Discussion: Can one meaningfully talk of a transcendent metaphysical God acting (creating sustaining, being loving) in a physical empirical world? Ayer was not simply concerned with talking about God, but also with all other religious language, including talk of an after life, which cannot be verified either. Talk of a soul he dismissed as meaningless since it is a metaphysical assertion to say that ‘there is something imperceptible inside a man, which is his soul or his real self, and that it goes on living after he is dead’. Talk of religious experience was also soundly dismissed by Ayer as being talk of experience which cannot be validated empirically: ‘The fact that people have religious experiences is interesting from the psychological point of view, but it does not in any way imply that there is such as thing as religious knowledge’. Discuss the following statements. What issues arise for the logical positivists? “The view from my hotel window is beautiful” “All ravens are black” “The Battle of Hastings took place in 1066”

Verificationism does not allow for statements that are not either empirically verifiable or tautologies. Such statements are considered as meaningless, by which they mean the statement literally has no meaning in a factual sense. As a result, statements regarding beauty or expressing a preference are meaningless. The beauty of a piece of art, a view, or a person cannot be decided on the basis of observation, nor can it be answered ‘true’ or ‘false’ Richard Swinburne in ‘God-talk is Not Evidently Nonsense’ challenges verificationism giving the example ‘All ravens are (at all times) black’. Swinburne points out that whilst people generally accept ravens are black, there is no way to ever confirm this statement, as however many ravens you look at there is always the possibility of there being one more raven that is not black. Therefore, according to verificationism, the statement is meaningless. A further problem lies with historical events and statements made about them. Saying the battle of Hastings happened in 1066 is not verifiable by us using our sense experiences and observations.

Enter Ayer once more... A.J. Ayer firstly clarified what was meant by meaningless, this being a statement that is not ‘factually significant’ (Language, Truth & Logic). Ayer was not denying that people make statements that are important to them, such as ‘God answers my prayers’ they are just unverifiable so have no factual significance. So, how do you verify a proposition? Practical Verifiability & Verifiability in Principle Practical verifiability refers to statements that can be tested in reality. If I said ‘Norwich City wear yellow and green shirts’ this is verifiable in practice. However, if I said ‘there is life on other planets in the our galaxy’ this is meaningful and verifiable in principle, but in practice we lack the technical ability to visit every planet and look for life. Strong and Weak Verification Ayer distinguished between ‘strong’ and ‘weak’ verification. Strong verification applied anything that can be verified conclusively using empirical evidence. Weak verification refers to statements that can be shown to be probable by observation and experience . Ayer suggested WV should be used as SV has no real application e.g. ‘All humans are mortal’.

Q. Can the traditional a posteriori arguments for the existence of God (the cosmological and teleological arguments) be subject to verification? Why/How? ‘For we shall maintain that no statement which refers to a ‘reality’ transcending the limits of all possible sense-experience can possibly have any literal significance. As such, the efforts of those who have striven to describe such a reality have all been devoted to the production of nonsense.’ Q. Can metaphysical statements be subject to verification? Why/How? Q. Are our five senses the only true way we can verify a statement? Discuss. Ayer’s Language, Truth & Logic was criticised by a number of philosophers, as such he published a second edition. In it he concluded that his distinction between SV & WV was not a real distinction. SV could not refer to ‘basic statements’ of ‘single experiences’ verified by their occurrence. He also saw WV as far too liberal allowing meaning to any statement whatsoever.

Directly and Indirectly Verifiable Ayer suggested two new criteria. Directly verifiable statements are ‘observation statements’ (a statement that records an actual or possible observation. E.g. It is snowing at the North Pole). Whilst indirectly verifiable statements are those which are not directly verifiable or analytic themselves but can be supported by other directly verifiable statements (E.g. The existence of black holes). Responses to the Verification Principle The most significant criticism was the statement of the theory itself does not pass the test as a meaningful statement. The verification theory cannot be verified by sense experience and so is not a meaningful synthetic statement; and if it is analytic, it is giving a new sense to the word ‘meaningful’, a new definition which we do not necessarily have to accept. The idea that all meaningful synthetic statements have to be empirically verifiable also causes practical problems. Many of the claims in science, for example the existence of black holes, cannot be verified by sense experience. Many historical statements of events that have happened in the past cannot be tested now using the senses.

Meaningless statements such as ‘ I had a weird dream last night’ would have to be dismissed because there is no way of testing them using the senses, but statements such as these do have meaning to us. Just like “I love you”. Logical positivists accepted that there was a problem, and that they were disallowing too much as meaningless, so the theory was weakened to allow for ‘indirect experience’. However there was still a desire to dismiss all meaningless talk of the supernatural, of god, of life after death and other theological concepts such as sin and salvation. Religious truth claims such as ‘God created the world’ were ruled out as unsound. John Hick argued that religious truth claims are verifiable, because they are ‘eschatological verifiable’. He meant that although we cannot test and see at the moment, in this life and world, whether the good will be rewarded, or whether God really does exist and love us, after death these claims will be verified. Although critics of John Hick have argued that ‘eschatological verification’ is not possible, because even if there is an afterlife and even if we do have a physical senses in it with which to perceive things, they will not necessarily be the same senses that we have now; and if there is no afterlife, then there will be no one to do the verifying.

It became clear and Ayer himself agreed, that the theory could not be adjusted so that scientific and historical statement were seen to be meaningful and yet religious claims ruled out. The falsification principle was developed as a modification of the verification principle, once it had been accepted that the verification principle was unsound.