Problem of Knowledge

by Alfred Jules Ayer

In this major book the acclaimed author of Language Truth and Logic tackles one of the central issues of philosophy -- how can we be sure we know anything -- by setting out all the sceptic's arguments and trying to counter then one by one. In considering all the main philosophical issues involved -- how we know that something is a fact, that our senses and memory don't deceive us, that other people are conscious in the same way that we are -- he throws a clear light on the nature of our fundamental beliefs and provides an outstanding example of the philosophical mind at work.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, Metaphysics

224 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1956

About the author

In 1910, Sir Alfred Jules Ayer was born in London into a wealthy family. His father was a Swiss Calvinist and his mother was of Dutch-Jewish ancestry. Ayer attended Eton College and studied philosophy and Greek at Oxford University. From 1946 to 1959, he taught philosophy at University College London. He then became Wykeham Professor of Logic at the University of Oxford. Ayer was knighted in 1970. Included among his many works are The Foundations of Empirical Knowledge (1940), The Problem of Knowledge (1956), The Origins of Pragmatism (1968), Metaphysics and Common Sense (1969), Bertrand Russell (1972) and Hume (1980), about philosopher David Hume. Later in life, Ayer frequently identified himself as an atheist and became active in humanist causes. He was the first vice president of the British Humanist Association and served as its president from 1965 to 1970. He was an Honorary Associate of the Rationalist Press Association from 1947 until his death. He was also an honorary member of the Bertrand Russell. In 1988, Ayer had a near-death experience in the United States after choking on salmon and subsequently losing consciousness. He wrote of his experience in “That Undiscovered Country” (New Humanist, May 1989): “My recent experiences have slightly weakened my conviction that my genuine death, which is due fairly soon, will be the end of me, though I continue to hope that it will be. They have not weakened my conviction that there is no god. I trust that my remaining an atheist will allay the anxieties of my fellow supporters of the British Humanist Association, the Rationalist Press Association and the South Place Ethical Society.” He died shortly after at age 78 in London. D. 1989.

More: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A._J._Ayer

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ayer/

http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/t...

http://www.ucl.ac.uk/~uctytho/AyerbyT...

http://badassphilosophers.tumblr.com/...

http://www.informationphilosopher.com...

Reviews

[Lilly · Rating 5 out of 5]

SO INTERESTING. I love philosophy. This took me way too long to read as it was quite challenging to read. And gave me a bit of a headache. Its so fascinating seeing how things can be proved by logic

[Andrew Noselli · Rating 3 out of 5]

In this book, A.J. Ayer cites Gilbert Ryle, who says that the act of seeing a tree, much like the action of Achilles racing the tortoise, does not designate something that is 'in process' but something that is accomplished and as such is now at a state of completion. Ayer sees Zeno's paradox as belonging to a different conception of time, one situation as being of differentiated instants, while the other representing a continuous whole. Therefore, he concludes, anyone who tries to draw ultimate definitions to experience or define existence in terms of a predicate action is making an error in logic. However, Ayer contends that Ryle is incorrect when he says that the impressions that philosophers cite as evidence of the data coming in from our senses do not really exist. The supposed validity of this view, which was popular around the turn of the 20th century, he says, was strengthened by the fact that there was a mistake in the then-current thinking of the day: the mistaken belief was that something must mediate between external objects and the mind. Accordingly, Ayer does not feel this state of affairs poses a major objection to the sense-datum theory of reality.

Like the uncovering of the language-game inherent in Zeno's paradoxes, Ryle's comments on the everyday transactions between sensation, perception and materiality does not comprise a vocabulary of real life in the sense that it is rendered inadequate for the ordinary purposes of communication. To further refute Zeno and the other philosophers who, he says, were confused between the logic of reality and the logic of language, Ayer says that it is a mistake to consider statements about physical objects as being translatable into statements about sense-data. This is yet another false assumption that has hampered logical thinking for millennia.

The third advance on the faulty logic of the great philosophers of the past, and perhaps the most incomprehensible one Ayer advocates, is the proposition that later events are in fact responsible for earlier effects. Ayer seems to feel that the truth of this statement is augmented by the common and supposedly consensual notion that the world, and the universe surrounding it, is growing ever more uniform through the progression of time. This argument, which fails to be fully convincing to my mind, is not only contrary to the Aristotelian conception of the order of time-logic, but it springs from what Ayer speculates is the mistaken assumptions made from the fact that our notions of causality is derived from the experience of human action; such a mistake potentially arises, Ayer says, when we consider the fact that our actions are directed towards the future and not the past.

At the end of the book Ayer takes up David Hume's skeptical position that suggests that human life and consciousness is extinguished with the loss of the body and, as he puts it, he is not convinced that the alternative proposition, i.e. that a person's existence is tied to the existence of the body, is necessarily true. This to me is a very revealing passage in that it shows Ayer's ideological motives behind all of his indubitably demonstrable intent of sweeping up the logical problems and paradoxes of philosophy. In my opinion, this is a line of thinking to be used only when discriminating between various philosophers at the highest critical level. This style of thinking is brought to bear on the fact that, Ayer suggests, Hume was misled by his own philosophical assumptions. To state it as clearly as I can, Ayer implies that Hume may have been mistaken in saying that, because he said he could not conceive of God's existence due to the radical bent of his positivist worldview, which did not accept the alternative logic of a bodiless soul, i.e. that there is not God, it should not be the case that the only accessible models of reality are the physical facts of existence itself. Is this true or should the concept of divinity stand opposed to the vacancy of continuous bodies and cardinal integers that the logical positivists claim are the ne plus ultra of physical existence? On this note Ayer concludes his book here, saying, "Further than this we cannot go."

