First Response to Ken Matheson Daniel Lightsey, Texas A&M University Ken Matheson’s “The Elimination of Metaphysics” analyzes the ideas of A.J. Ayer and Karl Popper that are discussed in their respective books Language, Truth and Logic and Logik der Forschung (The Logic of Scientific Discovery). Matheson focuses on Ayer’s work specifically, and scrutinizes Ayer’s demarcation criterion for what makes a statement meaningful/sensible and what makes a statement meaningless/senseless. Ayer’s demarcation criterion for what makes a statement meaningful is whether or not that statement can be supported by empirical evidence, actual or hypothetical, that is available to us via sense experience. As Matheson notes, Ayer comes from the positivist tradition that was very prevalent in the early 19th century among philosophers, and his demarcation criterion for a meaningful statement is alike to the verification principle developed by the Vienna Circle (Uebel). What is particularly interesting about these criteria, which Matheson makes explicit in his paper, is that they are statements about meaningfulness, not simply truth or falsehood. The positivist says statements such as “God exists”, “murder is wrong”, and “beauty is valuable” are meaningless. It is one thing to claim the statements above are wrong, but it is entirely another thing to assert that one cannot meaningfully discuss such statements. Now, prima facie, this demarcation criterion is absurd and self-contradictory as Matheson goes on to show in the final pages of his paper, and as he says, Ayer’s criterion really says “nothing at all”. I am fond of what the philosopher Del Ratzsch has to say about positivism’s finest quality, “[Positivism’s] one redeeming quality seems to be that it also destroys itself” (Ratzsch 38). Positivism seems to arise from a firm commitment to the sciences due to there extraordinary predictions and results. But even here, positivism shoots its self in the foot. No one has had a sense-experience of an electron—they are theoretical entities —but it is accepted throughout the scientific community that electrons, and other point-like particles, exist. No doubt there are other examples in the sciences of postulated entities that have never been experienced (e.g. genes). One would have to be an anti-realist when it comes to much of contemporary science by adopting Ayer’s demarcation criterion for meaning, and thus science loses its luster.
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