With the loss of a family member our income took a hit. My Patreon supporters ensure I will never employ paywalls or intrusive third party ads here, and I always benefit most from more Patreon patrons. And there are other ways to tip me or support my work (like buying my books, and more: see How to Help for a complete rundown). But I’m beginning a new thing too:

Every month I will write about something I recommend buying and why. I am an Amazon Associate, so if you click through the sales link in any of these brief recommendation blogs (like today’s), I will get a commission on everything in your cart when you check out (even if you don’t buy the thing I recommend, and even if you buy a bunch of weird stuff like lawnmowers or rare autographed baseballs), as long as you fill that cart after following my link, and complete your purchase within 24 hours. I also get bonuses (in addition to the commissions) if my links pull enough sales volume every month (at least a thousand dollars, which is hard to do, but hey, let’s try!).

This holds for all Amazon links in any article or page on my entire website. But here I am highlighting two of the books I have long recommended people read.

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Today’s featured books are masterworks in philosophy that I believe every philosopher must read (and I believe every citizen should endeavor to be some scale of philosopher): A.J. Ayer’s Language, Truth, and Logic and Michael Polanyi’s Personal Knowledge.

Many might recognize LTL. It’s a famous monograph, one of the most important works of philosophy written in the 20th century. It is the core text of what was then called “logical positivism.” Ayer released it in 1936 but to stymie subsequent critics he published a much-improved second edition in 1952, which is the one still in print and the one I recommend. It’s an easy read, at only 160 pages and well written in plain language (there is barely any jargon or convoluted or dense text). PK is lesser known now but was a very influential book published shortly after (and somewhat in response to) LTL. The edition I recommend is the new 2015 enlarged edition, with an introduction by science historian Mary Jo Nye. PK is longer than LTL, clocking in at 464 pages. But it is also in an easy-to-read style. And reading the two back-to-back will give you insights that reading either one alone wouldn’t.

Why these? My philosophy today is still well represented in my 2005 book Sense and Goodness without God (which has evolved only a little since: see Revisions to Sense and Goodness without God), and my epistemology today remains grounded in my synthesis then of the epistemologies of Ayer and Polanyi. Every philosopher must begin with epistemology, their “theory of knowledge” (since all other knowledge depends on how you work out how you can know things at all). And I think no epistemology will be well grounded that does not build on and address these two works. So if you want, I can unpack that a bit…

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One of the most crucial methods philosophers should adopt is to seek a synthesis of competing views on every subject (for an example, see Open Letter to Academic Philosophy: All Your Moral Theories Are the Same). Your epistemology, for example, should explain the entire contents of Ayer and Polanyi: if they went wrong somewhere, it should entail how and why; and if they got something right, it should incorporate that into whatever you need to replace it. If there are things Ayer got wrong that Polanyi got right, and vice versa, you should end up with a coherent epistemology consisting of everything Ayer got right and everything Polanyi got right (and abandoning everything they got wrong). And endeavoring to find a way to do that that is also coherent, not only with itself but with everything else we have learned about the world, is what will lead you to a robust epistemology closer to the truth than any other you might meet.

This does mean Ayer and Polanyi aren’t right about everything. But they are right about a lot. And though they appear to be competing—even contradictory—points of view, they actually can be harmonized. You can see what such a synthesis looks like in my book Sense and Goodness. Once you read them you’ll see how I retained some of each, and dropped some of each, to produce a new epistemology. An important component of which is semantics—what we mean when we say things. Ayer builds his epistemology on top of a semantic position regarding the “meaning” of propositions (things we assert, in whatever words or language). Polanyi then problematizes that project. But he doesn’t destroy it. If you think it through after reading them both, Polanyi’s view provides a valuable mod to Ayer’s, by which Ayer’s position can actually be improved.

Does this mean logical positivism is correct? Not really. The term carries a lot of baggage, some of which should not have been thrown out with the bathwater. But what survives is a new thing, a synthesis of positivist and nonpositivist approaches.

For example, the central thesis of LTL (which, despite what critics have said, is correct) is that all meaningful propositions derive their meaning entirely from what would verify or falsify them—such that, if a sentence contains no indication of what would verify or falsify it (even in principle, even in the future, with some magical instruments or access to information), it has no meaning at all. Because every assertion asserts something is different about the (real or conceptual) world, such that denying an assertion amounts to denying that that difference exists, and that difference actually existing is what it means to call that assertion true. So how you know whether an assertion is true is contained within the meaning of the assertion itself.

