Hans Hahn, mathematicians; Friedrich Waismann also trained as a mathematician, but quickly turned to pure philosophy; and finally, Viktor Kraft had a background in geography. That being said, besides a broad interest in psychology, ethics, culture, biology, and linguistics, physics was the main field of study and inspiration for Herbert Feigl, Béla Juhos, Rudolf Carnap, Philipp Frank, and Moritz Schlick, who, as the only local university professor among the group, acted as its leader (for a while, they were known as “the Schlick Circle”). Given their method of combining the scientifically sober approach of empiricism with the strict method of logic, their approach was often called “logical empiricism.” While this moniker was not wholeheartedly embraced by all members of the group—thus it revealed deep philosophical differences—I will keep referring to “logical empiricism” for reasons of simplicity.4
By 1932/1933, the Circle was somewhat past its heyday. It had entered the public scene in 1929 with the publication of its manifesto (Carnap, Hahn, Neurath 1929/1973), which caused division among some of its members because of its philosophical stance and socio-political layers. Carnap had already published Der logische Aufbau der Welt in 1928 and then left for Prague during the fall of 1931. The debate on the structure of sentences describing basic experiential issues (the so-called protocolsentence debate) went on for years, though most of the Circle’s members were out of town from time to time. This fluctuation in activity is not simply an outsider’s evaluation; it was also noted by members of the Circle themselves. Gustav Bergmann (1993, 195), a peripheral member,
4 A similar discussion group evolved in the mid-1920s in Berlin. Hans Reichenbach, who is often considered its leader, claimed that what distinguished the Berlin Group from the Viennese one was that it kept close watch of the sciences, in contrast to the latter’s philosophical inclination towards general ideas. As a result, Reichenbach tended to refer to the unfolding movement in Berlin as “logical empiricism” and to the Viennese one as “logical positivism.” For the philosophical and general significance of these terms, see Uebel (2013).
later wrote that the Circle “already reached its highpoint in 1927/28, maintained momentum for several years and by 1931/32 already showed clear signs of splintering and, as a consequence, declining” as the original scientific outlook of the group was replaced by Schlick’s Wittgensteininspired vision. In a letter, Schlick himself (known for his admiration of Wittgenstein) stated that he would not hold any meetings of the Circle during the winter of 1933 as “[s]ome of our old members have grown too dogmatic and might discredit the whole movement; so I am now trying to form a new circle out of younger men who are still free from principles” (Moritz Schlick to David Rynin, November 4, 1933). The times were changing, and everyone felt that the philosophical (and often personal) struggles and debates had undermined the group’s internal unity (or at least the appearance thereof).
When he arrived in December of 1932, Ayer thus experienced a rather peculiar Vienna Circle: a rapidly changing, factious group that had already diminished in numbers. While he was perhaps unaware of these tensions, his stay in Vienna inevitably determined what made it into his book (or perhaps more importantly, what did not). Ayer attended Schlick’s philosophy of nature course at the university and the private meetings of the Circle at the library of the Mathematical Institute.
Between January and March 1933 (when Ayer returned to Oxford), it was mainly Schlick, Waismann, Hahn, Menger, and Kurt Gödel, occasionally Neurath and presumably Kaufmann and W.V.O. Quine who were present at the discussions.
During these few months, Ayer witnessed the debate surrounding the nature of protocol-sentences at its peak. Neurath defended a fallibilistphysicalist conception and argued that the so-called protocol sentences were about physical (space-time located) objects and that all such sentences were always revisable, while Schlick advocated for a more subjectivist and foundationalist conception. Ayer’s (1978, 134) sympathies “la[y] mainly with Schlick” though in time he “[came] to agree with Neurath that all our beliefs are fallible.”5 At the university of Vienna,
5 The precise nature and scope of the protocol-sentence debate (especially Schlick’s conception) is still under discussion, but for an up-to-date presentation, see Uebel (2007). As Thomas Uebel argues in his chapter in this volume, after the publication of LTL, Ayer again sided with Schlick and
Schlick lectured mainly about the laws of nature, conventions, spacetime, and probability—topics that Ayer had presumably encountered through his English contemporaries (like Richard Braithwaite and C.D. Broad), and thus neither produced any revelation nor influenced him in the long run.
