ABSTRACT
A.J Ayer a logical positivist and indeed at all his fellow
logical positivists were moved by the achievements and clarities in science and
as it were, they moved to bring these achievements and clarities in science
into philosophy. They believed that there are ambiguities and confusion in
philosophical languages and that such ambiguities and confusions would be a
thing of the past in philosophy when they are all jettisoned. It was their view
also that those ambiguities in philosophy gave rise to metaphysics. Metaphysics
for these positivists was to be expunged because it contained no knowledge as
it purports to give. They (positivists) termed its knowledge pseudo-knowledge.
In this work therefore, I wish to show that no matter the amount of attack
directed to metaphysics by Ayer and his co-positivists, metaphysics will never
be eliminated because man must go beyond the physical to explain realities
like: life, God, man, world and man’s place in it, justice etc. for the sake of
this work, I shall employ analytical method in order to do justice to this
work.
CHAPTER ONE
1.0 GENERAL INTRODUCTION
Philosophy which began
vigorously from the Ancient periods with its attendant rigorosity and
criticality in reasoning have apparently gone beyond the era of animism and
anthropomorphism that marked the works of Homer and Hesiod no thanks to the
seeming criticality with which the early lonian philosophers philosophized.
Various philosophies were put up, some rejecting the existing culture status
quo ante, others supporting the prevalent culture condition by way of
proffering solutions. This brings out the truism in the fact that there is no
subject or field of study which began without any basis or what Heidegger would
call the prestructure of understanding extending also to the maxim of
Gardemer that no one speaks from nowhere. Bringing out organically therefore
the importance of Heideggerian prestructure of understanding to the development
of philosophy, F. Copleston avows “one does not need to know very much about
the history of philosophy in order to realize that philosophy does not develop
in complete isolation from other elements of human culture.”1 In the
light of the above, the emergence of the logical positivists with their
principle of verification is precipitated by some antecedents.
The
principle of verification became for A.J. Ayer, a member of the Vienna circle,
and indeed all the logical positivists a vademecum for their
philosophical activities.
It must be noted that the
first glimmers of the principle of verification were first observed in the
ancient philosophers who tried to situated being or reality with what could be
seen. Thales choice of water as the cause of reality is a telling sign of this
long marathon. Furthermore, the echo became louder and clearer in the late
medieval times when William of Ockham came up with the idea of nominalism which
postulated that “science as objective knowledge of necessary connections can be
validated without postulating
mysterious universal entities out there.”2 This brought about a
complete over hauling of the dominant views as it opposed other views such as
conceptualism, realism, moderate realism etc. Capturing the scenario more
aptly, Copleston opined “…the nominalist spirit if one may so speak, was
inclined to analysis rather than to synthesis, and to criticism rather than to speculation.”3
The full import of the nominalists’ spirit was that “…through their critical
analysis of the metaphysical ideas… the nominalists left faith hanging in the
air without (so far as philosophy is concerned) any rational basis.”4
This view
when pursed to its logical conclusion set the ground for the elimination of
metaphysics. It must be noted and just in line with what Copleston said that
“the development of mathematical and scientific studies by
such 14th century figures as Nicholas of Oresme, Albert of Saxony
and Marsilius of Inghen is generally associated with the Ockhamist
movement.”5 Bacon’s idea of induction and the distempers of learning
gave a sure background to this in the late Renaissance.
In the modern period, Descartes’
quest for certainly and clarity of knowledge was informed by the Renaissance
trail blazing effort, although Descartes toed the rationalist line, he was
nevertheless triggered off by the sole desire to make philosophy certain and
clear with his “methodic doubt”. Empiricism, it must be noted rose at this
period with John Locke and David Hume as the notable progenitors. As a matter
of fact, Empiricism could be taken to be the most pronounced and indeed the
foremost background to logical positivism.
In the contemporary era, the
rise of idealism became a blessing in disguise; idealism opposed to logical
positivism in all ramifications inadvertently gave rise to the idea of logical positivism.
The effect of the attack carried out against idealism (both British and German)
by B. Russell and G.E. Moore which swoop the up-coming philosophers had a
lasting impression on them as so logical positivism was evolved. Suffice it, to
say that though both Russell and Moore were joint in their attack against
idealism, nonetheless they were non-aligned in their mode of the attack. R.R.
