AO1 - Ayer Verification Principle PDF

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25/25 Essay on the Verification Principle - Philosophy Assignment - Reference to Ayer...

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Theme 4 – Part 1 AO1 – Examine the concepts of verification principle (20) The verification principle means something is meaningful if it can be proved through empirical evidence. ‘Verification’ is the testing of a statement to find out if it is true. The principle is saying that historical statements, aesthetic judgements and even scientific laws are excluded. However, the statements are not false, they are rejected because they are meaningless. For example, all elephants are small but it is not true but is it meaningful as it can be verified. According to the Vienna Circle, they said that statements were only meaningful if they were capable of being shown true or false. If they were mathematical and tautological. It was divided into analytic, which is the truth of the statement within the statement itself; the dog is black. Synthetic which is a statement that can be proven true by form of sense, experience, experiment; tea has gone cold. This shows it is verified by sense to prove its validity. Ayer was one of the logical positivists, who were inspired by the theories of the early Wittgenstein and wanted to answer rather than what makes a statement ‘meaningful’ as opposed to what makes it ‘true’. There have been two main editions to Language, Truth and Logic, both of which will be analysed and explained below. Ayer begins his thesis by arguing that for a statement to be ‘meaningful’ or ‘factually significant’, it must either be a tautology or provable by sense experience. This approach is inspired by Hume’s fork, who claimed that meaningful language was either a priori analytic or a posteriori synthetic. Ayer’s belief also sides with scientific approach. He argues that because statements such as ‘God Exists’ cannot be empirically proven and are not analytical (because he rejects the claims of the ontological argument), they are thus meaningless. Ayer rejected metaphysical statements as they do not fir their criteria of meaning which makes them meaningless. These statements were rejected as there was no way of being able to determine their ‘truth’. He concluded that talk about God cannot be proven true or false are meaningless. Ayer dismissed any talk of religious experience which cannot be empirically verified. Ayer recognised that the principle of verification, set out by the Logical positivists, had a clear limitation. It was not able to take into account statements that were made about things that were accepted as meaningful even though they were not considered to be immediately verifiable in practise. From this realisation, Ayer developed the verification principle by including the concepts of practical verifiability, and verifiability in the principle. He also proposed strong and weak form of the verification principle. For example the strong form of the verification principle means only accepting as meaningful those statements that could be immediately and practically verified. The weak verification principle took into account the fact that as long as we knew that experience could be used to establish the truth of the statement, then we could accept it as meaningful, in a weak sense of verification. Therefore, historical statements where we know what sense experiences would count towards us being able to verify them, for example we could ‘see’ the coronation of Elizaebeth 2 in 1953. Hence, if you couldn’t directly observe an event, if you had been there, then this is what you have seen and hear could count as verification. For Ayer, experience would make a statement meaningful. Ayer modified the verification principle by distinguishing between strong and weak verification because he concluded that talk about God cannot be proven truth or false. He also dismissed any talk of religious experience that can be verified empirically. He said that if a religious statement fall into neither category of strong or weak verification it is because they are neither true nor false, but meaningless. For Ayer, experience wold make a statement meaningful.

Theme 4 – Part 1 The difficulty with the verification principle was that is it too rigid. The strong form suggests we cannot make claims about history as there is no empirical evidence. Scientific laws become meaningless, for example It is impossible to verify gravity. Richard Swinburne said that universal statements cannot be verified, for example ‘all humans are mortal’. Although, they seem to be meaningful they are nonsense by the verification principle. Later the verification principle adopted by the Vienna Circle became known by latter thinkers as the strong verification principle. The statements had to be verifiable in practice, which sets up a verification principle to test whether a statement Is meaningful. The Vienna circle claim the existence of God is a meaningless issue. Religious believers, atheist and agnostic are making equally meaningless statements; “only thing that can be proved are worth discussing; the rest is a lot of hot air”. The Vienna Circle concluded that religious statements were meaningless as they do not satisfy the criteria....