At the Thursday meetings (which at that time were held every second week), Ayer tried to follow the discussions, with more or less success. In his letters and later memoirs, he emphasized that his command of the German language was quite rudimentary, and though it admittedly improved with time, it was hard for him to follow the informal discussions or to raise relevant questions (1978, 134). As he wrote to Ryle in the report about his mission, “[o]n the whole I have got very little out of them all” (Ayer to Ryle, February 19, 1933; quoted in Harré and Shosky 1999, 31). Nonetheless, Ayer got a sense of the general atmosphere as well as a glimpse of the democratic discussion ideal of the Circle, and embraced most of its core theses, especially as these were conveyed to him in a rather polemic manner. I do not mean to imply that Ayer’s linguistic difficulties are the main source of his misrepresentations and oversimplifications, but they certainly hindered his understanding of all the exhaustive distinctions, the nuanced divergences, and the continental background of the Circle.
After his culturally engaged stay of four months in Vienna, Ayer travelled back to Oxford to take up his scholarship at Christ Church. With his usual passion and extraordinary speed, he quickly began to write articles and gave lectures on “The Philosophy of Analysis (Russell, Wittgenstein, Carnap)”; as Ayer’s biographer, Ben Rogers (1999, 99) has claimed, this “seems to have been the first time anyone in Oxford had ever given a lecture series on a living philosopher.”
Besides lecturing on the novel scientific philosophy, Ayer started to publish many of his new ideas and insights. That same year, his very first developed a foundationalist conception, based on the correspondence theory of truth (see also László Kocsis’ chapter below). 1 Introduction: From Spying to Canonizing—Ayer and His…
philosophical paper appeared in The New Oxford Outlook (a magazine for Oxford scholars) and discussed behaviorism (Ayer 1933a). In this quite radical and popularizing paper, Ayer identified the task of philosophy as a search for meanings, in this case, the translation of mental terms into behavioristically accepted ones. During the years 1933 and 1934, Ayer published ten articles, some of them contradicting each other on fundamental issues (e.g. whether or not there are atomic propositions that describe basic facts), but all of which pointed toward a bigger project, a general worldview. As Richard Wollheim (1991, 23) noted, “[LTL] certainly articulated a vision of the world,” and Ayer’s separate, mostly short papers indeed raised the possibility of a more general conception. To begin with, Ayer (1933b) wrote a piece about “Atomic Propositions,” in which he argued that even the propositions describing an individual’s own sense-experience could be factually mistaken, and that far from being secure, all our basic propositions are revisable. As Ayer (1933b, 4) wrote in the spirit of Neurath, “[o]ne’s own assertions are logically no more sacrosanct than other people’s.”
While in LTL, Ayer still claimed that all our empirical propositions are, in fact, hypotheses, and can thus be abandoned (LTL, 38), he formulated this point more clearly in his response to Béla Juhos regarding the negation of empirical propositions:
It is true of every empirical hypothesis that we can continue to accept it, in the face of apparently unfavourable evidence, if we are prepared to make suitable assumptions. Whether it is rational to make these assumptions is, of course, another question which does not concern us here. (Ayer 1936c, 262)
Thus, around the time he published LTL, Ayer thought that empirical statements are anything but certain and “sacrosanct”; they could be revised at any time and upheld against any supposed counterexamples. In fact, Ayer (LTL, 38, n.7) later argued that falsification faces similar troubles to verification (neither of them could be conclusive), a point he explicitly directed against Karl Popper; he later recalled that he was motivated in this reasoning by Poincaré, from whom he took a certain form of holism (Ayer 1987, 28).
