Alfred Jules Ayers Language, Truth and Logic, the Major...

In 1936 Alfred Jules Ayer published a book named, Language, Truth, and Logic. At the time of its publication, it was understood to be the major thesis of Logical Positivism (Macdonald). In order to understand the Verification Principle, one must first become somewhat familiar with Logical Positivism. Logical Positivism is a school of philosophic thought that combines empiricism, the idea that observational evidence is indispensable for knowledge of the world, with a version of rationalism incorporating mathematical and logico-linguistic constructs and deductions in epistemology, the study of knowledge (Log Pos). The Verification Principle states that a statement is cognitively meaningful if and only if it is either analytic or in†¦show more content†¦In the future I believe humans will return to the practice of having fewer divorces. According to the Verification Principle, Logical Positivists believe a large part of philosophy can not be judged as either true or false. Many statements concerning aesthetics, metaphysics, and theology have been rendered cognitively meaningless and cannot be proven logically, mathematically, nor by observation or experiment (Reilly). Woodstock was a great event for music lovers. Tonight the stars will cease to shine. Is there really life after death? A.J. Ayers and the Logical Positivists believed that cognitively meaningless statements had no truth in value, and that itself made it a waste of time to debate them. Karl Popper did not like the requirement that meaningful sentences be verifiable, stating the positivists’ criterion of verifiability was too strong a criterion for science, and proposed that they be replaced by a criterion of falsifiability (Karl Popper). Popper believed that falsifiability was a better criterion because it did not invite the philosophical problems inherent in verifying induction, and it allowed statements from the physical sciences which seemed scientific but which did not me et the verification criterion (Log Pos). Popper also argues that science should adopt a methodology based on falsifiability, because no number of experiments can ever prove a