Ammerman succinctly captured this position when he aptly observed:
Moore and Russell were in
complete agreement about what was wrong with idealism or how best to expose the
error contained in it. On the contrary, their differing interest soon led them
in diverging directions, although they remained united always in their
rejection of Neo-Hegelianison.6
In this joint rejection, each
carved a niche for himself of course with parallel positions, Moore vacated
with common sense realism, Russell parted with logical atomism. They each
anchored their philosophies tenaciously on their divergent positions. The
introduction of Ludwig Wittgenstein was by no means a surprise as he was the
sharpest of B. Russell’s students. His Tractatus Logico-Phiosophicus was
somehow anticipated as he built his philosophy upon that of Russell.
These simmering philosophical attitudes become as they were the fountain-head
and the prelude to the rise of logical positivism as pursued by the Vienna
circle.
Be that as
it may, the logical positivists have the principle of verification as their
major arrow head on which their project is foundationed. This principle of
verification implicitly means that the meaning of a proposition is the method
of its verification. In this sense, it looks set to provide a criterion of
meaningfulness. By extrapolation, this verification principle suffocates those
propositions that does not fall under its ambient and tagged them meaningless.
In this way, metaphysical statements, ethical statement and the likes were
branded as nonsensical and pseudo-statements.
By and large, when we beam
our critical torchlight on the strength of the philosophies of Ayer and the
logical positivists, to say that it contains an inherent contradictions and
inconsistencies will be to belabour the obvious, for it will be apodictically
true, that the verification principle is masquerading in some incoherencies and
inconsistencies. This suggests that their (logical positivists’) views may not
altogether be correct or dogmatically conclusive. This essay takes it upon
itself therefore to be a critique of the verification principle in its quest to
deny and eliminate metaphysics. In the end, we shall deduce whether the
verification principle emerged victorious in its quest to eliminate
metaphysics or whether it is only crying wolf where there in none.
A
SHORT BIOGRAPHY OF SIR ALFRED JULES AYER
Sir Alfred Ayer was born in
1910. He was educated at Eton and Christ Church as a King’s scholar and as a
classical scholar respectively. His interest in philosophy was developed by
Gilbert Ryle who encouraged him to spend some time in Vienna. It was while at
the University of Vienna that he attended the meetings of the Vienna circle and
subsequently got converted to logical positivism. During the Second World War,
he spent most of his time in military intelligence. After the war, he became
Grote Professor of philosophy of mind and logic at the University College
London. He left London to become the Wykeham Professor of logic at the
University of Oxford, and also a fellow of New College Oxford from 1959. During
this period, Ayer became a fellow to many colleges. He became a prominent and
well-known public figure in England at this point and began appearing in radio
and television programmes. He was knighted in 1970.
Ayer made his name as a
philosopher with the publication of his major work, language, logic and
truth in 1936; this work also established him as the leading English
representative of logical positivism, a doctrine put forward by a group of
philosophers that are known
as the members of the Vienna Circle. The major argument of the logical
positivists which was defended greatly by Ayer was that all literally
meaningful propositions were either analytic (true or false in virtue of the
meaning of the proposition alone) or verifiable by experience. Ayer was influence
by the philosophers of the Vienna Circle especially Moritz Schlick, Rudolf
Carnap, Gilbert Ryle whom he calls mentor and Isaac Berlin.
Ayer took special interest in
encouraging the young philosophers who more often than not refer to him as “Freddie”.
After his rest from strenuous philosophic activities, he continued to support
the annual British philosophical journals. Ayer married four times and one
remarriage.
Ayer saw himself as one of
the descendants of the British empiricism fathered by John Locke and David Hume
and which was continued by B. Russell and G.E. Moore. He wrote extensively both
articles and books in the areas of philosophy of mind and science. Sir Alfred
Ayer died in June 1989.
The logical positivist tied
with the apron of clarity and tempered solely by the achievements of science as
they were mainly scientifically minded philosophers or philosophically minded
scientists were ipso facto thorough going empiricists. For them, any
knowledge that transcends the limits of sense expression is not possible. They
also have it that the problems of philosophy were nothing but linguistic
problem due to ambiguities and lack of clarity in the use of words, and when those
ambiguities are cleared then there would no longer be anything of such like
philosophical problems. Wittgenstein in support will say “what can be said at
all can be said clearly, and what we cannot talk about we must pass over in
silence.”7 A.J. Ayer, stating his anger against the metaphysicians,
audaciously said:
The fruitlessness of
attempting to transcend the limits of possible sense experience will be
deduced, not from a psychological hypothesis concerning the actual constitution
of the human mind, but from the rules which determines the literal significance
of language. Our charge against the metaphysician is that… he produced
sentences which fail to conform to the conditions under which alone a sentence
can be literally significant.8
In order to differentiate
meaningful propositions from the meaningless ones, Ayer propounded a criterion
to this effect which he calls The Principle of Verification. With this
principle, he and other positivists set to clear from philosophy problem arising
from the lack of clarity of words or proposition. But then the question is “To
what extent can they succeed”?
