A. J. Ayer Quotes on Knowledge
Ayer's Language, Truth and Logic (1936) introduced the British philosophical public to the Vienna Circle's logical empiricism with a program of unmatched polemical clarity. The verification principle — that a statement is meaningful only if it is either analytic or empirically verifiable, at least in principle — eliminates traditional metaphysics, theology, and the value-objectivity of ethics and aesthetics as cognitively meaningless; ethical statements express attitudes (the early emotivist version of expressivism) rather than describing a moral reality. The later Foundations of Empirical Knowledge (1940) and The Problem of Knowledge (1956) develop more cautious analyses of perception and the standard analysis of knowledge as justified true belief, against which Ayer's broadly empiricist commitments remained constant through the post-positivist later career.
Quotes
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Attributed to A. J. Ayer:
“No statement which refers to a reality transcending the limits of all possible sense-experience can have any literal significance.”
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Attributed to A. J. Ayer:
“It is silly, as well as presumptuous, for any one philosopher to claim that he is bringing the pursuit of truth to its conclusion.”
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“The Foundations of Empirical Knowledge (1940).”
I am using the word " perceive ". I am using it here in such a way that to say of an object that it is perceived does not entail saying that it exists in any sense at all. And this is a perfectly correct and familiar usage of the word. If there is thought to be a difficulty here, it is perhaps because there is also a correct and familiar usage of the word "perceive", in which to say of an object t -
“I see philosophy as a fairly abstract activity, as concerned mainly with the analysis of criticism and concepts, and of course most usefully of scientific concepts.”
As quoted in Profile of Sir Alfred Ayer (June 1971) by Euro-Television, quoted in A.J. Ayer: A Life (1999), p. 2. -
“Philosophy in the Twentieth Century (1982) p. 133.”
There never comes a point where a theory can be said to be true . The most that one can claim for any theory is that it has shared the successes of all its rivals and that it has passed at least one test which they have failed.