If it’s not published, I’m sure nobody here will know, but you might find this interesting.

This user has been deleted and all their posts removed.

Please accept the comment that answers your question.
seconds ago — Brian Leahy

Many thanks for such a masterly reply to my question which guided me towards remembering what I first read back in the early 1970s when I started to read philosophy at the new British Open University and found that wonderful arrogant piece from Ayer’s Language Truth and Logic that, “metaphysical statements such as “God exists” are unverifiable and meaningless.”
God is not the important factor for me but his dismissal of metaphysical most certainly was.

Many thanks for such a masterly reply to my question which guided me towards remembering what I first read back in the early 1970s when I started to read philosophy at the new British Open University and found that wonderful arrogant piece from Ayer’s Language Truth and Logic that, “metaphysical statements such as “God exists” are unverifiable and meaningless.”
God is not the important factor for me but his dismissal of metaphysical most certainly was. — Brian Leahy

Given the way God's defined, incorporeal and such, God is unverifiable and if one defines meaning(fulness) as only that which is verifiable, God is meaningless, no?

Ayer probably used God as an index case, the quintessential metaphysical claim, and if you disagree with him, you should be worried.

Verifiability is, as far as it matters to me, a critical concept in philosophy but my reasons may differ from those who originally proposed it. In the age of the internet we're in, we're bombarded with email scams - money, cars, degrees, jobs are all being used as bait for the unwary individual. How does one sort out the genuine good offer from the bad ones? You cross-check, you ask around, you do some Googling, etc. What exactly is it that you're doing here? Verifying of course. Verification is one of many proven methods that help us tell the truth from a...wait for it...lie. In other words, that which fails verification is usually a falsehood/lie.

Given all of the above, what's your take now on the unverifiable? Is the unverifiable more like a lie (failed verification) or more like the truth (passed verification)? Should we give the unverifiable the benefit of the doubt (there maybe something to metaphysics after all) or should we err on the side of caution (metaphysics is nonsense)?

Imagine the following:

Scenario 1 [Verifiable claims]
Someone tells you to sell everything you have - laptop, car, house, everything - and give the proceeds to a charity but he'll give you 4 billion dollars in a box. You have the option of verifying if the box really does contain that sum of money.

Scenario 2 [Unverifiable claims/metaphysics]
Someone tells you to sell everything you have - laptop, car, house, everything - and give the proceeds to a charity but he'll give you 8 billion dollars in a box. You don't have the option of verifying if the box really does contain that sum of money.

What should you do?

My answers:

Scenario 1: You should obviously sell all you possess and take the 4 billion dollars. This is a no-brainer!

Scenario 2: Is the person making you the offer telling the truth or is it a lie. Do you see what's happened? Unverifiable literally means a lie makes an appearance as a possibility. I guess I answered my own question. If unverifiable were a number, it would be rounded off to a lie. Err on the side of caution is what this is called.

That said, giving the benefit of the doubt is also considered a reasonable course of action. Should we believe this person actually wants to part with 8 billion dollars? Not likely but, at the same time, not impossible!

It looks like we have two possibilities we have to tackle.

1. The possibility that the box is empty (a lie)
2. The possibility that the box is not empty (a truth)

The solution seems profoundly simple. Metaphysics is at its heart an exploration of possibility and so the metaphysician isn't actually bothered by the fact that fae could be wrong. All the metaphysician wants to do is to closely examine the possibility space as it were. Thus, to the metaphysician, selling everything fae has for the mere possibility that fae could gain 8 billion dollars is as good as it gets - a lucrative deal by all accounts.

Many thanks for such a masterly reply to my question which guided me towards remembering what I first read back in the early 1970s when I started to read philosophy at the new British Open University and found that wonderful arrogant piece from Ayer’s Language Truth and Logic that, “metaphysical statements such as “God exists” are unverifiable and meaningless.” — Brian Leahy

I'm a little lost in this conversation, which is fine. For what it's worth, my memory of Collingwood is that he identified "There is a God" as an absolute presupposition for the practice of science. It was my understanding that he meant that as a statement that we live in a lawful universe. @tim wood - Do you remember this? Do you see it the same way I do?

This user has been deleted and all their posts removed.

While disputes with colleagues is a good part of being a professional philosopher, they would put their professionalism at risk if they resorted to name-calling. So I think Collingwood's position on Ayer would be better expressed by saying that he profoundly disagreed with him.

I was amused to see that the entry on Ayer in my edition of the Oxford Companion to Philosophy was written by Timothy Sprigge, the author of "the Vindication of Absolute Idealism".

