EVALUATION OF ALFRED JULES AYER’S CRITICISM OF METAPHYSICS

Résumé

Ayer’s criticism of Metaphysics is premised on his criterion of meaning, namely, a modified verification principle. Ayer comes from a tradition of thinkers who uphold that unless a proposition is an a priori statement or an empirical statement, such a statement can neither be true nor false. The consequence of this is that such a statement is literally nonsensical. Such a statement cannot, therefore be used to refer to anything real. It is merely a statement that expresses one’s emotional inclination towards the subject. The argument followed that unless such statements can be empirically verified, such statements are meaningless. However, this approach has been viewed to be not just reductionist in its essence but limiting as well. It is conceived as such on the grounds that when subjected to itself, such a criterion defeats itself like the proverbial ouroboros. Ayer, consequently, reformulated the principle to shield it from these limitations. He proposed that statements ought not to be conclusively verifiable in experience before they are regarded as being imbued with meaning. Ayer thus summated that so long as some possible sense-experience is relevant to the determination of a proposition’s truth or falsehood, such a statement can be termed meaningful. While there are many ways of defining what the concept of meaning implies, Ayer makes a distinction between “literal meaning” and “factual meaning”. He uses “literal meaning” to distinguish his form of meaning from other implications of the concept of meaning, while the expression “factual meaning” refers to the case of statements which satisfy the modified verification principle without being analytic. This paper adopts the expository and evaluative methods of philosophical research. Premised on this, the paper sets out to evaluate Ayer’s critique of Metaphysics and thus concludes that Ayer’s criticism is plausible but has been misread. This paper is thus a call for a reconsideration of the criticisms Ayer proposed, from this, it will become clearer the kinds of statements Ayer believes are nonsensical.