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Philosophy & Theology Pre-u Paper 2 – Topic 2. Philosophical and Theological Language HYPERLINK \l "verificationismandfalsificationism" Verificationism and falsificationism HYPERLINK \l "ethicallanguage" Ethical language HYPERLINK \l "mythsymbolanalogy" Myth, symbol, analogy, Language games HYPERLINK \l "theconceptofgod" The concept of God HYPERLINK \l "basilmitchel" Basil Mitchell: The Philosophy of Religion HYPERLINK \l "ajayerlanguagetruthlogic" A J Ayer: Language, Truth and LogicVerificationism and falsificationismVerificationism was invented by the logical positivists of the Vienna Circle, a group of philosophers, the most famous of which was A. J. Ayer. Their theory of meaning was that words get their meaning by connecting to the world or by being true by definition. If a word connects to the world, that connection should be verifiable. The verification principle states that in order to be meaningful, something must be either 1) analytically true or 2) empirically verifiable. Religious language is neither analytically true nor empirically verifiable because ‘God’ is a metaphysical term according to Ayer which means it is about something beyond the empirical world, so there can be no way to empirically verify it. Ayer’s theory was criticised for being overly restrictive of meaning. Wouldn’t History be considered meaningless because it can’t be empirically verified? To respond to this, Ayer came up with weak and strong verification. We can strongly verify whatever we can conclusively verify by observation and experience, so there is no doubt about it. We can weakly verify anything for which there is some evidence which points to its probably being the case. E.g. Historical documents and archaeological findings can be strongly verified, and on the basis of those we can weakly verify that there were certain civilisations in the past with certain histories to them.Ayer argued for weak verification, that if it’s possible to know what would verify a statement in principle, then it is meaningful. However, Ayer was dissatisfied with this strong/weak distinction. The problem with strong verification is that it can’t apply to anything, since mere observation cannot establish conclusive proof of anything beyond all doubt. The problem with weak verification is that it could potentially justify anythingAyer accepted this and finally improved his theory into:Direct verification – a statement that is verifiable by observation. E.g. ‘I see a house’ is directly verifiable and so has factual meaning.Indirect verification – when things we have directly verified support a statement which we can’t directly verify, we can be said to have indirect verification for it. E.g. ‘This key is made of iron’. The verification principle can’t verify itself. It states that for something to be meaningful, it must be analytic or empirically verifiable, however that means that in order for IT to be meaningful, IT must be empirically verifiable. Ayer responded to this by arguing that the verification principle was just a definition not a truth claim.It’s unclear how this works as a response since definitions have to be meaningful too.Swinburne argued that we know what it means for toys in a cupboard to come alive when no one is there to see them, therefore no way to verify, yet it’s still meaningful.Hick argued that there is a way to verify religious language, because when we die we’ll see God and then we’ll know.Falsificationism was invented by Karl Popper who thought he could capture empiricism better than verificationism could. Popper was impressed with Einstein who claimed Mercury would wobble in its orbit at a certain time in the future because if he was wrong, his theory would be falsified. Popper was less impressed with marxists and freudians because they only looked for verifications of their views without ever admitting a way they could be falsified. Popper illustrated this with swans the claim ‘all swans are white’ which to be verified would require knowing that at no point in time nor at any place in the universe did a non-white swan ever exist. However, the claim is falsifiable because we can say what would prove it wrong; seeing a non-white swan. Anthony Flew applied this to religious language. He claimed that because religious people can’t say what logically possible state of affairs is incompatible with their claim that God exists (in other words, because they can’t say what would prove them wrong), they are not actually asserting anything about the way things are (since there is no entailed claim about the way things are not). Therefore Flew considers religious language meaningless.P1 - A claim about the way the world is entails a claim about the way the world is not. (e.g saying the chair is blue entails that it is not red)P2 - Disproving something involves showing the world is not as it claims. P3 - If something cannot be disproven than it is not committed to a claim about the way the world is not.C1 – In that case, an unfalsifiable claim cannot be a claim about the way the world is. Swinburne argued that we understand what it means for toys in a cupboard to come alive when no one is there to see it. There is no way to falsify this, yet it is still meaningful, therefore something doesn’t have to be falsifiable in order to be meaningful.A falsificationist could respond that if someone doesn’t understand how or why the toys come alive, then perhaps they can’t really be said to actually grasp the meaning of it. This seems quite a restrictive view of meaning however. Do we have to understand something in order to know what it means?St Paul claimed that if Jesus’ body were discovered then belief and faith in Christianity would be pointless. This suggests Flew is incorrect to think religious language is always unfalsifiable as there are at least some believers whose belief is incompatible with some logically possible state of affairs. That would show that Paul’s religious language would pass Flew’s test of falsification and so would be meaningful.The parable of the gardener is how Flew illustrated his response to claims like St Paul’s. Two people are walking and see a garden. One claims there is a gardener who tends to it, so the other suggest waiting and seeing if that is true. After a while, the other says ‘actually, they are an invisible gardener’, so they set up barbed wire fences and so on to try and detect this invisible gardener, at which point they then say ‘actually, it’s a non-physical gardener’. Flew’s point is that this is what religious people do whenever anyone tries to empirically test their belief. Some excuse is made about why that test is not appropriate. But for every excuse made, a potential empirical foothold for God is removed, thereby causing the concept of God to ‘die a death of a thousand qualifications’ – Flew. If there is no logically possible state of affairs which we could investigate that would be incompatible with the belief in God, then it is unfalsifiable and so meaningless.Flew’s response to Paul, based on the parable of the gardener, would be that if we actually found Jesus’ body, Paul would make up some excuse as to why that test was not a valid empirical test of his religious belief after all. Perhaps he would claim the devil put a fake body there, for example.The falsification principle cannot falsify itself and is therefore meaningless. Popper responded to this criticism by claiming that falsificationism was not a criterion of meaning, just a method of distinguishing the empirical from the non-empirical. Since Flew used falsificationism as a criterion of meaning, however, it seems he makes falsificationism vulnerable to the same criticism verificationism had.Mitchell argued against flew’s conclusions with the parable of the partisan. Mitchell argued that rather than need to say what would prove them wrong, religious belief can be said to be connected to empirical reality if it allows empirical evidence to count against it, like the problem of evil. Mitchell imagines the example of a soldier fighting for the resistence against the government in a civil war. One day someone comes to them and claims to be the leader of the resistance, on their side, but a double agent pretending to be on the other side. The soldier decides to have faith in this person, even when they see them fighting for the government. This is analogous to faith in God, despite the counter evidence of the problem of evil. Mitchell’s point is that religious people do allow empirical evidence to count against their belief, they simply judge overall to retain faith. Their belief is connected to empirical reality as a consequence however, and can therefore be said to be cognitively meaningful according to Mitchell.Arguably Mitchell’s criteria for falsifiability are insufficient. Merely allowing evidence to count against your belief doesn’t make it falsifiable. Only being able to say what would prove it wrong, not merely count against it, makes something falsifiable.Blicks. R. M. Hare disagreed with the cognitivism of veriticationism and falsificationism and instead argued for non-cognitivism. Hare argued that religious language doesn’t get its meaning from attempting to describe the world, but from expressing ‘attitudes’ – which he called a Blick. The expression of attitudes is not an attempt to describe the world, therefore they cannot be true or false. Hare illustrated this with the example of a paranoid student who thought his professors were trying to