A. J. Ayer Quotes on Truth
A. J. Ayer’s Language, Truth and Logic (1936) gave Anglophone philosophy its most influential popularization of Vienna Circle logical positivism and the verificationist analysis of meaning. The central thesis is that meaningful empirical statements are those whose truth is in principle settleable through observation, and that the apparently substantive claims of metaphysics, theology, and traditional ethics — which fail this test — are not false but literally meaningless, expressing emotive attitudes rather than asserting truth-evaluable content. The framework, simplified for a wider audience from the more guarded positions of Carnap and Schlick, dominated mid-century Oxford philosophy of language until the post-positivist critiques of Quine and the later Wittgenstein displaced the verificationist criterion — though Ayer’s parallel work on knowledge, perception, and personal identity remained influential well past the eclipse of his early framework.
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:
“The presence of an ethical symbol in a proposition adds nothing to its factual content.”
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Attributed to A. J. Ayer:
“There are no moral truths, but only moral attitudes.”
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Attributed to A. J. Ayer:
“I tend to think that art expresses what cannot be put into theoretical form.”
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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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“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.”
Philosophy in the Twentieth Century (1982) p. 133.