Criticism of the Verification Principle in A.J. Ayers Book Language, Truth and Logic :: Philosophy

Criticism of the Verification Principle in A.J. Ayers Book Language, Truth and system of logicINTRODUCTION This essay will consist in an exposition and reproval of the Verification Principle, as fill outed by A.J. Ayer in his obtain Language, Truth and Logic. Ayer, wrote this book in 1936, but also wrote a new introduction to the imprimatur edition ten years later. The latter amounted to a revision of his in the beginning theses on the prescript.It is to both accounts that this essay shall be referring. Firstly, I shall expound the substantiation teaching. I shall then present that its condition of significant types is inexhaustible, and that this makes the principle inapplicable. In doing so, I shall have exposed serious inconsistencies in Ayers theory of meaning, which is a necessary part of his modified verification principle. I shall also expound Ayers theory of knowledge, as related in his book. I will show this theory to contain logical errors, making his modified ver sion of the principle flawed from a second angle. The relationship of this essay with the two foregoing essays of this series can be understood from Ayers Preface to the First strain of his book The views which argon put forward in this treatise derive from the doctrines of Bertrand Russell and Wittgenstein. For understate interest, Language, Truth and Logic was written aft(prenominal) Ayer had attended some of the meetings of the capital of Austria Circle, in the 1930s. Friedrich Waismann and Moritz Schlick headed these logical positivists of Vienna. Their principle doctrine can be verbalize to have been founded in the meetings they had with Wittgenstein and their interpretation of his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Ayers book expounds and, in his view, improves on the principle doctrine of the Vienna Circle the verification principle. Waismann and Schlick adopted this principle after it was first given to them by Wittgenstein himself. Waismann recorded the conversation, wher e Wittgenstein stated If I say, for example, Up in that location on the cupboard there is a book, how do I mountain about verifying it? Is it sufficient if I glance at it, or if I look at it from different sides, or if I tackle it into my hands, touch it, open it, turn its leaves, and so forth? There are two conceptions here. One of them says that however I set about it, I shall never be able to verify the propose completely. A proposition always keeps a back door open, as it were.