very nature, to be bound up with verification by sense-experience. It is possible to think that this line of reflection is circular or begs the question.
It is also possible to wonder more radically, if the whole philosophical situation in which we are involved by Ayer is otherwise. At any rate is it better described in a very different way? Does the whole argument really go in the other direction? Might it be that the supposed premise or basis mentioned above is the conclusion, and the supposed conclusion is the premise or basis? That is, an examination without presupposition of particular utterances of metaphysicians, moralists and religious people shows the utterances to be other than propositions or statements, other than true or false. And this is summed up in or provides good reason for the generalization that is the Verification Principle. Certainly you can read Chapter 6 of Language, Truth and Logic , 'Critique of Ethics and Theology in this way. At the centre of the chapter is the line of thought that particular moral judgements are essentially expressions of emotion or perhaps commands.
If now I say stealing money is wrong I produce a sentence which has no factual meaning that is, it expresses no proposition which can be either true or false. It is as if I had written Stealing money where the shape and thickness of the exclamation marks show by a suitable convention, that a special sort of moral disapproval is the feeling which is expressed. It is clear that there is nothing said here which can be true or false.3 Others certainly embrace the given idea about moral utterances directly without aid from any general principle. As for Ayer's lines it is not as if Stealing money is wrong is first identified by some mark as a moral judgement, thereby taken as falling under the Verification Principle and only then concluded to be neither true nor false. The simpler view if it raises philosophical problems is that when you look around there is no particular fact of the matter to be found to give a truth-value to Stealing money is wrong.
If you read Chapter 8 largely about metaphysics there is the same possibility. The dispute between philosophical idealism and realism about whether as idealism supposes everything that exists is in some sense mental or spiritual is not approached with the Verification Principle in hand. Rather it seems the dispute is looked at directly, independently of the principle. So too with the metaphysical controversy between those who say reality is One and those who say it is Many the Monists and the Pluralists. Each of the utterances All is One and God exists is something for which we are at least hard-pressed to find a fact that makes it true or false. There has of course been discussion of the basis of the Verification Principle the possibility of a proof of it. Ayer himself enters into this question, as already noted. Can it be maintained rather that this is on the way to being as much beside the point or indeed confused as the idea that the generalization All men are mortal' rests on some general basis or proof distinct from individual facts of mortality individual deaths? Whatever the direction of argument and whatever the possibilities of two-way argument which also need to be mentioned but cannot be considered here, there is another question about Ayer's Logical Positivism. So far we have it that the Verification Principle is that an utterance is required to be either analytic or roughly speaking, empirically verifiable such that some sense experience is relevant to it. Good philosophy however goes beyond rough speaking. What is the Verification Principle precisely speaking? The 1936 edition of Language, Truth and Logic, mainly in the preface and first chapter attempts an explicit statement of the principle. It became clear that it was open to objection by way of a logician's