Ayer's Argument Analysis

At the beginning of the 20th century, a group of philosophers believed that there are a lot of concepts that are ambiguous in traditional philosophical propositions. These ambiguous concepts led to the confusion of traditional philosophy. For this reason, the logical positivists proposed their criteria of meaning, and the purpose of which is to clarify the propositions in traditional philosophy. Logical positivism only recognizes two formal propositions. One is logical and mathematical analytical propositions, and its essence is a tautology or synonymous repetition, thus having innate fidelity. The other is propositions that can be proven or falsified by experience. Such propositions derive their effectiveness through experience and are
He argues that these propositions cannot be judged as true or false through logic or experience. In other words, these statements are neither logically tautologies nor empirically verifiable. However, although Ayer believes metaphysical propositions do not have the meaning of true or false judgments, they still have expressive emotional, ethical or aesthetic significance. On the other hand, according to the criterion of meaning, the task of philosophy or its purpose is no longer to study the world of transcendence, but to clarify the meaning of the proposition. In other words, it helps to distinguish which propositions are meaningful. Therefore, the object of study for philosophy is no longer God or entity, but
In Ayer’s Language, Truth and Logic, Ayer faces this challenge by modifying the criterion of meaning. The criterion of meaning, which also known as verifiable principle holds that the propositions expressed in a sentence must be analytical or verifiable, otherwise the sentence is meaningless. However, a sentence has, first of all, a literal meaning, otherwise it cannot express a proposition. This leads to the fact that the meaning itself has already been assumed before applying the criterion of meaning, and the criterion of meaning is also redundant. For this reason, Ayer retreats, applying the verifiable criteria directly to the sentence. Moreover, Ayer introduced the word “statement”, that compared to a sentence, a statement is expressed by a sentence, and two sentences that can be translated are considered to be one statement, and the proposition refers to valid statements. In this way, the criterion of meaning is to distinguish between the set of statements contains propositions and the set of statements does not contain propositions. Further more, Ayer believes that the statements expressed by the sentences are merely agreement for a use of language. In Ayer's view, the nature of philosophical propositions is linguistic rather than analytic. In fact, once the philosophical proposition is considered as factual, it is easy