Verifiability is Truth

A.J. Ayer

When it comes down to it, there’s enough mystery in the knowable world that we don’t need to resort to mysticism, religion, or high level metaphysics. Perhaps the empiricists and analytic philosophers have it right. David Hawkes makes the following remark in his essay on the art critic Dave Hickey in the TLS, (“Everyone’s a Critic,” 5/27/16), “Hickey’s intellectual hero is J.L. Austin, the English analytic philosopher who developed the concept of the 'performative' statement. A 'performative' is a sign or series of signs that achieves an objective effect in the real world, as when a priest declares a couple married.” How simple and lacking in any temptation towards the divine, the infinite or metaphysical! And signs can literally be that. For instance take the classic “Stop” sign or the triangular warning to “Yield,” which are the victims of their own ubiquitousness. We take them for granted because they don’t furnish us with a manual on how to deal with our problems, but on a daily basis they are what makes life possible simply because they save our lives. And what good is Kant’s categorical imperative or Heidegger’s “Dasein,” or “being there,” if the very states they refer to doesn’t comprise the certainty of an oncoming car. Reality may only appear to us as the shadow on the wall of the caves that we inhabit, but so what? Why is it so bad to limit propositions to tautologies like “a rose is a rose?” Verifiability not beauty is truth. If it’s ultimately impossible to parse out the truth, then why bother?  Why not make your bible A.J. Ayer’s Language, Truth and Logic?

Philosophy's Flights

Photo of A.J. Ayer

In “Philosophy’s Flights” in last Sunday’s Review (NY Times, 7/1/12), Jim Holt asks “Is Philosophy Literature?” He’s talking about analytic philosophers, philosophers of language like Bertrand Russell and later Thomas Nagel, Phlippa Foot (of trolley problem fame), Harvard’s Hilary Putnam, Kwame Apiah, and Colin McGinn who all ultimately came to the fore as a reaction against the unverifiable propositions of metaphysics. Of course today there are philosophers like Derek Parfit whose On What Matters attempts to bridge the gap between the limitations of the subjective (utilitarian) mind and broader ethical considerations. By the way, Holt’s piece is a selection from a longer series called The Stone, which can be found on the Times blog. Holt answers his own question with a resounding yes but not before he makes the following qualification (in the longer version) which is reminiscent of those commercials for new urine flow medications on CNN that offer a list of disclaimers. “Today analytic philosophy has a broader scope then it used to...it’s less obsessed with dissecting languages; its more continuous with the sciences (this partly due to the American philosopher Willard Quine who argued that language really has no fixed system of meanings for philosophers to analyze). Yet whether they are concerned with the nature of consciousness, of space-time or of the good life, analytic philosophers continue to lay heavy stress on logical rigor in their writings. The result, according to Martha Nussbaum (herself a sometime member of the tribe), is a prevailing style that is ‘correct, scientific, abstract, hygienically pallid’—a style meant to serve as ‘a kind of all-purpose solvent.’” In this little passage Holt takes back what he giveth away and it’s funny that missing from his list is the ne plus ultra of all language philosophy A.J. Ayer’s wondrous Language, Truth and Logic which does for analytic philosophy what Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style did for grammar. Still there are two exhibits that Holt offers in defense of analytic philosophy as literature, Quine’s article “On What There Is” which Holt comments “can be read over and over again, like a poem” and Saul Kripke’s Naming and Necessity, a compendium of three Princeton lectures which don’t contain “a dogmatic or pompous word...and not a dull one either” that seem de rigueur for anyone interested in his initial query. And then there are the first and last lines of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus “The world is everything that is the case” and “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” Wasn’t Wittgenstein the master of philosophical haiku?

Comp 101

In high school composition classes, and later in freshman college English courses, students learn to write themes. This is the derivation of the word “theme-book.” The idea is to present a cohesive essay in which a lead paragraph or sentence sets out a proposition. It’s much like proving a theorem in geometry, and bears an uncanny resemblance to the notion of tautology in linguistics, where statements like “the red chair is red” are examples of a priori analytic knowledge—in lay terms, self-evident iterations that don’t advance our knowledge of reality. The idea of the freshman comp essay is a little more sophisticated. A rather obvious proposition that doesn’t need proving is made, such as “All men are dogs.” Supporting evidence is provided, such as “Jack is a man,” with a concluding paragraph, which in some distended way dramatizes that, yes, Jack is a dog who wants to fuck every Jill in sight. Students are thereby graduated with honors in impoverished ways of thinking and then go on to contaminate the discourse that occurs in the course of human life. This contamination of language and thinking is no mean feat. People who make inanely self-evident statements that they go on to embellish is the second leading cause of heart disease in the United States after trans fats. Not only does college encourage us to make nonsensical statements that demonstrate a complete absence of intuition and metaphysics (apologies are here rendered to A.J. Ayer, the famous philosopher and author of Language, Truth, and Logic, whose thinking has had such a deleterious effect on human thought), it encourages the life-defeating proposition that one idea should follow from the next. A new era of writing instruction must begin in which students are taught the value of the non sequitur, where unproven statements are enthusiastically encouraged, and where students are taught to stop embellishing a point ad nauseum (yes we got the idea, you don’t have to wrap it up with a bow!), and are instead shown the value of moving on to fresh ideas both in writing and in life.