Summary of Alfred Jules Ayer's Language, Truth and Logic

Everest Media

Description

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book.
Sample Book Insights:
#1 The traditional disputes between philosophers are, for the most part, as unwarranted as they are unfruitful. The surest way to end them is to establish beyond question what should be the purpose and method of a philosophical inquiry. And this is not difficult to do.
#2 The author claims that the human mind is incapable of understanding things in themselves, and that we can only understand things as they relate to our own experience. This means we can never truly understand anything beyond our senses.
#3 The criterion used to test the genuineness of apparent statements of fact is the verifiability criterion. A sentence is factually significant to a given person if, and only if, he knows how to verify the proposition that it purports to express.
#4 The distinction between the strong and weak sense of the term verifiable is important. A proposition is said to be verifiable in the strong sense of the term if its truth can be conclusively proven in experience. But a proposition is verifiable in the weak sense if it is possible for experience to render it probable.

Sujets

• Philosophie
• Épistémologie
• Philosophie et théologie
• Philosophy
• Logic

Informations

• Publié par: Everest Media LLC
• Date de parution: 11 mai 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9798822505506
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Insights on Alfred Jules Ayer's Language, Truth and Logic
Contents Insights from Chapter 1 Insights from Chapter 2 Insights from Chapter 3 Insights from Chapter 4 Insights from Chapter 5 Insights from Chapter 6 Insights from Chapter 7 Insights from Chapter 8
Insights from Chapter 1

#1

The traditional disputes between philosophers are, for the most part, as unwarranted as they are unfruitful. The surest way to end them is to establish beyond question what should be the purpose and method of a philosophical inquiry. And this is not difficult to do.

#2

The author claims that the human mind is incapable of understanding things in themselves, and that we can only understand things as they relate to our own experience. This means we can never truly understand anything beyond our senses.

#3

The criterion used to test the genuineness of apparent statements of fact is the verifiability criterion. A sentence is factually significant to a given person if, and only if, he knows how to verify the proposition that it purports to express.

#4

The distinction between the strong and weak sense of the term verifiable is important. A proposition is said to be verifiable in the strong sense of the term if its truth can be conclusively proven in experience. But a proposition is verifiable in the weak sense if it is possible for experience to render it probable.

#5

The criterion of factual significance is that a sentence should be allowed to be factually significant if and only if it expresses something which is definitely confutable by experience. But this criterion is too narrow. It does not allow us to accept general propositions or propositions about the past.

#6

The world of sense-experience is not even false, but it is still not meaningful. The senses sometimes deceive us, but that does not mean the world of sense-experience is unreal. There are no conceivable observations that could lead to the conclusion that the world revealed to us by sense-experience is unreal.

#7

The verification principle, in the form in which we have stated it, is valid. It states that all propositions that have factual content are empirical hypotheses. Every empirical hypothesis is relevant to some actual or possible experience, so a statement that is not relevant to any experience has no factual content.

#8

The use of the term substance to describe the things that exist provides us with another example of how metaphysics is written. It is assumed that there is a single real entity that corresponds to each name, and so the term substance is used to refer to the entity itself. But from the fact that we use a single word to refer to a thing, it does not follow that the thing itself is a simple entity.

#9

The concept of Being is a good example of how a consideration of grammar leads to metaphysics. The origin of our tendency to raise questions about Being, which no conceivable experience could answer, is that sentences that express existential propositions and sentences that express attributive propositions may be of the same grammatical form.

#10

The view that the metaphysician is a poet who talks nonsense is based on the assumption that both talk nonsense. But this assumption is false. In the vast majority of cases, the sentences produced by poets do have literal meaning.

#11

The philosopher does not intend to write nonsense. He may have been deceived by grammar or make mistakes of reasoning, such as the view that the sensible world is unreal. But it is not the mark of a poet to make these mistakes.