kill him. Even when shown the evidence that they were not trying to kill him, by meeting them and seeing they were nice people, the student did not change their mind. Hare argued this shows that what we say about the world is really an expression of our Blick rather than an attempt to describe the world. If it were an attempt to describe the world, the meaning could be changed by that description being shown to be false. Because the meaning in the students mind was not changed by contrary evidence, Hare concluded that meaning must be connected to a non-cognitive attitude or Blick.Although Hare saves religious language from being disregarded as a meaningless failed attempt to describe the world, nonetheless he only does so by sacrificing the ability of the meaning of religious language to have any factual content. So when a religious person says ‘God exists,’ for Hare they are really expressing their attitude rather than actually claiming that there objectively exists a God. Many religious people would claim however, that they really do mean that ‘there objectively exists a God’, irrespective of their attitude. Aquinas wrote many long books attempting to prove the seemingly cognitive belief in God true. So arguably Hare fails to capture the true meaning of religious languageHare could respond that although many religious people may indeed feel like they are making factual claims about reality, their conception of reality is really just an aspect of their Blick. Saying God exists therefore really serves to add psychological force and grandeur to what is actually just their attitude. Ethical languageMeta Ethics is a branch of Philosophy which developed quite late in intellectual history, starting a little with Hume but not really getting going until G. E. Moore who recognized the possibility of asking not what is good but what good is. Kant’s ethics, Aquinas’ natural law, Utilitarianism and so on were before Moore and all make a claim about what good is, but meta-ethics deals much more exclusively with that question of what good is, which opens up a domain of philosophical investigation ‘above’ standard ethics (hence ‘meta-ethics’) in which competing meta-ethical theories each provide argument for what they claim good actually is.There are two main aspects to meta-ethics:LinguisticWhat is the meaning of ethical language? Cognitivism - ethical language expresses beliefs about reality which can therefore be true or false.Non-cognitivism - ethical language expresses some non-cognition like an emotion, does not attempt to describe reality and therefore cannot be true or false.MetaphysicalWhat is the actual nature of morality in reality? Realism vs anti-realismRealism: The view that moral properties exist in reality.Anti-realism: The view that moral properties do not exist in reality.Normative ethics are ethical theories which attempt to devise a system by which we can distinguish right from wrong, e.g Utilitarianism, Kant’s ethics, Natural law, Situation Ethics, etc. Normative ethical theories all have a Meta-ethical core from which they proceed. For example, utilitarianism claims that goodness = happiness. That is a meta-ethical view about what goodness is. Once Utilitarianism has established that, it goes on to create the hedonic calculus and so on, making a system by which we can decide how we ought to act, which is the normative part of theory.Ethical Naturalism – is the view that goodness is something real in the world. Ethical language is meaningful as it describes some real property in the world. So ‘X is good’ is essentially the same type of statement in terms of how it is true as ‘X is made of wood’. It is made true by facts in the world. Utilitarianism claims that goodness = pleasure or happiness. Pleasure and happiness are natural properties (at least if you don’t believe in a non-natural soul). Meta-ethically, Utilitarianism is therefore a form of naturalism, moral realism and cognitivism.The linguistic claims of Utilitarian naturalism are straightforwardly that ethical language is cognitivist as it functions no differently to expression of any other type of belief about reality. To describe the color of the table, I say ‘the table is brown’. This is an indicative sentence expressing a belief about reality. The ethical language ‘stealing from a bank is good’ is no different for the utilitarian naturalist. It is an indicative sentence and a proposition about reality which will be either true or false depending on whether that particular action of stealing leads to the greatest happiness for the greatest number.Bentham’s Utilitarian naturalism: “Nature has placed us under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure. It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do, as well as to determine what we shall do … a man may pretend to abjure their empire: but in reality he will remain subject to it all the while”. Bentham’s argument is that it is our human nature to seek pleasure and avoid pain, so that’s all there is for morality to be about. We just are the kind of thing which cannot help but find pleasure good and pain bad. Bentham claims we could try to pretend otherwise but cannot escape this nature. As this is a fact of our nature, it is therefore a fact that goodness = pleasure.Mill’s proof of utilitarianism attempted to prove that happiness was the one thing that people wanted for its own sake. He drew an analogy with sight, claiming that the only evidence for something being visible is that it is seen, and so the only evidence for something being desirable is that it is desired. The proof that happiness is desirable is therefore that it is desired. It follows for Mill that because he has proved that happiness is desirable, it therefore ought to be desired and so utilitarian naturalism is true.G. E. Moore argued that Mill commits the fallacy of equivocation here, which is when you use a word which has two meanings and fail to make it clear which meaning you intend in a way that damages your argument. ‘Visible’ does just mean ‘can be seen’ but to suggest it is analogous to ‘desirable’ is to equivocate as ‘Desirable’ could mean ‘capable of being desired’ but also ‘should be desired’. Mill has proved that people are capable of desiring happiness but not that happiness should be desired, so he has failed to show that goodness = happiness.Mill isn’t claiming absolute proof however. As an empiricist, Mill is looking for evidence. While it’s certainly the case that people can actually desire what they should not desire, nonetheless if there is something that everyone desires i.e. happiness, then that is evidence which makes it reasonable to infer that happiness should be desired. Hume’s law criticises naturalism. Hume said philosophers talk about the way things are and then jump with no apparent justification to a claim about the way things ought to be. Hume claimed this was a fallacy as is-statements do not entail ought-statements.?Hume argues that you could be aware of all the facts about a situation yet if you then pass a moral judgement, that clearly cannot have come from ‘the understanding’ nor be ‘the work of judgement’ but instead come from ‘the heart’ and is ‘not a speculative proposition’ but an ‘active feeling or sentiment’. This looks like an argument against realism but also against cognitivism and for non-cognitivism, specifically emotivism.To illustrate, take the example of abortion. Some argue that because a foetus develops brain activity at a certain time, it’s wrong to do abortion past that point. However, that inference has a hidden premise; that it’s wrong to kill something which has brain activity. It’s a fact that the foetus has brain activity, but that it’s wrong to kill something with brain activity does not seem like a fact nor derived from a fact. We might try and justify that further by suggesting that it’s wrong to kill human life or cause pain and so on. However, while it’s factual that there is such a thing as the ending of human life and the causing of pain, is it a fact that doing such things are wrong? We can easily imagine what sort of evidence establishes that ‘pain can be caused’ is a fact, but it’s not easy to see how to do that to establish that ‘it’s wrong to cause pain’ is a fact. Bentham does think that certain is-statements entail ought-statements but and gives an argument for that. He do not simply ‘leap’ from is to ought without justification, so as long as his argument works they could be considered to solve Hume’s is-ought gap.The open question argument is Moore’s main argument against naturalism.If goodness were identical to some natural property like happiness as utilitarians claim, then the statement 'Goodness is happiness' should be equal in meaning to 'happiness is happiness'. If A and B are identical, then they should be interchangeable such that 'A = B' should mean the same as 'B = B'. However, Moore argued that since a naturalist is claiming that goodness is a natural property (like happiness) then 'Goodness = X natural property' must be a synthetic statement about the world, yet 'happiness = happiness' is analytic. A synthetic statement cannot be equivalent in meaning to an analytic one, therefore they do not have the same meaning and therefore cannot be identical.A question is closed if it shows ignorance of the meanings of the terms involved to ask. A question is open if it does not display ignorance of those meanings to ask it. Since 'Goodness = X natural property' for a naturalist would be synthetic, one could