1 Introduction: From Spying to Canonizing—Ayer and His…
While “Atomic Propositions” did not explicitly refer to the Vienna Circle (besides a quick mention in the final short note of the paper), Ayer published two papers about metaphysics in 1934 that addressed issues and solutions of logical empiricism directly.6 In the first paper, “Demonstration of the Impossibility of Metaphysics,” Ayer (1934a, 335) stated that his views were “not original” and that he only aimed to express the logical empiricists’ concerns in a clearer fashion. He took Carnap’s view that the metaphysician’s sentences are not uncertain, arbitrary, or simply false, but that they are nonsensical. He argued that metaphysics arises from two sources, namely from linguistic or grammatical mistakes and from emotional extrapolations. About the latter, he wrote that metaphysicians “wish to present them not as feelings of their own, but somehow objectively as facts; therefore they express them in the form of argument and theory. But noting is thereby asserted” (Ayer 1934a, 342).
With these vehement attacks, Ayer had already stepped on some people’s toes. Even before his first anti-metaphysics paper, the British philosopher and psychologist C.A. Mace (1934a) had criticized Ayer’s approach as being too simplified in allowing only fact-representations (of science) and emotion-expressions (of arts). Mace upheld the thesis that all sentences have both representative and expressive functions; just as a poet’s verses have both literal and emotive meaning, he suggested that even the metaphysician’s sentences might mean something. Ayer (1934b) quickly responded to Mace and tried to underline the differences between poets who, in their special way, write intentionally, and metaphysicians who are caught up in linguistic traps and thereby produce “rubbish” (Ayer 1934b, 56). Although Mace (1934b) replied to Ayer, their debate did not cross the threshold of responsiveness of the philosophical community at large. Perhaps this was due, as some have claimed, to the idea that metaphysics was already dead in England by the time of Ayer’s rise:
6 Ayer’s third paper, “On Particulars and Universals,” did not consider the Vienna Circle explicitly, except for a quick note at the end of the paper, which is concerned with structure and not with content (Ayer 1933c, 62). In fact, the paper mentions only Frank Ramsey and Russell. Thus, seemingly, Ayer at first tried to adapt himself to the regular British scene, given that his “Atomic Propositions” focused on atomic facts, the main question of the so-called Cambridge School, which Susan Stebbing had discussed in some detail.
The sort of supra-mundane, transcendent metaphysics which was the particular object of Positivistic odium was, in this country, already almost wholly extinct when their attack was launched. There was a coffin, perhaps, to be nailed up, but no Goliath to be conquered. (Warnock 1958, 122)
Note the tension here: Ayer always complained that Oxford was a place full of metaphysics, while G.J. Warnock (and others) argued that logical positivism à la Ayer simply came too late, since metaphysics was already in decline by the 1930s. Even if the critics are right, what Ayer felt to be the general atmosphere is a different issue. On the other hand, Warnock presumably had in mind British idealism as the most characteristic form of English metaphysics, which was indeed declining in the 1930s. Gilbert Ryle (1971, 10) once formulated a similar diagnosis: “Most of us took fairly untragically [the Vienna Circle’s] demolition of Metaphysics. After all, we never met anyone engaged in committing any metaphysics; our copies of Appearance and Reality were dusty; and most of us had never seen a copy of Sein und Zeit.” (Except for Ryle, of course, who reviewed Martin Heidegger’s book in 1929.) But this assessment (regarding the demise of metaphysics by the 1930s) is true only with two reservations. First, though idealism was overcome in philosophical circles, influential scientists like James Jeans and Arthur Eddington had just recognized its potential value and power in scientific popularizing (Tuboly 2020a). Secondly, even though Warnock may have been right about the status of metaphysics in England (notwithstanding Ayer’s constant complaints about his metaphysics professors at Oxford), the rising tide of phenomenology, existentialism, and other schools of thought in Germany and France was already lapping at England’s shores.
In the two years before the publication of LTL, Ayer published papers about internal relations (Ayer 1935a), truth and protocol sentences (Ayer 1935b), and the analytic movement in England (Ayer 1936c), the latter, upon Neurath’s request, for the 1935 Paris congress on the unity of science.
