Abstract
A.J. Ayer’s Language, Truth, and Logic had been responsible for introducing the Vienna Circle’s ideas, developed within a Germanophone framework, to an Anglophone readership. Inevitably, this migration from one context to another resulted in the alteration of some of the concepts being transmitted. Such alterations have served to facilitate a number of false impressions of Logical Empiricism from which recent scholarship still tries to recover. In this paper, I will attempt to point to the ways in which LTL has helped to foster the various mistaken stereotypes about Logical Empiricism which were combined into the received view. I will begin by examining Ayer’s all too brief presentation of an Anglocentric lineage for his ideas. This lineage, as we shall see, simply omits the major nineteenth century Germanophone influences on the rise of analytic philosophy. The Germanophone ideas he presents are selectively introduced into an Anglophone context and directed toward various concerns that arose within that context. I will focus on the differences between Carnap’s version of the overcoming of metaphysics, and Ayer’s reconfiguration into what he calls the elimination of metaphysics. Having discussed the above, I will very briefly outline the consequences that Ayer’s radicalization of the Vienna Circle’s doctrines had on the subsequent Anglophone reception of Logical Empiricism.
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Notes
- 1.
This paper was first presented in 2018 at the conference on “The Historical and Philosophical Significance of Ayer’s Language, Truth and Logic” at the University of Pécs, organized by the MTA “Lendület Morals and Science” and the “Empiricism and atomism in twentieth-century Anglo-Saxon philosophy” Research Group. I owe many thanks to all those present, as well as to the anonymous reviewers, for many helpful questions and suggestions. I am particularly grateful to Adam Tamas Tuboly for inviting me to contribute to the conference and book, and for his many insightful comments and suggestions. All page references to Language, Truth and Logic below are to the second edition of 1946; see Ayer (1936/1946), noted in the text as “LTL.”
- 2.
For a detailed discussion of weaker versions of verificationism see Hans-Johann Glock’s chapter in this volume.
- 3.
Susan Stebbing was also largely responsible for introducing the Vienna Circle’s ideas to British philosophers in her 1933 British Academy address; see Stebbing (1933); see also Siobhan Chapman’s discussion of Stebbing in her chapter of this volume.
- 4.
In an interview from 1989, Ayer says that he “didn’t speak much German” at the time, and that “I couldn’t really take much part in their debates, but I understood what was going on” (Ayer and Honderich 1991, 209). This may at least partly account for his ignorance of the Germanophone context in which the Vienna Circle’s ideas were developed (see e.g. Carnap et al. 1929/1973). Nonetheless, in that same interview, more than 50 years after LTL was published, Ayer still discusses the obscurity of nonsensical German (and French) philosophy, as opposed to the clarity of English-speaking philosophy in the tradition of British Empiricism (Ayer and Honderich 1991, 212–213 and 225).
- 5.
This may be compared with the acknowledgment section of his “Demonstration of the impossibility of metaphysics” from 1934, where he simply says that his views are not original, but clearer versions of those developed by Schlick et al. (Ayer 1934a, 335).
- 6.
According to Ayer, Ryle instructed him to spend his honeymoon in Vienna in 1933 (rather than go to Cambridge to attend Wittgenstein’s lectures); see Ayer and Honderich (1991, 209).
- 7.
Ayer (1936) also presented a British lineage for Logical Empiricism at the International Congress for Scientific Philosophy in Paris in 1935. (Here, he carefully distinguishes between two directions in British philosophy, the Moorean account of directive analysis which Stebbing (1933) employs in her criticism of the Vienna Circle, and his own Russellian defense of their position.)
- 8.
By 1936, a number of Vienna and Berlin Circle members had already started publishing articles in English, for example Kurt Grelling (1928), Otto Neurath (1931/1983), Moritz Schlick (1931/1979, 1932/1979, 1935/1979), Blumberg and Feigl (1931), Rudolf Carnap (1934a, b, 1936–7), Herbert Feigl (1934), Carl G. Hempel (1934), and Juhos (1935) Furthermore, a number of Anglophone discussions of logical positivism had already been available, for example, Susan K. Langer (1930), Sidney Hook (1930), Helen Knight (1931) (which surveys, apart from new works of Neo-Scholasticism and Phenomenology, the first issue of Erkenntnis, and summarizes three articles by Schlick, Carnap, Reichenbach, and Waismann); E.B. Ginsburg (1932), Ernest Nagel (1932, 1934), Stebbing (1933), Walter S. Gamertsfelder (1933), Victor F. Lenzen (1933), John Dewey (1934), and W.V.O. Quine (1935).