1.2
STATEMENT OF THE PROBLEM
The search for “what is” has
been an age long dispute in philosophy. The early Greek philosophers started to
philosophize with the question – “Ex qua materia constituti mundi” (Of
what material is the world made of?). As different eras passed by, the question
became more aptly situated in a branch of philosophy known as “Epistemology” or
“The Theory of Knowledge”. The question then took a different dimension to be
“what is truth or knowledge? How do we know that we know?”
In response to this question,
different schools of thought erupted with their divergent positions as to the
different modes of knowing. We are very conversant with the cat and dog war
posture between the two worldviews that dominated the modern era of philosophy
– that is the empiricists and the rationalists. They were trying to defend
graciously their standpoint as to the ideal mode of knowing. Kant steps into
the stage this period in an attempt to synthesize the views of the empiricists
and the rationalists. Kantian synthesis took the form of “Copernican
Revolution”
This means for G. Ozumba that “he was able to show that knowledge acquisition
involved a co-operative activity between the senses and the perceiving mind…
the external world of phenomena does not impose itself on the mind as the empiricists
believed but that it is the mind that imposes it’s a priori categories on the
world of phenomena.”9 Hegel at this point appeared in Germany with
his absolute idealism. Later the German idealism was transferred to England
where F.H Bradley, Mc Taggart and Bosanquet became its erstwhile apostles. It
was however in a bid to debunk idealism (both British and German) that G.E.
Moore and B. Russell developed the ideas of common sense and logical atomism
respectively. Next on stage was Ludwig Wittgenstein who was a student of
Russell. Wittgenstein still drinking from the philosophical tea bowl of Russell
wrote his first major work “Tractatus logico-philosophicus” in 1921. At
the production of this work, the logical positivist took it (Tractatus)
as their philosophical bible and posited that it contained the canons of their
principle.
It was under the influence of
this Tractatus that A.J Ayer and indeed other logical positivists
brought out with vigor the verification principle and delineated it to be both
a theory of meaning and criterion of meaningfulness. With this principle as his
bedrock, Ayer submits “until he [the metaphysician] makes us understand how the
proposition that he wishes to express would be verified, he fails to
communicate anything to us.”11Against this
backdrop therefore, whatever that does not pass the acid test of this principle
should be considered not just nonsensical but also meaningless. Under this
verification shade, metaphysics was to be eliminated.
1.3
THE PURPOSE OF THE STUDY
It is the aim of the writer
to determine whether or not A.J Ayer succeeded in eliminating metaphysics with
his verification principle. As a matter of clarity, the principle which serves
as a weapon in the hands of Ayer will first be exposed and subjected under the
sledge hammer of reason in order to establish its validity. When the principle
holds sway, then it might accomplish its tasks, and when the reverse is the
case then the principle will not at all be tenable and its task will not also
be feasible.
1.4
SCOPE OF THE STUDY
Alfred Jules Ayer, a logical
positivist, in his great really work Language, logic and Truth had only
one mission which is to eliminate metaphysics on the ground that its
utterances are due in large
part to the commission of logical errors. In order to circumscribe and arrest
the situation, Ayer and his fellow positivists came up with the criterion of
meaning called “the principle of verification’’. In order to do justice to the
thesis, the whole corpus of logical positivism and what they stand for will be
carefully exposed. In this light, the principle of verification will be
carefully and overtly highlighted with a view to dissecting how far it has
fared in its denial and subsequent elimination of metaphysics.
In a bid to carefully do
justice to this work, the chapters have been divided into five. The first
chapter takes care of the general introduction. The second chapter deals with
the literature review. Chapter three deals with analyzing of concepts to make
way for a profound comprehension of the whole idea of verification principle,
while the penultimate chapter tackles Ayer’s attempt to eliminate metaphysics
and the varied nuances and dimensions of the verification principle. The last
chapter hugely criticizes Ayer’s arguments with that of the logical positivists
against metaphysics. Evaluation and conclusion would sequentially follow suit.