be acquainted with the subject (goodness) but not the predicate (X natural property) and therefore would not necessarily be displaying ignorance of the terms involved to ask the question. Therefore, it will always be an open question whether goodness really is X natural property as we can always meaningfully and intelligibly ask the question 'is goodness really X natural property?'Some have argued that Moore’s argument is merely a case of the paradox of analysis. The reason for its failure is clearer when applied to the case of water and H2O. If H2O = water, then H2O = water should be equal in meaning to H2O = H2O. Yet the former is synthetic and the latter analytic. Moore’s logic seems to imply that water cannot be equivalent in meaning to H2O.W.D. Ross defended intuitionism from this criticism, arguing that in cases other than ‘goodness’, such as the water and H2O example, proper understanding of the definition of water as H2o will lead one to realise that ‘water = H2O’ is actually analytic. In that case, H2O = water is equivalent in meaning to H2O = H2O, and therefore water does = H2O. However due to Moore’s claim that ‘goodness’ cannot be defined, that cannot be done with goodness. No amount of understanding of the term ‘goodness’ can make you think that ‘goodness = happiness’ is equivalent to ‘happiness = happiness’.Arguably Moore can only prove that the linguistic concepts of goodness and happiness are distinct concepts that cannot be identical. Metaphysically, the property of goodness and the property of happiness could still be non-analytically identical. The concepts may be non-identical, but in this universe they might happen to be identical. For example, there is a possible world in which water is not H2O, so the concepts ‘water’ and ‘H2O’ are not analytically identical but do have synthetic identity in this universe. The same might be true of goodness and happiness in this universe. The distinct concepts of ‘goodness’ and ‘happiness’ when instantiated as properties in this universe might happen to refer to the same property. So, Moore’s proof of conceptual distinctness (analytic non-identity) does not rule out the synthetic property identity of goodness and happiness.Moore’s naturalistic fallacy was influenced by Hume and went on to argue that goodness can't be equated with any natural property (like happiness) as any attempt to do so commits the naturalistic fallacy. Moore claimed that we can’t define goodness. We can’t say what goodness is. It is like the color yellow - you can't describe or define yellow, you just experience it and can only point to yellow things. What is yellow? What does it look like? Just yellow... Moore says the same is true for goodness. Therefore, goodness can't be a naturalistic thing as naturalistic things can all be defined. So, we experience goodness, which Moore clams is due to a faculty of intuition.Moore’s non-naturalism: Intuitionism holds that when we observe or reflect on a moral situation, such as someone stealing, our intuition gives us the proposition ‘stealing is wrong’, depending on the consequences. This isn’t reducing morality to some subjective feeling however. Just as all humans have no choice but to perceive the color yellow when looking at a yellow thing, Moore thinks humans have no choice but to apprehend the truth or falsity of a moral proposition when observing or reflecting on the relevant moral situation. He thinks this occurs because we apprehend ‘non-natural properties’. Intuitionism is cognitivist as Moore thinks that ethical language expresses a belief about the non-natural reality, which is based on an intuition. Moore is criticised for having an indulgent metaphysics of non-natural properties existing in a supersensible realm being somehow apprehended by a mysterious faculty of intuition. How could he possibly prove any of this?Moore responds by making an analogy between his non-natural notion of ‘goodness’ and numbers, saying that neither ‘exist’ but do have ‘being’ in some way. Moore says there is no supersensible reality. By ‘intuitive’ he only meant not inferred from other kinds of knowledge like logical or natural truths.Mathematics has other sources of verification however, such as its use in physics and engineering. It’s possible goodness functions similarly to maths, but does it? Moore is claiming both that there are truths which are neither natural nor logical truths which can be accessed in a non-empirical way. This is unacceptable to empiricists who would question how Moore could possibly know this. Isn’t it more evidence based and simpler to claim instead that intuitions come merely from upbringing and social conditioning, thereby making them subjective, anti-realist and relativistic?Moral disagreement. Not everyone has the same intuition about what is ethically good or bad. How can Moore explain moral disagreement if everyone has intuitive access to objectively true moral propositions?Moore firstly argued that people often fail to be as clear as possible in their ethical propositions. Moore secondly argued that the process of figuring out ethical truth required fitting your intuited moral propositions together which must be coherent, thereby requiring you to use reason which thereby provides room moral disagreement.Pritchard, an intuitionist, responds that moral disagreement occurs because some are less morally developed than others.But consider The Pope, the Dali lama, and Peter singer. All are very morally developed people, yet all differ radically in their conception of ethics. This could suggest that intuitions just come from culture and upbringing rather than a non-natural reality. That is the view of moral relativism.Emotivism (non-cognitivist & anti-realist)Hume claimed that “reason is the slave of the passions”. There are everyday examples which illustrate this. When someone criticises your deeply held personal belief, your mind instantly starts thinking of counter-responses. If it cannot think of anything, it starts getting angry and projecting negative psychological motivations into the critic. This looks like your mind has pre-conceived feelings and the role of reason and rationality is merely to provide ad hoc rationalisations to serve our prejudices. Our mind is more like a lawyer than a scientist. This suggests emotivism is true because the cognitive part of the mind is a slave of the non-cognitive part which means that our ethical language is fundamentally expressing non-cognitions.Jonathan Haidt is a psychologist who argues that Hume was certainly right to think that the emotions influence our reasoned moral judgements, but claims that Hume went too far to call reason a ‘slave’ of the passions. Haidt instead argued that the emotions are like an elephant and reason is like a human riding on top of the elephant. For the most part, the elephant will just go wherever it likes, dragging the rider along with it. However the rider can exert some influence over the elephant, especially by paying careful attention to the sort of things that motivate the elephant. Hume’s theory of motivation holds that belief alone cannot motivate action as you need a desire for that – beliefs only providing knowledge of how to achieve that desire. This would rule out purely cognitive states as sufficient for motivating moral action and therefore ethical language must contain at least some non-cognitive element.It could be that ethical language expresses a belief which might cause desires which then motivate action. The ethical language is purely cognitive as it expresses only beliefs which then have secondary non-cognitive effects on us. However, this doesn’t explain why some beliefs motivate desires in some people but not others. If the belief has this secondary non-cognitive effect, shouldn’t it have that effect in anyone who believes it? McDowell responds that beliefs cause desires which then motivate action depending on the mind of the person, specifically their moral outlook and general understanding of how to live (virtue). That explains why the same belief causes a desire in some who might be virtuous but not others who might not be.Ayer agreed with G.E Moore's naturalistic fallacy argument, that 'goodness' could not be identical with any natural property. However, Ayer disregarded Moore's 'non-natural' properties solution as unverifiable. Ayer thinks we are therefore left with the position that there are neither natural nor non-natural moral properties in reality, so anti-realism is true. Ayer’s anti-realism relies on the success of Moore’s arguments against naturalism therefore, however, as his own theory only specifically targets intuitionism.Ayer accepted the fact-value distinction that Hume’s is-ought gap implied. Ayer also thought the connection between moral judgement and motivation and the connection between motivation and feeling, made it most plausible that emotions were the best candidate for explaining the psychological function of ethical language and its unverifiability. Unlike subjectivism which claims we are describing or reporting our feelings, Ayer thinks we are expressing them when using ethical language.Boo/hurrah theory. Ayer concluded ethical language was meaningless according to his verificationist theory of meaning,?since it can't be empirically verified nor is it analytically true. Ayer proposed that rather than attempting to describe reality, ethical language really expresses emotion. Saying 'X is good' is really akin to hitting ur toe on a chair and saying 'oww'. The meaning of 