As always, he was quite productive, and all his philosophical thoughts revolved around some of the central arguments of LTL. Right after Ayer returned to Oxford, his views were out in the open and critical voices were already abundant (see below). In order to keep up Ayer’s enthusiasm
1 Introduction: From Spying to Canonizing—Ayer and His…
and perhaps to settle some of the disputes and thus straighten things out, one of his best friends, Isaiah Berlin, suggested that he compile his thoughts in a small booklet. Ayer followed the advice, sat down in his small room at Oxford, and after writing the same number of words every morning, finished LTL in one and a half years, a few months before his 25th birthday.
Language, Truth and Logic came out in January 1936; initially, only 500 copies were printed because at that time Gollancz focused on political titles (especially from the radical left) and underestimated the demand. The following month, another 250 were issued, and the book went through four reprints before the war, though this still amounted to fewer than 2000 copies. To put this in context, Sir Arthur Eddington’s The Nature of the Physical World sold more than 20,000 copies between 1928 and 1938, while more than 100,000 copies of Sir James Jeans’ The Mysterious Universe were printed within two years (Whitworth 1996, 67, 71). In Ayer’s case, Gollancz was always careful not to print too much at once. As the book came to be known and used quickly (Ayer even claimed that it was circulated as a textbook; LTL, 5), Gollancz decided to issue a second edition for which Ayer wrote a longer introduction, explaining the changes in his views between 1936 and 1946 (see LTL, 5–26). The second edition, with the new introduction, became an internationally known textbook on logical empiricism. Altogether, LTL went through more than 27 reprints, and it has never been out of print.
Ayer repeatedly claimed, perhaps to ward off criticism, or possibly because he indeed believed it, that the book did not contain any new thoughts, but only a novel way of presenting and ordering the rich material to which it referred. Much later, this idea resurfaced in the secondary literature, and even in Ayer’s last Festschrift, Anthony Quinton (1991, 40)
noted that LTL “is almost wholly composed of preexisting material.” Whether this is, in fact, true or not is the subject of the various chapters of this volume, but in the following paragraphs I will provide a starting point by outlining the book’s main theses.7
The first chapter of LTL, “The Elimination of Metaphysics,” which echoes Carnap’s famous “Überwindung” paper in a somewhat more radical fashion, sets the tone of the book and contains the basics of Ayer’s toolkit. Enemies are introduced: metaphysicians who intentionally produce mystical systems, building them up from significant and objective propositions, but who are then deceived by the superficial grammar of language (LTL, 33). What is his problem with these people? Metaphysicians claim that they have (or aim for) knowledge that transcends empirical reality; but if the range of significant propositions is limited to that of the empirical ones (and the tautological ones, see below), then metaphysics will be meaningless by definition. Ayer’s main task is therefore twofold: to show that all metaphysicians try to go beyond the empirical realm and to buttress his core thesis that only empirical propositions are meaningful in a literal sense.
The first seems to be (a rather plausible) assumption, given that most of the well-known German, French, and English metaphysicians of the period indeed tried to reveal the non-empirical essence and nature of the world. Regarding the second, Ayer utilizes his “criterion of verification.” For him, only those statements are literally meaningful (this needs to be emphasized, as Ayer seems to accept a sort of subjective moral and aesthetical significance beyond literal meaningfulness) which can be verified; that is, “a sentence is factually [or literally] significant to any given person, if, and only if, he knows how to verify the proposition which it purports to express” (LTL, 35). Verification is thus closely tied to experience, but Ayer also differentiates between practical verifiability (an actual act of verification, carried out in a concrete situation) and verification in principle (an act of verification that cannot be carried out for practical reasons but can be described in theory). Furthermore, he makes a
7 In 1936, the very first critical review of LTL claimed that “the whole book proves much less than either the dust-cover or his own first paragraph appear to assume” (Tomlin 1936, 202, original emphasis).