- 9.
An overview of the contemporary Anglophone presentations of Logical Empiricism, including, apart from Ayer, Stebbing, and Nagel, the work of Charles Morris, is given in Pincock (forthcoming). (Of these, I will not consider Morris’ book since it was published after Ayer’s.) An even earlier stage in the Anglophone reception of Logical Empiricism is described in Verhaegh (2020).
- 10.
Weinberg (1936) also covers a lot of the material that Ayer omitted, but was only published, after LTL.
- 11.
Of course there are continuities between early modern and Logical Empiricism; see for example Krisztián Pete’s chapter on the connections between Ayer and Berkley’s non-cognitivism.
- 12.
In 1931 Reichenbach offers a similar presentation of his stance as a “triumph” of both Rationalism and Empiricism; see Reichenbach (1931/1978).
- 13.
See also Tuboly (2017, 46–53) where he argues that the Vienna Circle’s members themselves also underplayed Frege’s influence.
- 14.
Stebbing’s (1930) A Modern Introduction to Logic was an attempt to rectify this; she acknowledges Frege’s significance (40, 129, 132, 181, 213, 442, 459, 486–487), but places Russell’s work center-stage.
- 15.
- 16.
He does note that Tarski, who is vaguely in the line of influence of Brentano, “developed a deductive theory of syntax or metalogic several years before Carnap’s publications on this topic” (Nagel 1936b, 50).
- 17.
The French conventionalists had a significant influence on the Vienna Circle, especially Neurath; see for example Haller (1979/1991) and Uebel (1997). Anglophone sources available to Ayer that mention at least the name of Poincare as an influence on Logical Empiricism include Neurath (1931/1983, 48) and Gamertsfelder (1933, 108).
- 18.
- 19.
Though Kant is not directly referenced, his treatment of metaphysics may be what Carnap has in mind when he talks of metaphysics as “uncertain, on the ground that its problems transcend the limits of human knowledge” (Carnap 1932/1959, 60).
- 20.
See the chapter of László Kocsis in this volume.
- 21.
See also Uebel (2007, 334). For more detail on some of the ways in which Ayer is involved in ongoing debates within the Vienna Circle, see Thomas Uebel’s chapter in the volume.
- 22.
Ayer elsewhere (“Demonstration of the impossibility of metaphysics”) addresses this distinction by explaining that, like Carnap, he considers that “questions about the meaning of a concept reduce themselves to questions about the meanings of […] the simplest proposition in which it can significantly occur” (1934a, 337). The absence of such an account in LTL could simply be an omission on Ayer’s behalf or it could signal Ayer’s distancing himself from Carnap’s account (though resolving this question would require going beyond the bounds of this inquiry).
- 23.
Ayer (1934a, 338, 342) also sees that there may be an attempt to convey emotion behind some nonsensical sequence of words.
- 24.
While later in LTL Ayer resists this conclusion, Ayer (1934a, 342) had briefly restated Carnap’s point about metaphysics being the result of a “desire also to express their feelings about the world. Literature and the arts afford the most satisfactory medium for such expression.”
- 25.
- 26.
As noted above, Ayer’s “Demonstration of the impossibility of metaphysics,” published a month later in July 1934, also cites Carnap’s article, as well as Schlick, as the sources of its arguments.
- 27.
Furthermore, Ayer had different targets and motivations than the Vienna Circle; see Vrahimis (2013a).
- 28.
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Vrahimis, A. (2021). Language, Truth and Logic and the Anglophone Reception of the Vienna Circle. In: Tuboly, A.T. (eds) The Historical and Philosophical Significance of Ayer’s Language, Truth and Logic. History of Analytic Philosophy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-50884-5_2
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