'oww' is that it expresses - it connects to - the part of your mind that feels pain. That feeling of pain is not a cognitive belief that could be true or false. It's the same with ethical language says Ayer - it connects to and expresses non-cognitive emotions, not cognitive beliefs. So 'X is wrong' is really 'boo to X', or 'X is good' is really 'hurrah to X'. Ayer’s metaphysical claims rely on the success of Moore’s arguments against naturalism. Utilitarian naturalism. If Bentham is correct in his metaphysical claims then naturalism is true which makes the metaphysical anti-realist position of emotivism false.The verification principle has the problem that it can't verify itself, so verificationism looks to be incoherent.Ayer claimed that his emotivism would survive even if verificationism and positivism failed. This is because he argued that ethical language was unverifiable because it was not fact stating. Ayer's claim is that there is nothing more to ethics than expressing emotion. It follows that there is no objective?truth nor falsity in ethics. Different people are not good or bad, they just have different emotional associations. Hitler had a particular emotional association towards Jews. There's nothing more that can be said, no way to say Hitler was 'really wrong', just that one might have a different emotional reaction than him.?Some bring up this sort of point as a criticism against emotivism since if this was believed by everyone then the world might descend into anarchy and chaos if there are no?objective ethical principles. This criticism in a way misses the point of meta-ethics however. Meta-ethics is just trying to determine what rightness and wrongness are. We may not like the result, it may indeed lead to the destruction of the world. But that doesn't mean it's incorrect. The science behind nuclear bombs may well end up destroying the world, but that doesn't mean it's incorrect. If ethics really is mere expression of emotion, then we can't disprove that merely by pointing out what would be the consequence of everyone believing that as an argument against its truth.Moral disagreement. Ayer’s dealing with Moore’s issue of moral disagreement simultaneously serves to defend emotivism from a criticism and provide an argument in its favour. Subjectivism is the view that ethical language reports or describes subjective feelings. Moore criticised subjectivism as being unable to explain moral disagreement. Two different subjective feelings cannot ‘disagree’ because they are not representations of objective reality. Ayer states that the impossibility of moral dispute follows from his emotivism too which means Moore’s argument from moral disagreement also applies to his theory. Two different emotions cannot be said to disagree. Ayer admits that people do engage in disputes which are ‘ordinarily’ thought of as disputes about value and have what can sound like rational arguments on either side of what seems like a debate. If ethical language were really just an expression of emotion, that should not be possible.Ayer claims that he can answer Moore’s critique by claiming that “one really never does dispute about questions of value”. Ayer claims that moral disagreements are either genuine disagreements about non-moral facts or not genuine disagreements. Ayer points out that when we disagree with someone morally, we ‘admittedly resort to argument’ to win them over to ‘our way of thinking’, but our arguments do not attempt to show that they have the ‘wrong’ ethical feeling towards a situation which they have ‘correctly apprehended’. Ayer claims that his analysis showing the impossibility of moral disagreement provides support for his claim that ethical language is not fact stating, since disagreement about facts is possible.Imagine persuading someone who was selfish to give to charity, however. They might well correctly apprehend all the relevant facts but still prefer to keep their money for themselves. The charity worker might then entreat the selfish person to empathize more with the suffering of others.Ayer could regard such entreating as not an argument, however. Statements such as ‘think of the children’ are not arguments nor what we properly understand to be a rational position in a dispute about something supposedly objective.Prescriptivism. Non-cognitivist & anti-realist. R. M. Hare agreed with Hume’s is/ought gap and with Moore’s rejection of naturalism. Although Hare was a non-cognitivist and thought ethical language didn't describe reality and couldn't be true/false, he nonetheless thought it could have meaning as an expression of commands/recommendations/prescriptions. So for Hare, 'X is wrong' means 'don't do X'. That is clearly not a description nor can it be true/false. We have choice and freedom to decide which prescriptions to make, whereas we have less choice over which emotions to feel. They are also more rational as they are the product of informed imaginative and consistent thought. They are still separate from truth however. Prescriptive moral statements prescribe how the world should be rather than describe how it is. Hare thought the word ‘ought’ means both a universal prescription and also reflected the speakers interests.So prescribing something imposes rational constraints on you because you could?prescribe something that contradicts your previous prescription(s). This isn't to say that you 'couldn't', do that, but that you would be irrational if you did. Therefore Hare makes room for rationality and rational considerations to exist within ethics, avoiding the reductionism of emotivism.Mackie’s arguments for cognitivism and against non-cognitivism. Mackie claims that objectivism about values has ‘a firm basis’ in ordinary thought and the meaning of ethical language. While he thought that metaphysically Moore was wrong to think ethical terms intuited some non-natural reality, nonetheless in moral contexts ethical terms ‘are used as if it were the name of a supposed non-natural quality’ (my emphasis).Mackie regarded emotivism as ‘part of the truth’ as it explains why ethical language is motivating of action, but claims it’s a ‘very natural reaction’ to non-cognitivism to “protest that there is more to ethics than this, something more external to the maker of moral judgements, more authoritative over both him and those of or to whom he speaks, and this reaction is likely to persist. Ethics, we are inclined to believe, is more a matter of knowledge and less a matter of decision than any non-cognitive analysis allows.” Naturalism satisfies this demand. Linguistically, however, naturalism only seems to allow for a purely descriptive and ‘inert’ ethical statements, which Mackie thinks ethical language clearly involves more than, e.g. motivation.Mackie illustrates his view with the case of a scientist doing research on bacteriological warfare who is in a state of moral perplexity, wondering whether it would be wrong of them to do such research. Mackie claims such a person would ultimately want to ‘arrive at some judgement about this concrete case. While his emotions and prescriptions will be part of the subject of the judgement, no such relation between the scientist and their proposed action will be part of the predicate. What they want to decide is not whether they really want to do the work, whether it will satisfy their emotions, whether they will have a positive attitude towards it in the long run, or whether the action is one they can happily, sincerely and rationally recommend or prescribe in all relevantly similar cases. What they ultimately want to know is whether this action is ‘wrong in itself’. Mackie thinks this is how ethical language is really commonly used. Mackie concludes that ‘ordinary moral judgements include a claim to objectivity, an assumption that there are objective values’. Myth, symbol, analogy, Language gamesVia Negativa – Pseudo-Dionysus argued that God is ‘beyond every assertion’, beyond language. He therefore cannot be described is positive terms i.e by saying what he ‘is’. God can only be described negatively or ‘via negativa’ – by saying what God is ‘not’. Maimodenies also argued for the via negative because humans cannot know God in his essential nature and therefore cannot speak about what God is. Maimodenies used the illustration of a ship. By describing what a ship is not, we get closer to describing what a ship is.Arguably we only get closer to describing what a ship is because we already know what it is. If we describe everything a ship is not, this leaves a ship shaped hole in our description. However describing everything that God is not does not leave a God shaped hole in our description. So we don’t get closer to describing what God is by saying what he is not.If we say that God is not human or physical or earthly then we do at least avoid anthropomorphasising God which gets us closer to describing God than if we were left with our confused via positiva view.Analogy. Aquinas agreed with the Via Negativa to an extent since he thought humans were fundamentally unable to know God in his essential nature. However he thought we could go a bit further than only talking about God negatively – he argued we can talk about God meaningfully in positive terms by analogy. An analogy is an attempt to explain the meaning of something which is difficult to understand by using a comparison with something familiar and easier to understand. Aquinas rejected univocal and equivocal language when talking about God.Univocal: statements that mean the same thing for God and humans (e.g. God’s love and my love – love means the same thing)Equivocal: statement that mean different for God and humans (e.g. God is wise and I am wise)We cannot interpret God univocally because we are anthropomorphising him, how could words describing us apply to a transcendent infinite being? We cannot interpret God equivocally because it leaves us unable to understand what our words mean when applied to God since we don’t know God. That would leave religious language meaninglessSo, it’s wrong to say we are completely the same as God, but it’s also wrong to say we’re completely different. The middle ground Aquinas finds is to say we are ‘like’ God – Analogous to God.Aquinas thought through analogy (explaining something complex by comparing it to something simple/brain and computers), we can talk about God meaningfully. Religious language attempts to describe the attributes or qualities of God. Aquinas believed there were 3 types of analogy that could allow religious language to be meaningful.Analogy of Attribution:· The qualities that we observe of something, tells us about the source of that thing.