Ayer's verification principle

• ayer developed his verification principle from his adoption of the Vienna circle's philosophy of logical positivism.
• verification principle

  the meaning of a statement is its verification
• there are two types of meaningful language:

  • analytic statements are true by definition
  • synthetic statements are empirically verifiable.

  all other statements (e.g. ethical, theological, aesthetic) are empty of meaning.
• ayer originally distinguished between verification in practice and in principle.
• verification in practice is possible only when statements can be conclusively established empirically

  • ayer recognised that at the present we might not have sufficiently established scientific knowledge to be able to verify something.
• verification in principle is possible when it can be stated what observations would make the statements verifiable in practice and doing so could be possible at some point in the future

  • for example, the statement that there are mountains on the far side of the moon
  • when ayer was writing 'language, truth and logic' this could not be verified
  • nevertheless, it was possible to state what observations would make it probable.
• ayer concluded that any statements unverifiable in practice or in principle have no factual meaning

  • he termed any such statement a 'pseudo-proposition'
  • this applies to statements such as 'god exists' or 'god is loving'
  • he claimed that ethical statements are simply statements of approval or disapproval.
• ayer was not concerned with whether or not religious statements were true. the central claims of theism and atheism alike are neither true nor false; they are simply meaningless and so all talk of them is pointless.
• s: the principle is straightforward, focusing on facts that can be directly or indirectly verified

  w: its straightforwardness doesn't mean it is right, and it is not helped by the fact that ayer amended his theory and then in the end said of logical positivism on which his theory depended 'I suppose the most important of all the defects was that nearly all of it was false.

  it also doesn't ring true to many people, who are convinced that human responses to the world in terms of ethics, philosophy, aesthetics, etc, are important and have meaning.
• S: it aligns itself with a scientific approach in its insistence on empirical support if any statements are to be meaningful. ayer's allowance of weak verification enabled scientific theories that cannot as yet be empirically proved to be considered.

  W: it makes the assumption that science tells us everything of importance about the world. many would disagree with this

  Karl popper said that the verification method is flawed science. he claimed that science works primarily through falsification.
• S: ayer points to the need to be clear in one's use of language. some religious claims are obscure and unsupported. it has made philosophers of religion thing carefully about the nature of religious language.

  W: ayer's criticism of religious claims is not true of all religious arguments. the claim that the existence of the universe is explained by an external creative intelligence is a reasonable hypothesis, given its basis in the observation that human minds are creative. this is no more irrational than other scientific assumptions.
• weakness

  the verification principle itself is meaningless, since it is not empirically verifiable. any weakening of the verification principle's conditions or any reassessment of its meaning such as that made by ayer, that the principle is a recommendation rather than a factual statement, creates further problems. either if these means that statements which ayer wished to exclude could now be accepted as verifiable.