A Critical Evaluation of Ayer’s Verification Principle

Abstract

Alfred Jules Ayer, an ardent member of the logical positivist movement and the propagator of the movement in the English speaking world, discussed at length the principle of verification-a theme that dominates his work on Language, Truth and Logic. In this work, Ayer argues that the principle of verification is a criterion of meaning that requires every meaningful statement to be capable of being verified. For Ayer, only empirical, tautological or mathematical statements that can be demonstrated to be true or false using either scientific method or logic. He asserts that any effort to have any discussion on anything whose truth cannot be ascertained through science or logic is an outright waste of time. Ayer considers statements whose truth or falsehood cannot be verified as meaningless. However, upon critical assessment, this principle collapses since it offers us only an aspect of reality. Some recent philosophers such as W.V.O Quine and N. Goodman, are convinced that the inadequacy of this principle derive from the questionable dichotomy between analytic and synthetic statements, or Hume’s dichotomy between logical and actual statements. This highly questionable dichotomy is one that underpins all of Ayer’s thought and the thought of the logical positivists in general. And as most scholars argue, the verification principle is simply a theory which consists in misconstruing the denial of the synthetic a priori as a criterion of meaningfulness.