· From seeing the urine of a Bull is healthy, we can conclude that the Bull is healthy· We can attribute qualities to the nature of God by looking at what he has created.· For example, regularity and purpose infers a designer.· For example, motherhood and protection infers a loving God.· We can draw limited conclusion about the makerAnalogy of Proportion:· The quality of attribute of something (musical talent), depends on the nature of the being (age)· The quality of these attributes are proportionally related to the nature of the being· For example, as you get older, you will get better at playing music· Finite qualities in the mundane are related proportionally to infinite qualities in the divine· For example, a baby’s linguistics are proportionally related to the speaking ability of an adult· A mother’s finite love is proportionally related to God’s infinite loveProper Proportion:1. Humans possess the same qualities like those of God (goodness/wisdom/love)2. Because we were created in the image and likeness of God3. But, because we are inferior, we possess the qualities in lesser proportionVerificationists can criticize analogy for religious language as what is being illustrated cannot be empirically verified.Richard Swinburne argues that speaking univocally is better, when we say ‘we are good’ and ‘God is good’, we mean the same by good.(counter: Aquinas would say that we cannot apply the same meaning to a transcendent, limitless being)The accuracy problem: the analogy that ‘electricity behaves like water’ works because we can determine the shared qualities (flow, current and power), and the differences (danger, state of matter). But we can only know this by comparing knowledge of both things. When we make analogies to God, we cannot know how accurate we are.Aquinas arguably doesn’t require that we know how accurate we are, just that we know that we are like God. If that’s all we claim, then we are speaking positively about God and so the cataphatic way is successful, perhaps in a very limited sense but successful nonetheless.Karl Barth thinks humans are incapable, on their own, of understanding God. ‘The finite has no capacity for the infinite’. He argues the analogical approach is flawed because it starts from a human understanding, and via attribution and proportion, claims to understand God. Analogy anthropomorphises God.While some might anthropomorphise God, arguably Aquinas guards against that because he is very clear that we cannot know God’s essential nature, just that it is like ours in some way.Arguably the infinite is not proportional to the finite. So we can’t say that God is like us just proportionally greater. Attribution also fails because there are instances where things create something radically different to or at least simply without one attribute that the creator had. E.g. a potter is conscious but creates unconscious pots. For all we know, God’s attributes are totally unlike ours.The bible claims we were created in God’s image and likeness, however. So we must be like God in some respect, which seems to leave room for analogy.Proponents of revealed theology like Barth thinks that the fall corrupted the imagio dei however. Arguably it’s an assumption to claim to know which attribute of ours (e.g. goodness, wisdom or power) are the ones that are analogous to God’s attributes. The bull and urine is an example which supports Aquinas because both urine and a bull can be healthy and indeed the health of the urine justifies attributing health to the bull. However, our creation by God might not be of the sort where attributes in the creator are bestowed to its creation. We can at least say that we are like God in some way, however, which although a very limited statement would count as successful via positiva. Symbol (Paul Tillich)Paul Tillich developed a theory of religious language that centres on the notion of symbols. Language is only meaningful – in so far as it – participates in the being of God. This active participation by language in a thing’s existence is the fundamental characteristic of being a symbol.Tillich makes a clear distinction between: words as signs v words as symbols. What is the difference from a sign saying Fiji, and the 0 A sign attaches a label, but the symbol participates in it what it points to (e.g. the cross is a powerful symbol because it represents Christianity and points to the death of Jesus) This is Tilich’s theory of participation by which he defines the core aspects of what gives something symbolic meaning:Pointing: words have to point to something, a meaning (“I threw a ball” – tells you something v “I ball a throw” – tells you nothingParticipation: It means that it is more than just a label. The symbol has a participation in what it is pointing to. For example, “I love you” participates in the act of loving someone.Revealing: To be symbolic has to reveal a deeper meaning, they open up levels of reality that are otherwise closed to us.Changeable: Symbols can change what they point to or may fail to consistently point to them. They open up the levels of dimensions of the soul that correspond to those levels of reality. E.g. the American flag used to be yellow with a snake, this flag doesn’t point to America anymore.Tillich thought that the language of faith was symbolic language. He thought symbolic language was like a poetry or a piece of art - it can offer a new view of life or a new meaning to life, but is hard to explain to people who haven’t experienced it, or not heard the poetry or seen the piece of art. Tillich thought that religious language is a symbolic way of pointing towards the ultimate realityThe vision of God which he called the ‘ground of being’. We have come to know this through symbols.Relationship with truth and empiricism:A phrase like “I love you” goes beyond simple empirical measure. There is a deep truth revealed by symbolic language but it is not an empirical truth. It is a different existential domain.Aquinas would argue that ‘God’ is not just a symbol but a cognitive belief about reality.Very hard to distinguish when language is being used normally and symbolically. For example, the religious language that Jesus was born in Bethlehem seems to be a fact not symbolic. When is language meaningful? It is hard to understand - the idea of a deeper meaning we know but cannot explain is ineffable and weak. Unpersuasive and empirically invalid.John Hick argued that ‘symbols participate in the reality they point’ is not entirely clear, especially this symbolic language is affirmed and negated by what they participate in. Many religious people would argue some religious language is literal.Symbolic language is changeable and prone to mistakes, stale through overuse, lost meanings over time.Tillich counter: we cant rediscover the questions Christian symbols are an answer to, that are understandable in our time.Bultmann argued for a particular kind of non-cognitive reading of the bible called myth. In ancient times, to describe a person you might tell a story about them. That story wasn’t intended to be cognitively/factually true, but to communicate what that person was like. Bultmann believed that was the intention of the authors of the Bible; they did not mean to write a set of historical facts. Myths communicate deep truths and values. They are more significant than a made-up fictional story. They deal with important questions about life. E.g ancient Roman and Greek mythology which thereby preserve cultural identity. Bultman argued that the modern audience is very different to the ancient one, and often mistakenly takes the bible to be literal and cognitive in meaning. We should therefore demythologise the bible according to Bultmann, which means to re-write it, replacing the stories with the deeper truth they intend to convey. For example, a story about Jesus healing a sick person really intended to convey that God loves and cares about our well-being and will endeavour to help us. Since that is the true meaning, we should replace the story with that message, thereby demythologising the bible.Aren’t the ‘deep truth’ Myths intend to convey down to interpretation and therefore subjective? How could we ever know we had ascertained the ‘true’ meaning? Many parts of the bible seem to be literal – e.g saying Jesus was born in Bethlehem. Nor does the bible anywhere say you shouldn’t take it literally. So