distinction regarding the strength of verification; a proposition is strongly verifiable if it can be conclusively established in experience and weakly verifiable if it is possible for our experience to render it probable (LTL, 37). After some examples and counterexamples, Ayer focuses on “weak verification in principle” and marks the question about meaningfulness as follows: “Would any observations be relevant to the determination of a proposition’s truth or falsehood?” If yes, then it is factually/literally/ empirically meaningful, if not, then it is meaningless.8
Since metaphysical statements describe a realm that lies beyond (or above) the empirical, they cannot be verified—neither in practice nor in principle. Therefore, metaphysical statements are literally meaningless. Needless to say, this amounts to a rather negative narrative or even a crusade, and in fact, LTL lacks Carnap’s positive narrative about the existential significance of metaphysics (a view which had its roots in Nietzsche’s and Dilthey’s philosophy and which obviously did not have any influence on the young Ayer).
Verification is doubtless the cornerstone of Ayer’s philosophy. If we can indeed separate the meaningful from the meaningless via verification, then metaphysics would simply be doomed to failure, the task of philosophy could be defined more easily along the lines of science, and we could also settle questions of morality and religion. Many philosophers recognized verification as being of utmost importance for positivists; already in 1935, W.T. Stace (1935, 418) called the idea “the now famous ‘principle of verifiability’,” and most of the papers published by British philosophers before and after LTL that dealt with positivism concerned verification.9
8 Ayer seemingly does not differentiate between verification as a criterion of meaningfulness, and verification as a certain form of theory which determines the meaning of a proposition. HansJohann Glock’s chapter in this volume takes up verification in detail.
9 Before LTL, Margaret MacDonald (1934) tried to clarify the issue of verification by pointing out that determining the truth and falsity of a proposition first requires an understanding of the proposition in question (contrary to Schlick’s famous doctrine that to understand the meaning of a proposition is to indicate the ways in which the proposition will be verified). In 1934, an entire symposium was devoted to questions of verification (Stebbing et al. 1934), and verification was also at stake for Max Black (1934) and for W.T. Stace (1935) who—in their replies to Ayer (1934a)— were critical of some of the details while supporting the intuitive core of the verification idea. After the publication of LTL, Gilbert Ryle (1936) wrote a shorter critical article. Stace’s (1935) paper became quite influential, with Ayer (1936a) producing a reply immediately after the publication of LTL, which was in turn followed by Alfred Sidgwick’s (1936) response. In 1937, A.C. Ewing
Some of them attacked verification in general and Ayer’s version in particular, the details of which were in constant flux; what seemed to matter most for Ayer was only the general idea that experience plays a crucial role in the characterization, determination, and understanding of propositions that purport to have factual meaning.10
Having thus set the scene, in the second chapter Ayer defines the task of philosophy as a certain critical-linguistic analysis of scientific and common-sense statements. The propositions of philosophy are not first principles (LTL, 46–48), and philosophy should not vindicate scientific statements either (LTL, 48–50), that is, science does not depend on philosophy. “The propositions of philosophy,” according to Ayer (LTL, 57), “are not factual, but linguistic in character—[…] they express definitions, or the formal consequences of definitions. Accordingly, we may say that philosophy is a department of logic.” But what is the precise nature of this type of analysis?11
Ayer provides the following example in the their chapter, taken from Bertrand Russell’s theory of descriptions, to show what he means when he says that the function of philosophy is to provide definitions in use. According to Ayer, “we define a symbol in use, not by saying that it is
(1937) published another paper on verification and meaninglessness, to which Sidgwick (1937) replied, followed by Ewing’s (1938) counter-reply. Verification was the topic of two more technical papers by Morris Lazerowitz’s (1937, 1939), Bertrand Russell (1937) devoted his presidential address at the Aristotelian Society to verification and Ayer’s friend, Isaiah Berlin (1938) also wrote about the topic. Finally, there were two further substantial events, John Wisdom’s 50-page essay (1938) and another symposium (Mackinnon et al. 1945) right before the second edition of LTL. As can be gleaned from this list, verification was a hot topic in England for many years, even after the Viennese logical empiricists had left it behind, first for confirmation and later for more technical and logical issues.
