Ayer's Philosophy Had To Be Grounded In Science

For Ayer, philosophy had to be grounded in science. This could be achieved through empirical observation. Ayer believed that all knowledge comes from the senses, that everything I know is justified by my senses. Additionally, a process of elimination for Ayer is sufficient for anything that cannot be answered by science. These eliminations can be conducted by using evidence based on you senses. Ayer concluded, “the criterion which we use to test the genuineness of apparent statements of fact is the criterion of verifiability” (Ayer, p.500). This means that any person can verify the proposition that a sentence expresses by figuring out what observations need to be made to accept it to be true or reject it to be false from observational reasoning. …show more content…
Ayer asserts that there are propositions that we could not verify if we did not have the practical means of doing so. This is what Ayer means by the sentence ‘there is water on Mars’. We do not have the practical means of being able to verify that there is, in fact, water on Mars. However, we do know what we would have to do in order to be able to verify it in principle. If we had a space ship, and a space suit that allowed us to walk on Mars, we then could verify whether water was on Mars. However, there is no space ship that has been invented yet for me to be able to do this. For Ayer then, this proposition is verifiable in principle, but not by observation because I lack the means for doing …show more content…
Ayer shows that there is a grammatical resemblance between these two propositions, additionally the same for the same sentences in other languages. This Ayer says, assumes then that they are of the same logical type. Ayer continues to say that, “Dogs must exist in order to have the property of being faithful, and so it is held that unless unicorns in some way existed they could not have the property of being fictitious” (Ayer, p.504). He notes that it is obvious that saying something that is fictitious is real is absolutely contradicting itself. Instead, they are “saying they are real in some non-empirical sense – that they have a mode of real being which is different from the mode of being of existent things” (Ayer, p.504). For Ayer, there is no way of testing whether it is real in both this sense and the ordinary sense, stating this fact is not significant, nor relevant at all. It is a mistake in language. It is in this way that saying ‘there is no external world outside of my mind’ is a weak proposition for Ayer. Both Kant and Ayer agree that existence is not an attribute because to attribute something to another thing means that it exists. It is self-contradictory and