ELIMINATION OF METAPHYSICS
According to the view of logical positivists, metaphysical statements are meaningless because they are cognitively meaningless. They transcend the world of science and common sense. Since they do not deal with the facts of the empirical world they cannot be determined as either true or false in the light of sense experience. Thus, they lack truth-value. The statements which transcend the limits of possible sense experiences cannot have any literal significance.
The charge made against metaphysicians is not that they attempt to employ the understanding in a field where it cannot be a profitably ventured but they produce statements which fail to confirm to the conditions under which a statement can be literally significant. Thus, logical positivists hold the view that through the verifiability criterion one can verify truth or falsity of a statement. Hence, the meaningfulness of a statement will be determined without any doubt. In other words, a statement is factually significant to any given person if and only if he knows how to verify the statement in question.
On the basis of the above consideration, logical positivists said that all metaphysical assertions are nonsensical because they do not convey anything about the facts of the world. They are not also a priori. . So a metaphysical statement is one which purports to express a genuine proposition but in fact expresses neither a tautology nor an empirical hypothesis. The problem which lies with metaphysicians is that they fail to see the relation between the statement and what it states about. This is because metaphysicians are misled by a superficial grammatical feature of the language. Logical positivists argue that the grammatical form of language hides its logical form. Let us consider the two following sentences as an example. 'Unicorns are fictitious' and 'Dogs are faithful'.2 Here, both the sentences are of same grammatical form but differ in their logical form. The analysis of the two sentences is as follows. Dogs must exist in order to have the property of being faithful. But the problem arises with the unicorn. Unless unicorn exists the property of being fictitious will not exist. Now to state that fictitious objects have a special non-empirical mode of real being is devoid of all literal significance. Hence, the truth-value of the first proposition cannot be determined. Therefore, it is a meaningless proposition. Metaphysical propositions are of the same nature whose truth-value cannot be determined and thus they can be ruled out from being called meaningful statements of a language.
| 2 | This example is taken from Ayer, A.J.(1976). Language, Truth and Logic. London: Penguine publication. Also see, Ammerman, R.R. (1965). Classics of Analytic Philosophy. New Delhi: Tata McGraw-Hill Publishing Company, p.119. |