Alfred Jules Ayer's "Language, Truth and Logic," the Major Thesis on Logical Positivism of its Time

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 principle empirically verifiable (Dr. Reilly - Notes). In this sense, cognitively meaningful is defined as either true or false. Analytic is defined as either mathematical or logical, and empirically verifiable is accepted if the statement can be proven either true or false on the basis of experience. So, a verificationist is someone who adheres to the verification principle proposed by A.J. Ayer in Language, Truth and Logic (Verificationism). The great debate amongst verificationist was whether the empirical observation itself must be possible in practice or just in principle.

If the verification Principle is true it has many different implications for ethics. The Principle of Induction is rendered cognitively meaningless by the Verification Principle. The Principle of Induction states that casual relationships that have been observed in the past will continue in the same way always and everywhere (Dr. Reilly). Back in the 1950’s and 1960’s, it was very uncommon to get a divorce. Families...

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...When Hume developed his Principle of the Uniformity of Nature, he noticed that we tend to believe that things behave in a regular manner; i.e. that patterns in the behavior of objects will persist into the future, and throughout the unobserved present (David Hume).

I truly believe that one day men will be able to birth children. Although God did not give males reproductive organs to give birth whose to say that it will never happen. Man has already achieved the knowledge to perform sex change operations, which is a major step in that direction. Whether we like it or not, science is already headed in that direction. Maybe one day, with the help from mother nature the laws of nature may evolve to allow men to do so. Right now, there is no way to travel into the future to see if that will occur, however I strongly believe it is a feasible observation to make.