It will be very correct to
say that an outright elimination of metaphysics based on the verification
principle is not possible. First among the reasons is that man is inextricably
and inexorably metaphysical and once we accept the fact that man is made up of
both material and immaterial elements, then we would be able to understand the
natural and irresistible urge towards metaphysics. Kant despite his devastating
critique of metaphysics had to admit that man has within him, the natural urge
towards metaphysics. The logical positivists did not explore these options.
Nevertless, they brought to bare another dimension with their analysis of
philosophical language. At least for the records, it made philosophers to be
more self-critical in their use of language than they have hitherto been. Going
by the above therefore, it will be very apt to say then that the significant of
this work is to show that metaphysics cannot be eliminated based on the logical
positivist’s criterion.
1.6
METHODOLOGY
The question of methodology
in a work of this magnitude cannot be over emphasized, and as the topic
suggests, the methodology to be employed will be largely expository,
analytical, critical and evaluative.
The historical point of view of the topic is however not overlooked. Efforts
will be made at a clear explanation of certain terms employed.
1.7
DEFINITION OF TERMS
Etymologically, the word
metaphysics comes for the Greek word Ta Meta Ta physika which means
“next after physics”. The word metaphysics as it is being used today was
first and foremost coined by Andronicus of Rhodes. As he was chronicling the
books of Aristotle, he (Andronicus) came upon the book that was after the one
named physics. As he was perusing through its contents, he noticed that its
subject matter transcends those in physics; he therefore decided to name it
metaphysics, which of course literally means “after-physics’’. According to B.
Ewelu, there are two possible reason why this title was given to this treatise:
Either because it comes after
the treatise on physics (Meta Ta physika - that which comes after physics) or
because the issues discussed in this treatise are about things that transcends
the physical world, such that metaphysics would mean beyond physics or beyond
the physical world.12
Be that as it may, the task
of saying what metaphysics is and what it is not by way of definition has being
on uphill task and any attempt towards this has always hit the rock or proved
abortive. The reason for the above situation is not for fetched as true to
any branch of philosophy, any attempt towards its definition has always divided
philosophers into warring camps and as such philosophies have always been
docked in and miraged in the elusive attempt to define such field. Metaphysics
being a branch of philosophy enjoys such a position as well. Moreover, this
does not mean that we cannot sieve out at least a welcomed and working
definition of the term. Metaphysics as a matter of fact is the science that
concerns itself with the first principles and realities in general. It is
essential both in the arts and in science. Metaphysics is therefore according
to Ozumba:
All pervasive in man’s quest
for a better understanding of the universe. It is because of this that
metaphysics is seen to be very close to epistemology which is a theory of
knowledge that examines the extent to which we can know.14
Metaphysics
in this respect has a method which does not lie in sense experience. It uses
abstract thinking as its method. Its method then is a prior
(Ratio-cinative), which involves reasoning on pure insights.
The practice of metaphysics
started from antiquity and reached its climax in the German idealism of Kant,
Hegel, Fitche and Schelling. In Britain, Bradley and Mc Taggart and also the
logical atomism of Russell and Wittgenstein were metaphysical.
REFERENCES
(1)
F. Copleston, A History of
philosophy: logical Positivism and Existentialism Vol. X1 (New York:
Continuum books, 2003) p.26.
(2)
C. Udebunu, The Scholastics,
Unpublished Lecture Note, 2004, p.27.
(3)
F. Copleston, A History of
Philosophy: Late Medieval and Renaissance philosophy. Vol. 3
(New York: Continuum books, 2003), p.11.
(4)
Ibid.
(5)
Ibid. p.15.
(6)
Lifes and Times of A.J. Ayer
culled from his book – language Logic and Truth
(7)
R.R. Ammerman (ed). Classics of
Analytic Philosophy (New York: Mc Graw-Hill Book, 1985), p.4.
(8)
L. Wittgenstein, Tractatus
Logico-philosophicus, ed trans by D.F. Pears & B.F.Mc Guinness (London:
Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974), p.3.
(9)
A.J. Ayer, Language, Logic and
Truth (London: Penguin
books,
1990), p.15.
(10)
G.O. Ozumba, The Philosophy of
Logical Positivism and the Growth of science (Calabar: Bacos
Publication, 2001),
p.9
(11)
A.J. Ayer, op. cit., p.17.
(12)
B. Ewelu, Metaphysics,
Unpublished lecture Note, 2006 p.1
(13)
Ibid., p. 43.
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