10 Recently, Pelletier and Linsky (2018) and Uebel (2019) have considered verificationism in the context of logical empiricism. In the introduction to the second edition, Ayer tried to refine the idea of verification, but as is well-known, Alonzo Church’s (1949) review of that edition put the final nail in LTL’s coffin, at least regarding verification. In the 1980s, Crispin Wright (1986) reformulated the principle and rejected Church’s counterexamples. Ayer (1992, 302) later accepted Wright’s proposal, though the debate did not end with that.
11 In fact, Ayer claims in LTL that there are no genuine philosophical propositions given that sentences in philosophy cannot be true or false. They are not about the everyday usage of words (in which case they would be empirical sentences), but about classes or types of expressions and thus their purpose is merely clarificatory. Nonetheless, in his new introduction (LTL, 26), Ayer claims that—contrary to the opinion of the Vienna Circle as he conceived it—philosophy does, after all, have its own special propositions, which are either true or false.
1 Introduction: From Spying to Canonizing—Ayer and His…
synonymous with some other symbol, but by showing how the sentences in which it significantly occurs can be translated into equivalent sentences, which contain neither the definiendum itself, nor any of its synonyms” (LTL, 60, original emphases). Consequently, using Russell’s example, the symbol “the present king of France is bald” is defineable as “there is one, and only one present king of France, and he is bald,” thereby making explicit the hidden logical structure of the expression to show that it is a description and not a referential phrase. While everybody seems to know how to understand the symbol “the present king of France,” revealing its logical structure might help us avoid unnecessary conclusions that we are not entitled to draw (such as positing a fictitious or subsistent entity that should constitute the present king of France). As Ayer formulates this point,
Those who use the English language have no difficulty, in practice, in identifying the situations which determine the truth and falsehood of such simple statements as “This is a table,” or “Pennies are round.” But they may very well be unaware of the hidden logical complexity of such statements which our analysis of the notion of a material thing has just brought to light. (LTL, 68)12
Philosophical analysis thus has the peculiar habit of starting from certain obvious expressions, then demonstrating that their simplicity is only apparent, before somewhat therapeutically dismissing the associated philosophical problems by pointing out those features of the expressions that were not visible before. “[T]he utility of the philosophical definition which dispels such confusions,” concludes Ayer, “is not to be measured by the apparent triviality of the sentences which it translates” (LTL, 68). This reflects Russell’s previous credo from his logical atomist period,
12 In fact, a substantial part of the chapter on the nature of analysis is devoted to one example, namely to the problem of how we can define material beings in terms of sense-contents (LTL, 63–68). Ayer tries to point out that talking about material things often conveys the idea that we are dealing with a metaphysical (ontological) problem, when, in fact, this is a linguistic issue of definitions in use. What is thus at stake here is how to translate (or reduce) material-things talk to sense-contents talk, a program which is entirely consistent with Carnap’s approach from the mid-1930s, especially as it was presented in Logical Syntax of Language (1934/1937) where he argued that in the (only philosophically acceptable) formal mode of speech, we are not talking about actual numbers, material things, and so on, but about number-words and thing-words.
namely that “the point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as not to seem worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it” (Russell 1918/2010, 20).
