Language, Truth and Logic

Introduction

Ayer wrote the book after spending several months with the Vienna Circle in 1933; it appeared in January 1936, when he was twenty-five. In under two hundred pages it presents the doctrines of logical positivism for English readers. Its criterion of meaning is the verification principle: a statement is meaningful only if it is analytic or empirically verifiable at least in principle. Ayer applies this to metaphysics, theology, the self and the problem of other minds, and treats the propositions of logic and mathematics as tautologies. In the introduction to the second edition (1946) he conceded several difficulties with the principle, which critics had shown could not easily be formulated without either excluding science or admitting metaphysics.

Connections

Builds on

• An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding1748 · David Hume
• Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus1921 · Ludwig Wittgenstein
• The Turning Point in Philosophy1930 · Moritz Schlick

Criticized in

• The Language of Morals1952 · R. M. Hare
• Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind1956 · Wilfrid Sellars
• Sense and Sensibilia1962 · J. L. Austin