is there really biblical support for this view?Bultmann responds that parts of the bible are myth, whereas other parts are literal.But then how do we know which parts are which?Language Games – Wittgenstein advanced two theories of meaning in his life. The first was quite similar to verificationism however his second theory – language games – completely contradicted it.The first theory is called the picture theory of meaning where Wittgenstein argued that words get their meaning by connecting to the world. More specifically, the logic of our language somehow connects to the logic of reality. Our words ‘picture’ reality by connecting to its logic.Wittgenstein later in his life repudiated the idea that words got their meaning by connecting to the world and instead argued they got their meaning by connecting to social reality. A language game exists when multiple people communicate. Wittgenstein called it a ‘game’ because he argued that language games consisted of rules. In each social situation the people participating in it act in a certain way because they have internalised and are following a certain set of rules which govern behaviour including speech. Therefore, the meaning of their speech will be connected to those rules i.e to the social situation. There can be as many different language games as there can be different types of social interaction, I.e potentially unlimited. Nonetheless, they will all be differentiated by the set of rules which constitute them.Religious people play the religious language game. Scientists play the scientific language game. For Wittgenstein, to uproot a word from the religious language game and try to analyse it within the context of the scientific language game is to misunderstand how meaning works. Words get their meaning from the language game in which they are spoken. So it’s no surprise to Wittgenstein that Ayer finds religious language meaningless, since Ayer is not religious and therefore isn’t a participant in the religious language game as he doesn’t know the rules of it.When Wittgenstein remarks that we have to ‘know’ the rules of a game to play it, he doesn’t necessarily mean consciously. For perhaps most of human social interaction we are following rules that we have unconsciously internalised. For that reason it can be very hard to say exactly what the rules of the religious language game are, as opposed to the scientific language game which is more cognitively formalised. Wittgenstein argued that the scientific language game can be about reality, since it is about evidence, experience and reason, whereas the religious language game is about faith and social communities, conventions & emotions.Arguably the scientific and religious language games can in fact be fused together. Behe believed you could prove god through science for example because of irreducible complexity.However, we could respond on behalf of Wittgenstein that this particular fusion of religion and science is really itself a unique language game, dissimilar to either the religious or scientific games. Alternatively, Behe could be argued to not be playing the scientific language game since most scientists reject his ideas.If all language is only meaningful within the context of a language game, in which language game is Wittgenstein’s theory of language games meaningful? Surely if it’s only meaningful within certain language games and not others, doesn’t that mean it’s not true? Isn’t Wittgenstein trying to rely on a meta-non-language game to describe language games, while also trying to insist there is no such thing as a meta-non-language game?The concept of God? Concepts of God as omnipotent, omnibenevolent, omniscient, creator, sustainer, both transcendent and immanent, perfect, simple; can these descriptions be applied coherently to God? ?Basil Mitchell: The Philosophy of ReligionA J Ayer: Language, Truth and LogicLogical Positivism is the school of Philosophy Ayer belongs to and Language, Truth and Logic was written to popularize its central tenants. Philosophers like Comte and Mill, impressed at the power of science, wanted to universally extend the use of the scientific method, a view called Scientism. Comte coined the term positivism referring to dealing with objective empirical data of a scientific sort and seeking to formulate empirical generalisations with explanatory power. This was developed by Russell’s logical atomism and Wittgenstein’s early work on the picture theory of meaning. Logical positivism continues that 19th century positivist emphasis. ‘Logical’ emphasises Russell’s influence of focusing on the logical form and use of language.Summary of Language, Truth and Logic. Chapter 1 – For a statement to be meaningful it must be analytic or empirically verifiable. When Philosophers attempt to theorize about metaphysics, that is, reality transcendent of sense experience, they are not using words meaningfully.Chapter 2 – So, the purpose of Philosophy is solely in analysing the way definitions are used and the logical consequence of those definitions. Philosophers do not ascertain truth, they only find out whether a statement is meaningful and if so, which type of empirical investigator might then verify it. Chapter 3 – This Philosophical analysis involves methods such as Russell’s definite descriptions which reduce a sentence of the form ‘the so-and-so’ into its constituent parts so that they might be better subject to empirical verification.Chapter 4 – A priori statements such as necessary truths are not innate and they might be learned from experience, but they are not justified by experience. Their justification comes from logical analysis showing that to deny them is to contradict yourself.Chapter 5 – Truth is not a thing in itself which requires special metaphysical explanation. When we say a sentence is true, the addition that it is true adds nothing to the sentence except to perform our assertion of it. Possibility is the most that our knowledge can achieve.Chapter 6 – Ethical language does not express any factually significant content and thus is merely an expression or outburst of emotion. Theological language about metaphysical entities like God is unverifiable and therefore meaningless.This chapter is the crucial first step on which all other chapters depend:Without Metaphysics the function of philosophy is changed from speculative to critical (ch 2).Without Metaphysics the nature of philosophical analysis is not going to be such that it’s telling us about a reality beyond experience (ch 3).The a priori does not tell us about metaphysical reality, it is simply tautological (ch 4).Truth and probability can be taken in a phenomenalist rather than a realist sense (ch 5).Ethics does not tell us about objective moral order in reality (ch 6).Theology does not tell us about the metaphysical entity known as God (ch 7).The elimination of metaphysics is not only the first chapter but the ultimate thesis of the entire book, which is then applied to various other areas and the resulting consequence explained.Chapter 1 – on the elimination of Metaphysics“The traditional disputes of philosophers are as unwarranted as they are unfruitful”.Ayer begins by introducing the classic debate between empiricists and rationalists. The empiricists claim that knowledge must be derived from the senses. However, Metaphysicians often claim that their premises are not based on their senses but derived from a faculty of intellectual intuition which enables them to know facts which are beyond sense experience.Ayer points out that Kant based his critique of transcendent metaphysics on fact rather than logic. Kant claimed it was a fact that our understanding cannot successfully transcend the senses. However, as Wittgenstein pointed out, that requires Kant to have a factual understanding of both sides of the limit of our understanding, which is self-contradictory. Bradley claimed that therefore anyone who claims metaphysics is impossible must therefore have a metaphysical justification for that, which is self-contradictory. The problem with eliminating metaphysics seems to be that it requires a metaphysical claim to do so.So, Ayer concludes that the elimination of metaphysics should not be based on fact, but on logic. It cannot be attacked by factually criticising its method of intuition. Ayer claims instead he can eliminate metaphysics not by suggesting a factual limit to thinking but by accusing the metaphysician of disobeying the rules governing the significant (meaningful) use of language. So, Ayer thinks he can avoid the question of whether there really is in fact a faculty of intuition by claiming that metaphysical language is meaningless.Language is thought to be divided into cognitive (expresses beliefs) and non-cognitive (expresses a non-belief e.g. emotions). Cognitive language is divided into synthetic and analytic. Analytic refers to definitions, tautologies and perhaps mathematics. Synthetic refers to factual statements. The verification principle. “A sentence if factually significant (meaningful) if, and only if, we know how to verify the proposition it purports to express – that is, if we know what observations would lead us to accept the proposition as true or reject it as false.” If a claim cannot be verified by sense experience, then it is not factually significant and only has a non-cognitive emotional significance. This allows Ayer to avoid having to make the metaphysical claim that metaphysics is impossible. Instead, he can say that metaphysical utterances