Language, Truth and Logic

"Many of those thinkers who made good abroad were the inheritors of the ethos of the Vienna Circle . They envisaged an entirely rational world, based on the Enlightenment, where all problems were subjected to empirical analysis. And if they couldn’t be subjected to that, they didn’t exist. The philosopher AJ Ayer used to come to the Vienna Circle’s meetings. He wrote a book which was heavily based on their outlook, and which was called Language, Truth and Logic. I recommend that book if you want to have a bird’s eye view into the way they looked at the world (even if Ayer more or less disowned it later). It’s quite a short book, and, even for non-philosophers, mostly understandable."

"Well for autobiographical reasons, really; without Ayer my book would not have been written. More than that, without Ayer, I may not have gone into philosophy in the first place. He captured me—or enticed me—into the world of philosophy, as he did many people. I read Language, Truth and Logic when I was 19. I was a militant atheist, as Ayer probably was. I thought that belief in God was not only stupid, but harmful as well. And Ayer provided me with the ammunition, as a teenager, to be entirely dismissive of religion and—I feel embarrassed about this now—entirely dismissive of religious believers too. In a way, it’s going even further, it’s even more of a fundamental objection to religious belief. He’s saying that religious believers can’t even discuss the nature of religion in the way they purport to, because, although they are uttering words, those are just a series of sounds that don’t connect to reality in any way. It’s a very radical critique of aspects of religious belief. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Of course, there are cultural aspects of religious belief that are entirely okay to discuss. So, it’s perfectly okay to say that X per cent of people are Christian or Muslim and that these people believe in X, Y and Z and that they engage in the following rituals…. The sociology of religion and the history of religion are unthreatened by logical empiricism, but statements such as ‘God believes that we should all behave in this way or in that way’—those are the sorts of propositions that Language, Truth and Logic attacks. Correct. That includes ethics, aesthetics and the parts of religion we’ve been talking about here. The first line of the book is: “The traditional disputes of philosophers are, for the most part, as unwarranted as they are unfruitful.” And then, on the first page, he goes on to attack “metaphysical utterances”. The logical empiricists have various enemies. But, really, a principal enemy is Heidegger. They thought that, essentially, Heidegger thought and spoke meaningless gibberish; that he purported to be deep and profound, but that many of his famous statements about ‘nothingness’ and so on, didn’t connect to the world in any way. They were literally meaningless. They might have had some kind of emotional impact on us, but they had no cognitive meaning. They thought that if you wanted to say something of emotional depth, philosophy wasn’t the appropriate vehicle. If you wanted to have a deep impact on people about the beauty and awe-inspiring nature of the universe, you should really be writing poetry or novels, not philosophy. That was Ayer’s view and the view of the logical empiricists. “When people talk about the Vienna Circle, they’re usually referring to the…meetings that would take place on a Thursday evening in the mathematics institute in Boltzmanngasse” The appeal of Language, Truth and Logic is that it’s a very short book—it’s only about a hundred and fifty pages long—and he doesn’t brook any doubt. It’s a book packed full of certainty. It’s polemical and it was very important in the history of logical empiricism because it brought the ideas of the logical empiricists from Vienna into the Anglo-American world. Almost all the Vienna Circle ended up in the Anglo-American world and had an impact on its philosophy, but it was this book, in particular, that translated the ideas of the Vienna Circle to the Anglo-American world and made them popular. Bizarrely, the second edition, which came out just after World War II, became a bestseller. Yes. He spent several months there after taking his undergraduate degree. His German was rudimentary, so he was relatively quiet during meetings; unusually quiet, because he was normally quite garrulous. He happened to be there at the same time as Willard van Orman Quine , who was another visitor, from the United States. Quine was a much better linguist: he participated more fully in Circle meetings. But the two of them got to know each other quite well in Vienna. You wouldn’t necessarily pick this up from Ayer’s book, but within the Vienna Circle there was very strong disagreement. They disagreed about many aspects of the Verification Principle and how it could be applied in various domains. Ayer’s view is, in some sense, a simplistic version of the Circle’s position – and certainly not one that everybody in the Circle would have signed up to. But, if you read it when you’re nineteen, as I was, it’s very exciting. And historically it was important in its influence on British philosophy. Yes. They do vary in personality. There isn’t one homogeneous personality. I don’t think the leader of the Vienna Circle, Moritz Schlick, was a ‘smasher’. I don’t think he wanted to take a big mallet and hit other philosophers over the head with it. But there were certainly members of the Circle—and Otto Neurath is a classic example—who were mallet grabbers and smashers and who really did want to make a noise and cause damage. It’s true that their philosophy was very radical, but some of them wanted to whisper about it, and others wanted to shout about it. Schlick was a whisperer; Neurath was a shouter. Yes. Their philosophy was iconoclastic, but they didn’t all share a view about the tone in which their philosophy should be broadcast to the world. Their famous manifesto, which was written in 1929 to thank Moritz Schlick for staying in Vienna when he could have taken a job elsewhere, summarizes their vision and ideas, but was not written by Schlick. Schlick was slightly embarrassed about the tone of it; it was more strident than he was comfortable with. It was strident because one of the lead authors was Neurath, and, as I’ve said, that was his character. But, you’re right, the philosophy itself was iconoclastic."