Intuition in Meaning
A PAPER ON AJ AYER’S VERIFICATIONISMJANUARY 2016
By Zoe Cohen
A.J Ayer was concerned with proving that there was little meaning and purpose in metaphysics, and that any discussion of things which transcend sensory experiences is an exercise in futility. He was a supporter of logical positivism and verificationism, which sought to give philosophy and empirical sciences a closer relationship. He boldly states, as verificationists do, that a statement regarding things in the metaphysical realm cannot be described as either true or false because they are simply senseless and philosophers who have spent their time describing such matters have been dedicated to creating nonsense. Ayer’s goal is to pin down a set of values which qualify a statement as being meaningful. Though he comes from a place of questioning the legitimacy of human understanding, it seems as though human intuition is more reliable than a finite set of rules in determining meaning.
Ayer references Immanuel Kant who takes a stance against transcendent metaphysics as well, but his reasoning differs. Kant’s view is that the human mind is not equipped to grasp concepts that are beyond the physical realm: it just is not programmed in our software. This begs the question, if a human mind is incapable of grasping such concepts, from which naturally follows that they are devoid of thoughts of that realm, how could we know that we do not know such things? This question would never bother us in the first place if it were inconceivable to us.
Upon consideration of this flaw, Ayer presents an alternative: that this is not a psychological issue. The answer cannot be found based on what a human brain can apprehend, but rather what makes a statement meaningful in the first place. He thinks that statements made about the metaphysical are not worth saying because they do not comply to the rules that give a sentence value, though he has no basis for saying this as of yet because no comprehensive guide of these rules has been formed. He attempts to retroactively pull it together. Ayer’s goal in his paper is to identify the characteristics of expressing a matter of fact, which he refers to as “the criterion of verifiability.” In proving a verificationist theory, one may indulge themself by forgoing the process of undermining specific arguments against it, instead sabotaging the entire genre of thinking that could go against it in one fell swoop. A verificationist could easily brush off any arguments made against their beliefs by claiming the statement is nonsense. It is important to take into account that the verification theory itself is not observable, a paradox which renders its own existence erroneous.
Ayer proceeds to vaguely and loosely hash out the criteria of a meaningful sentence. For many statements we assume that they would be verified if we went through the trouble of doing so, but we believe them without going through the process. There are also statements for which a proper experiment could not be conducted because we do not have the means, but verification is conceivable. Ayer refers to this as verifiable in principle. Ayer is not saying that anything that cannot be verified is fallacious, he is saying that at the very least a proposition must have some method with which it could be verified with, even if it is not an accessible method, though this would make it weakly verifiable. Take the theory of gravity for example: The theory is that mass is attracted to other mass by way of a specific formula. You can conduct many experiments by dropping objects of various densities and weight, and they may all fall to the ground with their acceleration matching what the equation said it would. But the theory of gravity is still a theory because to prove beyond all doubt that mass is attracted to mass you would have to drop every type of item with different characteristics against each other. Though that is not an experiment that can feasibly be accomplished, If Ayer so boldly wants to claim that statements that cannot be verified have no sense and are pointless to utter, statements that fall under the “weakly verifiable” should be as good as not verifiable at all. Theories such as the aforementioned gravity, or Ayer’s example that arsenic is poison or that all men are mortal, are laws that address an infinite number of material or events are no more than weakly verifiable. These statements address an infinite description of the events, objects, and phenomena, so a finite observation of them is not sufficient to verify conclusively. This means these statements cannot be proven, only disproven. Though it is of note that the example “arsenic is poisonous” does not fit in among the rest. For if one person ingested what is considered a lethal dose of arsenic and survived, it does not negate the many people before him who died from arsenic poisoning.
To Ayer, verifiability is not a binary. There is a range. Something is strongly verifiable if its trueness can be experienced first hand through the senses. An argument saying that the senses may not be as reliable of a source because they rely on the interpretation of something as fallible as a consciousness, is of no use for us here because it is of the metaphysical realm. A weakly verifiable statement is one which is potentially possible and certain observations increase the probability of its relevance. His use of the word probability jumps out here. Probability is generally used in the context of true or false, yes or no. The situation Ayer has created is more like “relevant or nonsense”, or perhaps “true or nonsense.” The goal is not to prove that all of these metaphysical concepts are inaccurate and not even to say that there’s no possible way there is some universal, abstract possibility of the ideas. In trying to prove a metaphysical statement wrong, you are affirming that you know enough about this to talk about it and that it is worth talking about. The point of verificationism is that there’s just no point in talking about it because we cannot arrive at a conclusive answer. They don’t take a stance against a particular concept, they just see it as a waste of time. The opposite of truth is not nonsense, but this theorem operates as such. It seems as though the theorem misses the point entirely, and Ayer has set out to prove something different than what he claims. His entire theory of meaning is based on verifiability, yet he undermines the very meaning of the word. He chose a specific characteristic, saying that the absence or presence of it is the determining factor in whether every single statement has meaning, that word should not be immediately muddled and warped.
As he says about language, we do not need to babble nonsense to pin down exactly what makes a statement devoid of sense. We know nonsense when we hear it. There is intuitive knowledge of sense in language. If, as he claims, we have an intuitive radar for nonsense, mustn’t we have an intuitive understanding of sense? How can we know the absence of something without knowing the presence of it? If we were inclined to use conclusive verifiability as what qualifies a statement as meaningful, then any general statements like those above go the same way as the metaphysical statements. Some positivists go so far as to say that these statements must be nonsense considering they do not pass the test, but they are still “important nonsense.” Such a statement is oxymoronic. A statement that fails the test that is designed to tell whether or not it is an important statement worth saying, it cannot still be described as important. The test itself becomes nonsense. Something is either verifiable or it is not.
Either his concept of what qualifies a statement as verifiable is too narrow and strict, or verifiability is not the ultimate determining factor in meaning. This world of chaos where nothing can be known for certain and we only wait for the day when an event proves that the things we believe and the laws that we abide by were nonsense all along is not our world. Under these conditions, we should not put faith in gravity because one day someone might drop something that does not fall. Though as stated before, for us to have an intuitive grasp of nonsense, we must be intuitively acquainted with sense. Perhaps it does go back to Kant with his ideas of psychology. If we can detect an error in the phrase “the ray of light is heavy” then what makes it impossible that we may be able to detect the presence of sense? Ayer brings up the fact that for many statements we assume it would be verified if we bothered to do so. That’s because our brains are attuned to picking out nonsense in statements in their construction and their language. We should not forgo human understanding and intuition in favor of a loosely defined and incomplete set of rules. If we would not accept a finite conclusion about something infinite like gravity, why should we accept a finite list of rules to catalogue something as infinite as meaning?
A world in which no one discusses or muses over anything but the explicitly verifiable is a world where no advancements are made: a world devoid of curiosity. Long before verifying a concept becomes a concern, someone comes up with an idea. It takes much development and discussion to test out an idea and perhaps decades may pass before someone comes up with a method for testing it. Perhaps Ayer’s verification criteria serves to identify only the easiest, most straightforward and banal ideas. But just as we cannot be utterly doubtless about the infinite nature of gravity, we cannot be sure that any metaphysical thought will never mature into something beyond nonsense. You cannot conclusively say that there is no purpose to considering an idea.