are meaningless because they cannot be verified in sense experience.Ayer believed in verifiability in principle and weak verification. He distinguishes between:Verifiability in practice, when there is a method of verification we have done. E.g. Seeing a house.Verifiability in principle, when we know there is a method of verification that we could do in principle but we just happen to lack the practical means of placing ourselves in the situation where we could employ that method. E.g. historical statements or what is currently technologically impossible but possible in principle. The only statement not verifiable at least in principle is the sort that is not at all available to empirical verification like metaphysical statements of reality transcending sense experience. Strong verification. Conclusive verification which provides certainty.Weak verification. Inconclusive verification which provides probability. If there is there any kind of support from empirical data. However, Ayer was dissatisfied with weak verification because it ‘allows meaning to any indicative statement’. So, he added:Direct verification – a statement that is verifiable by observation. E.g. ‘I see a house’ is directly verifiable and so has factual meaning.Indirect verification – when things we have directly verified support a statement which we haven’t directly verified but know how to verify, we can be said to have indirect verification for it. E.g. ‘This key is made of iron’. So ultimately a sentence is verifiable if it can be directly or indirectly verified.Ayer then goes through a number of metaphysical debates, showing how the dispute is founded on meaningless distinctions, between monism and dualism, appearance and reality, realists and idealists. There is no sense experience which could verify either side of these disputes and so they are meaningless because they involve metaphysics. Wittgenstein’s theory of language games is a criticism of idealised language theories like verificationism.Falsificationism is seen by Popper as an improvement on verificationism and so is a criticism. Some argue that empirical generalizations are not verifiable even in principle because there are always more possible cases that are inaccessible which could falsify the generalization. E.g. to verify ‘All swans are white’ would require verifying that at no point in the entire universe did a non-white swan ever exist. This is not possible even in principle.Some responded to this by replacing verifiable in principle with falsifiable in principle. This is not falsificationism as it still involves weak verification and direct verification, however. While falsifiability helps with general assertions, verifiability is still needed for singular assertions which are not always falsifiable e.g. ‘there exists a so-and-so who’ doesn’t seem falsifiable because there might be such a so-and-so who is hiding every time you go looking. The verification principle cannot verify itself. It states that to be meaningful a statement must be analytic or empirically verifiable. However, that means that in order for the verification principle itself to be meaningful, it must be analytic or empirically verifiable. If we try to take the verification principle empirically then it would be an empirical claim that if we investigate what kind of meaning people use then we will see that it is either analytic or empirical. But that appears to be false since empirical evidence shows that people have meant something else by meaning throughout history e.g. Plato found it meaningful to talk of the world of forms and theologians find it meaningful to talk of God, both of which involve unempirical metaphysical terms.Ayer responds by admitting that the verification principle cannot be a factual statement about the meaning of factual statements and claims instead that it is a methodological stipulation, a rule which the logical positivist adopts for methodological purposes. However, this appears to reduce the verification principle into a tool one might use if you already agree with empiricism. Metaphysical statements are now only meaningless to this particular empirical tool, rather than categorically meaningless.Page 33, Ayer shows the understanding of Metaphysics that he has: ‘that philosophy affords us knowledge of a reality transcending the world of common sense and science.’However, there are versions of metaphysics which are not about transcendent reality but the reality encountered in science and common sense, focused on making sure we have the best science possible, e.g. Whitehead who thinks Metaphysics grows out of and incorporates scientific concepts, such as the idea of an ‘event’ which we experience and science makes sense of but through metaphysical speculation Whitehead generalises to the view that everything is an event. This does not transcend common sense and science. Such theories work by proposing conceptual schemes rather than deductive foundation like Descartes. Ayer rejects Descartes but arguably that is only one form of metaphysics.Chapter 2 – The Function of Philosophy.Ayer claims Philosophers are never justified in constructing deductive systems. Deductive reasoning is still part of Philosophy, but Philosophers cannot propose first principles and then offer those principles and deductions which follow from them as a complete picture of reality, e.g. Descartes’ intuition and deduction thesis.Philosophy at the time was thought to have two functions, critical and speculative. Ayer claimed that by eliminating metaphysics this eliminates philosophical speculation about metaphysics and the development of metaphysical systems, so Philosophy becomes ‘wholly critical’. The critical function of Philosophy involves the criticism of arguments and the analysis of concepts. Page 49, the problem of induction. This is the problem that it seems any claim we make generalizing from our experience seems to assume that the future will resemble the past. If I see that whenever I drop a ball it falls to the floor, I might want to claim that it will do so next time. But this assumes that the future will resemble the past. That assumption does not seem to be inferred from experience. There is no amount of times an experience could re-occur which justify that assumption – that it will happen the same way next time. Page 50, Ayer claims the problem of induction is a ‘fictious problem’. The problem assumes a certain metaphysics of a stable world where the future resembles the past in order to be posed. If gaining metaphysical understanding is not part of Philosophy, then the search for a way to justify the metaphysical assumption that the future will resemble the past is not really a problem for philosophers at all. We can continue to engage in inductive reasoning for the simple reason that it seems to work for scientific purposes. The metaphysician might try to claim that thinking it seems to work involves assuming it will work in the future which entails assuming the future will resemble the past. However, Ayer would respond that he makes no such assumption. Maybe it won’t work! He doesn’t need to assume it will to notice that it currently is and that all he claims. So, knowledge of reality is simply not the concern of science.Page 57. “The propositions of Philosophy are not factual but linguistic in character”. They don’t describe the behaviour of physical or mental objects but they express definitions and the logical consequences of definitions. So, we may say that Philosophy with its propositions is a department of logic. It is concerned with the formal consequences of definitions, not empirical fact. There are no factual Philosophical propositions. Formulating, justifying and investigating factual empirical propositions is a scientific endeavour. Two kinds of cognitively meaningful propositions: analytic and synthetic.Philosophical propositions are analytic, Philosophy deals with definitions and the logical consequences of those definitions. The sole function of Philosophy is the analytic function.What then is the nature of Philosophical analysis? That is the topic of the next chapter; 3.Chapter 3 – The Nature of Philosophical AnalysisPage 60 – Philosophers are concerned not with ‘explicit definitions’ (e.g. dictionary definitions) but ‘definitions in use’. A symbol defined explicitly by defining it in terms of some other symbol. E.g. the symbol ‘Cardiologist’ is defined in terms of the symbols ‘heart doctor’. A symbol in use however is defined by showing how the sentences in which it ‘significantly occurs’ (is meaningfully used) can be translated into equivalent sentences which do not contain the definiendum (thing to be defined) nor any of the synonyms. Ayer uses Russell’s theory of definite descriptions to illustrate this philosophical analysis of symbols in use. Russell’s theory shows how sentences of the form ‘the so-and-so’ can be analysed into its logical constituents.