Ayer's criticism of metaphysics

1.0 INTRODUCTION Reading through his work, ‘Language, Truth and Logic’ Ayer represented in full the views of logical positivism. Although Ayer's views changed considerably after the 1930s, becoming more moderate and increasingly subtle, he remained loyal to empiricism, convinced that all knowledge of the world derives from sense experience and that nothing in experience justifies a belief in God or in any other extravagant metaphysical entity.
The obvious fact seen in his book that ‘no statement which refers to a reality transcending the limits of all possible sense experience can possibly have any literal significance’ is a disparagement of metaphysics. Therefore, in this brief work, it is geared towards analysing some of his logical criticisms of metaphysics. 2.0 DISTORTION OF THE CONCEPT OF METAPHYSICS Before I continue with this work, I wish to specify clearly that Ayer’s criticism of metaphysics could have arisen from the essential misrepresentation of the concept of metaphysics by the pyrrhonian scepticism. As a matter of fact, Aristotle used the name ‘first philosophy’ but in the course of arranging Aristotle works, Andronicus Rhodes used the name metaphysics (μεταϕυσικα) to indicate that these works come ‘after’ the chapters on physics. It was at this point that the concept of metaphysics was disfigured and even criticised especially by empiricism and other related schools of empiricism. This is because metaphysics was misinterpreted as only related with mysticism, obscurity, transcendental and spiritual. Some thinkers like Parfit Derek, David Hume, and Immanuel Kant followed with such misconstrued concept of metaphysics. 3.0 AYER’S CRITICISM OF METAPHYSICS It is an imperative to state that Ayer has a mission of evicting or eliminating metaphysics from philosophy by demonstrating that metaphysics is meaningless. Ayer began his criticism of the metaphysical thesis that it affords us knowledge of a reality transcending the world of science and common sense. He continued to argue that the metaphysicians began their enquiries with the evidence of his senses. And if so, what valid process of reasoning can possibly lead him to the conception of a transcendent reality. It is on this that it is established that from empirical premises nothing whatsoever concerning the properties, or even the existence of anything super-empirical can legitimately be inferred. For Ayer, we need only to formulate the criterion which enables us to test whether a sentence expresses a genuine proposition about a matter of fact, and then point out that the sentences under consideration fail to satisfy it. We can achieve this basically by following steps noted at the next paragraph. There should be a formulation of criterion in somewhat vague terms, and then give the explanations which are necessary to render it precise. The criterion which we use to test the genuineness of apparent statements of fact is the criterion of verifiability. This is to say that a sentence is factually significant to any given person, if, and only if, he knows how to verify the proposition which it purports to express. If, on the other hand, the putative (general accepted) proposition is of such a character that the assumption of its truth, or falsehood, is consistent with any assumption whatsoever concerning the nature of his future experience, then, as far as he is concerned, it is, if not a tautology, a mere pseudo-proposition. The sentence expressing it may be emotionally significant to him; but it is not literally significant. To have a full detail of the criterion of verifiability and adoption of this procedure, it is necessary to draw to draw a distinction between practical verifiability and verifiability in principle. A relational conclusion is made that proposition is verifiable in principle, if not in practice, and is accordingly significant. On the other hand, such a metaphysical pseudo-proposition as ‘the absolute enters into, but is itself incapable of, evolution and progress,’ is not even in principle verifiable. One cannot conceive of an observation which would enable one to determine whether the Absolute did, or did not, enter into evolution or progress. A further distinction which we must make is the distinction between the ‘strong’ and the ‘weak’ sense of the term ‘verifiable’. A proposition is said to be verifiable, in the strong sense of the term, if, and only if, its truth could be conclusively established in experience. On the other, in the weak sense, the experience renders it probable. Adopting the conclusive verifiability as our criterion of significance, we are logically obliged to treat general propositions of law in the same as we treat statements of metaphysician. In face of this difficulty, some positivists have adopted the course of saying that these general propositions are indeed a piece of nonsense. Indeed, it is my contention that no proposition, other than a tautology, can possibly be anything more than a probable hypothesis. And if this is correct, the principle that a sentence can be factually significant only if it expresses what is conclusively verifiable is self-stultifying as a criterion of significance. Those who adopt this course assume that, although no finite series of observations is ever sufficient to establish the truth of a hypothesis beyond all possibility of doubt. We seem to fall back on the weaker sense of verification. We say that the question that must be asked about any putative statement of fact is not, would any observations make its truth or falsehood logically certain but simple. The criterion seems liberal enough. In contrast to the principle of conclusive verifiability, it clearly does not deny significance to general propositions or to propositions about the past. It rules out certain formulations that ‘the world of sense experience was altogether unreal’. Consequently any system that condemns the sensible world as a world of mere appearances, as opposed to reality, is saying something which, according to our criterion of significance, is literally nonsensical. Ayer would have it that metaphysicians are attracted much to a priori propositions on account of its certainty and they owe their certainty to the fact they are tautologies. Metaphysical sentence is that which purports to express a genuine proposition, but does, in fact, express neither a tautology nor an empirical hypothesis. And as tautologies and empirical hypotheses form the entire class of significant propositions, we are justified that all metaphysical assertions are nonsensical. Apart from metaphysics not following to the criterion of meaning, metaphysics can also be nonsensical in this approach. The use of the term ‘substance’ provides us with a good example of the way in which metaphysics mostly comes to be written. Now, there cannot in our language, refer to the sensible properties of a thing without introducing a word or a phrase which appears to stand for the thing itself as opposed to anything which may be said about it. Therefore, the metaphysical statement that ‘to every name a single real entity must correspond ‘does not follow’ because it is necessary to distinguish logically between thing itself and any, or all, of its sensible properties. They employ the term to refer to the thing itself. Logical analysis shows that what makes these ‘appearances’ the ‘appearances of’ the same thing is not their relationship to an entity other than themselves, but their relationship to one another. 4.0 CONCLUSION Ayer’s work was definitive in criticizing metaphysics as not foundational in reality. The metaphysician has no intention of writing nonsense. He lapses into it through being deceived by grammar, or through commiting errors of reasoning, such as that which leads to the view that the sensible world is unreal.