With surprising speed, at the end of the chapter, Ayer quickly discredits some alternative conceptions of the nature of analysis. He claims (LTL, 68–69) that analysis is not about the sameness of meaning, given that logical analysis is concerned with the establishment of logically equivalent sentences (along the lines of the early Carnap, who required only the equivalence of truth values in Aufbau and later in Syntax). He also dismisses those approaches that define the task of philosophy as identifying “how certain symbols are actually used”—for in that case, philosophy would make factual statements about the customs of speakers, while by definition it should be concerned with logical relations and leave any empirical issues to the empirical sciences (in this case, to sociology and psychology).13
From general philosophy, Ayer moves toward his own form of empiricism in the fourth chapter. His main concern is how empiricists can account for two related major points, namely that mathematical and logical statements seem to be meaningful but cannot be reduced to empirical statements, while in his previously described theory of meaningfulness, only weakly and in principle verifiable (empirical) statements are cognitively meaningful. His solution is quite typical for the logical positivists, namely that logical and mathematical statements are analytic or tautological in nature. “A proposition is analytic,” Ayer argues, “when its validity depends solely on the definitions of the symbols it contains, and synthetic when its validity is determined by the facts of experience” (LTL, 78). Since logic and mathematics are devoid of empirical content, Ayer is also able to explain their necessity: logic and mathematics are necessary since “no experience can confute them” (LTL,
13 Ayer’s relation to ordinary language philosophy is the subject of the chapter by Siobhan Chapman and Sally Parker-Ryan. What is rather more surprising is that Ayer did not account for all the alternative conceptions that were explicitly in use by British philosophers. There is no mention of Stebbing, Wisdom, or Duncan-Jones, who were known as the “Cambridge School of Analysis.” The reason might be that around the time of writing LTL, Ayer dismissed the notion of “atomic facts,” writing elsewhere that “I cannot help regarding this conception as a relic of metaphysical realism” (Ayer 1936b, 58). Interestingly, in 1992, Ayer noted that the approach of LTL “was closer to that of the Cambridge School of Analysis than that of the Vienna Circle” (Ayer 1992, 301).
1 Introduction: From Spying to Canonizing—Ayer and His…
79), and their truth is determined via formal criteria such as consistency. Although they are factually empty, they do not belong to the realm of metaphysics, as they govern the logic of our language.
Chapter 4 does not contain many references, especially not to the logical positivists (Ayer mentions C.I. Lewis’ and Russell’s logical works, along with Henri Poincaré), but at the end we find a note about Hans Hahn’s “Logic, Mathematics, and Knowledge of Nature” (1933/1987) pamphlet. In fact, Ayer’s chapter offers quite a nice summary of Hahn’s main (historical and philosophical) points about the empiricists’ age-old struggle with logic and mathematics; in their estimation these were resolved in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. Similar to Hahn, LTL’s Chap. 4 also does not resort to any symbolism, derivations, or calculi, and instead introduces the reader to the philosophy of the new logic by means of easily readable passages.14
Having addressed how we can determine the validity (and truth) of the mathematical and logical domains, in Chap. 5 Ayer proceeds (or returns) to the empirical realm. Since “an empirical proposition, or a system of empirical propositions, may be free from contradiction, and still be false” (LTL, 90), Ayer proposes that there must be material criteria according to which the truth of empirical propositions can be determined. It is important to note that Ayer talks about a criterion of truth; he thinks that “truth” in itself is at least problematic; hence he neither wants to define “truth” nor explain its nature. Ayer was a deflationist when it came to the nature of truth, but he thought that we can and should say something about the criterion of truth, that is, about how we can decide which sentences are true and which are false. In the case of logic and mathematics, the criterion is a formal issue (usually consistency), but in the case of empirical ones, as we shall see, it is a more substantial material one.15
14 In the year LTL was published, Ayer took part in a symposium on “Truth by Convention” where he presented a much more detailed discussion and the context of his views on logic and analyticity (e.g. that a priori propositions about language are linguistic rules). In fact, he even discussed Quine’s brand-new paper, “Truth by Convention,” and tried to disprove his arguments about the circularity of logical conventionalism. See Ayer et al. (1936). In this volume, Nicole Rathgeb takes up the topic of analyticity and logic. On pages 16–18 of the new introduction (1936/1946), Ayer revised some elements of his earlier account.