‘The author of Waverly was Scotch’ can be translated into the equivalent sentence ‘One person and one person only wrote Waverly, and that person was Scotch. By analysing a sentence into its logical constituents, you now have statements that are clear and precise enough for empirical verification. If there is no way to empirically verify the statement, then it is not factually significant (it is meaningless). If it is factually significant (meaningful) then the Philosopher can refer it to whichever type of empirical investigator is best suited to verifying that particular fact. The role of the Philosopher is not to figure out the truth of a proposition, it is instead, through careful logical analysis, to figure out whether a proposition is meaningful and who then can verify whether it is true or false.Page 64 – The problem of giving an actual rule for translating sentences about a material body into sentences about sense data. The problem of the reduction of material things to sense data. This is the traditional philosophical problem of perception, raised by Plato, who questioned the reliability of perception. Locke’s representative realism also led to the same problem, which was how do we know whether primary qualities are objective as Locke thought or subjective as Berkeley thought. The realist/phenomenalist debate hinges on this question. Ayer questions whether sense datum statements are the logical equivalent of material object statements. Or is there something about material objects that cannot be equivalent to sense data? Material objects involve extension or spatial occupancy, which doesn’t seem to be a feature of sense data. This questions whether the reduction of material objects to sense data can ever be complete, since it will leave such things out. Ayer thinks there is some untranslatable ingredient in the language about material objects which makes him a phenomenalist. Ostensive statements are empirical sense datum statements which are so self-evident that they are absolutely certain. While some positivists thought there were such statements, such as a statement about a colour you might be experiencing. This seems absolutely certain. However, if you consider things like lighting and other conditions which affect perception, it no longer seems absolutely certain. So Ayer rejects Ostensive statements. Ayer does claim there are ‘basic statements’ which are more sure than others, but still no absolutely certain ones. This debate ultimately became important in the Philosophy of Mind because translating without remainder mental terms into brain terms seems to require physicalism, the view that the mind is physical. However, since Ayer rejected metaphysics he wasn’t interested in that question.Page 70. “It is to be remarked that the process of analysing a language is facilitated if it’s possible to use for the classification of its forms an artificial system of symbols whose structure is known. The best-known example is the so-called system of logistics (symbolic logic) employed by Russell and Whitehead in Principia Mathematica.” So you get a more precise logical analysis if you perform the translation of logical equivalences using symbolic logic. Chapter 4 – The A prioriThis chapter involves Ayer defending his brand of empiricism from the general rationalist criticism of empiricism that it is unable to explain how we gain knowledge of necessary truths. Necessary truths are statements of logic such as ‘whatever is, is’ and mathematics such as 5 + 7 = 12. It appears difficult to maintain that such truths are learned from experience because we only experience contingent particular examples of things existing or cases where five things plus seven things make twelve things. No amount of nor nothing in empirically observed cases of contingent truths seem to amount to the observation of a necessary truth. As Hume showed, no matter how many times you observe 5 + 7 equalling 12, for all you know the next time it will equal something else.Empiricists have two possible responses:1 - to deny that the truths of logic and mathematics are necessary truths, in which case the empiricist must account for the universal conviction that they are.2 – to deny that necessary truths have any factual content, in which case the empiricist must explain how a non-factual proposition could be true, useful and surprising. Surprising in the sense that one could understand the subject ‘5 + 7’ yet not know the predicate ‘= 12’.Failure to defend either of these responses will show that there are some truths about the world which we can know independently of experience; that there are some properties which we can ascribe to all objects, even though we cannot conceivably observe/verify that all objects have them. It will also show that our thought has a mysterious power to reveal such truths to us. This would justify rationalism over empiricism which would be fatal to verifications and so Ayer sets out to give his response.Ayer rejects Mill’s empiricist response. Page 75. Mill denied that there was any a priori knowledge at all because he thought supposed a priori knowledge like propositions of logic and mathematics actually are empirical hypotheses. Ayer responds “we maintain that they are independent of experience in the sense that they don’t owe their validity to empirical verification. We may come to discover them through an inductive process but once we’ve apprehended them we see they are necessarily true.”Ayer claims the best way to show this is to ‘examine cases’. Page 77 “The principles of logic and mathematics are true universally simply because we never allow them to be anything else and the reason for this is that we cannot abandon them without contradicting ourselves.” This is the traditional definition of a necessary truth, one whose contradictory is self-contradictory. “The truths of logic and mathematics are analytic propositions or tautologies.” They are not true of anything but are useful when we use language and try to use words univocally (when one word have one meaning) rather than equivocally (when one word has multiple meanings).Page 78. A proposition is analytic when its validity depends solely on the definition of the symbols it contains and synthetic when its validity is determined by the facts of experience. So Philosophy is concerned with definitions and the consequences of those definitions.Page 80 & 81 – Philosophy is treated as simply an application of logic to language.These first 4 chapters are about the workings and methodology of logical positivism.Chapter 5 – Truth and ProbabilityThe question of what truth is is really a question of the definition of truth in use. What is the logical equivalent of saying a proposition is true? Ayer’s argument is that when we say p is true all we are doing is asserting p. Consider any proposition containing the term ‘true. ‘It is true that ice is frozen water’. The part of the sentence ‘it is true’ doesn’t seem to add anything, which you can see if you consider the sentence without it: ‘ice is frozen water’. So, the assertion of truth is not itself a cognitive statement. The assertion of the truth of a sentence does not asserting anything additional to the sentence. Assertions of truth are performative utterances, meaning utterances which perform an additional function. For example during marriage when the priest says ‘I now pronounce you man and wife’, they are not just letting it be known, their utterance has the additional function of performing a religious and civil function. When expressing that something is the truth we are performing the function of asserting it. However, Austin thought you cannot translate ‘it is true that …’ without loss into simply a performative utterance. Austin thought that what was lost is the assertion that there is some extra-linguistic state of affairs to which the statement is referring. So Austin believed in the correspondence theory of truth; that the meaning of truth claims was to refer to reality.Ayer goes on to claim that In matters of verification and falsification, all that’s available is probability anyway. Truth in the sense of absolute certainty is not available.Chapter 6 – Critique of Ethics and TheologyPage 103. Four kinds of ethical utterances. 1 – definitions of ethical terms (e.g. justice). Ayer regards these as analytic. They are not true or false but just conventions about how we use language.2 – propositions describing the phenomena of moral experience. (e.g. I feel good about X). A sociologist or psychologist can verify whether these are true descriptions.3 – exhortations to moral virtue (e.g. have a heart). Such statements cannot be true or false as they are prescriptions.4 – There are actual ethical judgements (e.g. X Is right/wrong; good/bad)To claim X is right/good requires a definition of right/good. Ayer considers the utilitarian definition of goodness as resulting in good consequences. So for the Utilitarian, ‘X is good’ means ‘X is productive of Y consequences’. However, the latter seems to be a sociological statement not a moral statement. So the Utilitarian defines a moral term in non-moral ways, attempting to reduce the moral to the sociological/psychological.Ayer thinks Utilitarianism therefore fail to make sense of ethical language, agreeing with G. E. Moore’s naturalistic fallacy.Deontological definitions of good on the other hand are simply saying ‘X!’ which is just emoting; expressing emotion.This is distinct from subjectivism which defines goodness as certain feelings someone might have. This translates moral statements into psychological statements. So, Ayer rejects all attempted definitions of ‘good’ and so concludes it is not factually meaningful because it cannot be analysed. Ethical judgements are not actually judgements. Sentences like ‘X is wrong’ contain no factually meaningful predicate. So all such utterances can be are emotive exclamations, like outbursts of feeling.See Ayer in the Meta-ethics topic for more.Also see Ayer in the religious language topic for his views on theological language. ................
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