These two features cannot be separated; they are identical. Critics, for example, complained that some statements have multiple possible meanings (a sentence can be understood to be making an analytical statement or an empirical statement) or complex meanings (a sentence can have an analytical and an empirical component). But neither fact undermines Ayer’s point. You still have to choose one or the other, or tease them apart, when asking if a statement is true. So the so-called “analytic-synthetic distinction” remains a fact. There are no other meanings propositions can have. And all other attempts to make this conclusion go away fall to the same kind of analysis: they mistake what the distinction asserts; and offer no actual alternative to it.

But Ayer then went on to argue that moral and metaphysical propositions had neither, and thus, no meaning. Morals were therefore mere emotivist ejaculations (like just saying “yay!” and “boo!” with no actual truth value). Ayer was wrong. But his error is not in his epistemology, but its application—his analytic-synthetic semantics does limit and define what moral facts are, just not in the way he mistook (see The Real Basis of a Moral World). Likewise, Ayer argued that there can be no metaphysics, because any meaningful statement about metaphysics is just a statement in physics (if lacking adequate data to confirm). But his mistake there was in incorrectly analyzing the words “metaphysics” and “physics.”

By Ayer’s own principles (such as his extremely useful method of locating “definitions in use” that is alone worth the price of the book), the word “metaphysics” doesn’t mean something ontologically distinct from physics as the recognized science, but something epistemically distinct from it. Ayer conflated the word “physics” in use (a term referring to a scientific field and its results) with his own stipulated definition of “physics” in concept (which includes not just the science as-is, but all its possible or hypothetical future outputs). Metaphysics thus indeed is physics—in the latter and just not the former sense. What the word denotes is, rather, the physics that science hasn’t fully sorted out yet. Metaphysical statements are thus still statements capable of scientific verification or falsification. It’s just that everything falling under that rubric is the stuff science hasn’t been able to get to yet (due to a lack of instruments or other access to the requisite data). All metaphysics will become physics some day. But until then, it sits in the limbo of “more or less probable” rather than the solid state of “scientifically certain.”

These kinds of conclusions will arise from your own critical analysis, as you question assumptions in each author (see The Scary Truth about Critical Thinking). For example, if instead of just buying how Ayer analyzes the words “morality,” “metaphysics,” or “physics,” you apply his own principles to check if instead he has mis-analyzed them (these words “in use” don’t mean what he says; and when you get at what their actual meaning “in use” is, you get to a different understanding of them—and one that preserves his core methodologies and principles). But you will also be aided in this, and much else, by comparing Polanyi’s points and arguments with Ayer’s. Polanyi captures realities of epistemology that Ayer overlooked, such as the role of subjectivity and social construction of knowledge, but that, too, can be incorporated into Ayer’s model, resulting in a different epistemological framework, one that keeps Ayer’s best insights, while abandoning all its gaps and oversights.

I will close with some of the best remarks I found in the Amazon reviews of Polanyi, as they capture what you will find there that isn’t in Ayer (while what is in Ayer and not in Polanyi remains, of course, just as essential):

Outside of [the book’s] main plan, yet contributing to it, we travel over a huge range of territory. Physics, mathematics, psychology, biology, politics, history, religion, philosophy are all called into play. Along the way, we critique Marxism, scientism, mechanism, anti-traditionalism, over-traditionism, rationalism and more. It’s quite an adventure. In it all, Polanyi says, “look and see how it all goes together.” And it does.

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Of course you could say that about all philosophy of science texts, but this book is unique in that it doesn’t “start and end with words” like a lot of texts that seem to just be an ego outing by the author to dance with semantics, but actually helps the reader look at her life through different lenses, frames, focuses and zooms as we examine the practical assumptions we make when jumping from evidence to explanation. Highly recommended, but not for the faint of heart or time constrained soul!

I can vouch for these comments. They are spot on. Ayer’s Language, Truth, and Logic and Polanyi’s Personal Knowledge will be valuable and rewarding reads; and essential reads, if you want to hone up your philosophy of life.