15 On Ayer’s unique mixed theory of truth, see László Kocsis’ chapter in this volume.
Ayer argues against the idea that empirical propositions consist of two subsets, namely those that are absolutely certain, which, with some references to Schlick and Juhos, he refers to as ostensive propositions, and those that are hypothetical and therefore refutable. According to Ayer, ostensive propositions that only aim to register sensations with absolute certainty are impossible, since empirical propositions always also involve descriptive elements (LTL, 90–91). (Apart from some of the details of his reasoning about why “in principle”-like ostensive propositions are not possible, Ayer’s ideas about the necessarily descriptive character of empirical propositions—prohibiting pure registrations—are quite similar to the arguments that Wilfrid Sellars used to attack Ayer’s later phenomenalism.)
After noting that absolutely certain ostensive propositions are impossible, Ayer goes on to claim that empirical propositions “are one and all [all of them] hypotheses, which may be confirmed or discredited in actual sense-experience” (LTL, 94). As experience may affect any hypothesis (if we say that experience cannot refute a give proposition p, then p is simply a definition, see LTL, 95), Ayer also formulates the following thesis about conventionalism (which was made famous by Quine, but goes back to Poincaré, Neurath, and even Carnap), namely that “the ‘facts of experience’ can never compel us to abandon a hypothesis. A man can always sustain his convictions in the face of apparently hostile evidence if he is prepared to make the necessary ad hoc assumptions” (LTL, 95).
If any empirical hypotheses can be dropped (or can be maintained with the required reservations and modifications), what is the material criterion that determines their validity? Ayer’s answer is functionality, by which he means that “we test the validity of an empirical hypothesis by seeing whether it actually fulfils the function which it is designed to fulfil” (LTL, 95). For Ayer, the goal of science is mainly the prediction of future experiences, thus the validity of empirical hypotheses is to be determined by their ability to anticipate future experiences. Therefore, according to Ayer, “if an observation for which a given proposition is relevant conforms to our expectations, the truth of that proposition is confirmed” (LTL, 95), or in other words, “its probability has been
increased,” and if the reverse happens, “its probability has been diminished.”
To complete his overarching argument that “all synthetic propositions are empirical hypotheses” (LTL, 102), in Chap. 6 Ayer sets himself the task of accounting for value statements (both moral and aesthetical ones, as well as theological discourse). He finds both reductive and nonreductive theories lacking: the former reduce our value talk to something non-evaluative, that is, to empirical facts, namely “good” to “social or personal approval,” while the latter claim that moral notions are unanalyzable and can thus be apprehended via an unspecified and mysterious “intellectual intuition” (LTL, 104–107). Ayer argues that reductive theories are wrong because “it is not self-contradictory to assert that some actions which are generally approved of are not right” (LTL, 104), while non-reductive theories (he calls them “absolutist”) are unverifiable. Ayer also, somewhat weakly, claims that since we have made such great use of verification regarding synthetic statements, it “would undermine the whole of our main argument” if it turns out that ethical statements are factual but unverifiable (LTL, 106).
In so doing, Ayer thus tries to find a middle position. If ethical terms are reducible to empirical facts, then they are of concern to sociologists and psychologists but not to philosophers; ethical concepts are also unanalyzable for Ayer (as they are for absolutists), but his reason is that they are “mere pseudo-concepts” (LTL, 107). They add nothing to an empirical proposition; if you say that “You acted wrongly by stealing that money,” you add nothing to the empirical and verifiable content of the judgment, but you are “simply evincing [your] moral disapproval of it.”
Normative ethical statements describe nothing about the empirical world; by making them, we are “merely expressing certain moral sentiments” (LTL, 107) rather than truth-apt, factual sentences that have cognitive content. Furthermore, they might arouse feelings and induce others to carry out certain actions and even take the form of a command. Ethical statements, and value statements in general, “are unverifiable for the same reason as a cry of pain or a word of command is unverifiable— because they do not express genuine propositions” (LTL, 108–109).
With this radical view under his belt, Ayer quickly caused a stir at Oxford and beyond. Perhaps more than anything else, his ethical views