[Luke Hayward · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ayer, usually praised for concision, did not live up to my expectations :(

[Octavia Cade · Rating 2 out of 5]

OK, here's the thing. This book wasn't awful. For a philosophy book, it was actually reasonably well-written. Ayer is in love with commas, but he uses simple examples and tries to refrain from sounding like he's just swallowed a dictionary, so this book at least has the virtue of being somewhat accessible to the average reader.

I suspect I've given it a lower score than it deserves, but I just can't get past the subject matter. This aspect of philosophy (How do you know? How do you know that you know?) has always left me cold. I don't think I've an especially practical mindset but really, it's just so much mental masturbation. What is it FOR, for goodness sake? What earthly benefit does this sort of pondering give to anyone? Honestly, I've no patience for it.

I know, I know. I'm a Philistine at the coalface of philosophy, and I'm woefully under-rating. I don't care. It was okay. I found this book frustrating and difficult but I'm glad I read it. I just wouldn't do it again.

[John · Rating 1 out of 5]

The problem of "The problem of Knowledge":

Ironically, the writing is so painfully verbose and convoluted that it is difficult to understand. Clearly "I myself" must be the answer to its ambitious title. Furthermore, the examples tend to be placed where they provide no help to the reader, rather than where they might pull some gems out of the ether. Perhaps one day someone will rewrite this text more helpfully.

[Clifford · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read a portion of this book in college and decided it was time I read the whole thing. It's an important work in the field of epistemology, but not particularly readable. Still, Ayer was a major 20th Century philosopher and I've always been drawn to his work. Not this book, so much, but still it gave me a lot to think about.

[Caracalla · Rating 2 out of 5]

Strong two stars, but two stars nonetheless because a lot of ill-disguised and unjustified dogmatism and lazy periphrasis avoid assessing things essentially, although this is what the work aims for in investigating the nature of knowledge and the strength of the sceptical position.

[Lysergius · Rating 3 out of 5]

Pedestrian

[Peter Jakobsen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ayer is a blind alley albeit a convincing one. Yet logic and semantics will take us only so far and reading him, one thinks "you're too clever by half...too clever for our good..."

[T. Tokunaga · Rating 4 out of 5]

【Historical Proof: A Basic Manual / The Problem of Knowledge / AJ Ayer】

"I am maintaining that only that there is no warrant here for separating structure and content, for arguing that structure can be communicated where content can not" (p208, Section 4, Chapter 5)

If you're climbing up the ladder of a diving platform into Michel Foucault, it'd be not too late to read this book first. This is a classic study of epistemology before Foucault, is an enjoyable read for its concise style and exhalation about a hard matter like epistemology, and yet a densely written one.

According to Ayer, Foucault can be called a thinker "valuable to the extent that one does not merely insist that factual inferences from one level to another are legitimate but seriously tries to meet the arguments which go to show that they are not" (p83, nearby the end of chapter 2). Foucault was scientific. However, it doesn't mean that Foucault's nearly limitless accumulation of proof was perfect. We need much more discipline, such as scrutinizing if the proofs he collected were really valid.

I simply wish Foucault had used simpler terms like "sense-data" (i.e. What it "seems") instead of those esoteric French verbs interwoven in a way which most academics in Anglosphere wouldn't be able to grasp the variety of nuances behind them. He was probably analytic in mind, but his language wasn't. It might be a hard read but if you've already dived into the vast sea of archaeology of intellect, because you can see here something you already know in a much clearer, plainer prose which looks devoid of enough instances. Even it precedes Foucault in putting one's historical identity in question (p178, at the beginning of chapter 5)

However, this book is really polemic in a sense that early Ayer was supposed to be: it's tiring. It's a chagrin that Ayer was this quarrelsome for his criticism on "naïve" realists' and sceptics' focus on ontology is really hitting hard (p150, chapter 4), whereas he suggested that they could be improved into distinguishing ontology as a field.

[George Vernon · Rating 3 out of 5]

Concepts and understanding belonging to philosophy of mind whenever mentioned are poor. Many of the sceptic's problems are based on weak conceivability arguments or caused by the implacable insistence that philosophers have on if-and-only-ifs, and are easily circumnavigated by a Bayesian epistemology. The writing is generally good, though, and it would be unfair to blame the deplorable state of 20th century epistemology wholly on Ayer.

[Benjamin · Rating 5 out of 5]

While I brought this book more for my love of A.J. Ayer rather than my interest in the topic. I found that I was already familiar with much of the ideas and arguments used.

That being said, I found it a very good and rather comprehensive introduction to the subject and would recommend it to anyone wanting to get into the problem of knowledge.

[Aymen Ayed · Rating 3 out of 5]

did not like

[Sean · Rating 1 out of 5]

Good ideas, quite basic thinking though hidden in too many words. Would not recommend it to anyone I like. Do not bother reading, you will find most of what is spoken about you already know.

[sarah]

Too much philosophy for me

[Animesh Mitra · Rating 4 out of 5]

A great book on epistemology.

[Meg]

this took me two years at least.

[Esther Inkoom]

Ayer

[Doris Raines · Rating 5 out of 5]

It. Has. Been. Said. The. Mind. Is. A. Terrible. Thing. To. Waste. It. Is. So. True.