Both Sprigge, and the Companion's editor, Ted Honderich, studied under Ayer at UCL. Honderich contributed a supportive preface to Ayer's final book, a collection of essays entitled "The Meaning of Life". This was published posthumously in 1990. If it contains any allusion to the Monty Python film of the same name, this has so far eluded me.

Anyone who entertains nostalgia for Collingwood and British Idealism (I don't) might also appreciate the remarks of another professional philosopher (Ray Monk), published in Prospect https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/ideas/philosophy/39183/how-the-untimely-death-of-rg-collingwood-changed-the-course-of-philosophy-forever

This user has been deleted and all their posts removed.

I used the words I did basically because, in this debate, my sympathies are with Ayer rather than Collingwood.

RGC called Ayer a fool for his logical positivism. (And imo made his case.) — tim wood

I've gone back to my copy of Ayer's memoir, "Part of My Life (1977)", which confirms that, as Oxford colleagues, he and Collingwood were on good terms. Ayer says that RGC "did however take the book [Language, Truth and Logic, 1936] seriously enough to devote part of his lectures to refuting it. He ended one such lecture by saying 'if I thought that Mr Ayer was right, I would give up philosophy.'"

That book, written after Ayer had studied with some of the Logical Positivists then active in Vienna, begins with a chapter "The Elimination of Metaphysics". Here, Ayer maintained "that no statement which refers to a 'reality' transcending the limits of all possible sense experience can possibly have any literal significance".

Collingwood wrote his Essay on Metaphysics (1940), and his rebuttal of Ayer features in chapter XVI, "Suicide of Positivistic Metaphysics", which appears to rest on RGC's theory of absolute presuppositions.

Many years ago (around the time Ayer was writing Part of my Life, in fact), I bought a copy of Collingwood's Autobiography, which I still have. In the chapter "Question and Answer", Collingwood outlines his departure from conventional propositional logic, with the view that any proposition Is in fact an answer to a question, and should be considered in that light. In the Essay, he says "Every statement that anybody ever makes is made in answer to a question"; and also "If the meaning of a proposition is relative to the question it answers, its truth must be relative to the same thing".

I'm not now convinced by any of this. While the context in which a proposition occurs may be useful in understanding its meaning, and perhaps the reasons for its being stated, its truth will be independent of this context. The laws of motion formulated by Isaac Newton were accepted as science because they fit the facts, quite independently of the story about the apple in his orchard. Or indeed anything else about Newton's life or the society he lived in.

I enjoyed Ray Monk's biography of Wittgenstein. However, I think the view in his Prospect article that Collingwood's early death altered the course of British philosophy is stretching the facts a bit. In my view, Ryle was influential principally because he was an operator, not because he held a particular Oxford professorship.

Even if Collingwood had lived on and the vacancy not occurred when it did, Ryle would certainly still have written "The Concept of Mind", and possibly also been appointed editor of Mind, the pre-eminent British philosophical journal. I don't think Collingwood was an influencer on that level. I see him as a bit of an outsider: his influences were not local thinkers but Italians (Croce, Gentile), so he was not part of any Oxford faction. As far as I know, he left few followers to advocate and develop his thinking. Contrast his contemporary Wittgenstein, who also died early, but left a small army of disciples -- Anscombe, Geach, Rhees, von Wright, Malcolm etc.

Of course, I could be wrong about that. It is true that, 80 years after his death, quite a lot of his work is still available, in print or as e-books. I'd be interested to learn more about any influence it has had.

I'm not now convinced by any of this. While the context in which a proposition occurs may be useful in understanding its meaning, and perhaps the reasons for its being stated, its truth will be independent of this context. The laws of motion formulated by Isaac Newton were accepted as science because they fit the facts, quite independently of the story about the apple in his orchard. Or indeed anything else about Newton's life or the society he lived in

I think you're right, although there also is a sense in which Newton's Laws are only an answer to a certain sort of question. Something like: "given we observe x,y,z..., what will happen next." It does not seem to answer the question of "why" we observe what we do. Various thinkers, Hegel, Cartwright, etc. have gotten at this over the years. But as you say, the truth relative to what they can answer seems quite independent of the question.

You can turn Newton's Laws into the answer for "why" questions, but this will tend to involve positing "natural laws," as casually efficacious entities that sit "outside" or "above" the universe and dictate its evolution. This is indeed exactly how they were viewed during Hume's time, but as Hume shows this opens them to a host of critiques.

Anyhow, on the topic of positivism, I have always found it fascinating how important Newton was for them as an exemplar of what science (and so all knowledge) should be. After all, there was this huge focus on falsification, but Newton's Laws were falsified in astronomy almost immediately. Orbits simply didn't line up with his laws. But we didn't abandon the theory, rather we posited hitherto unobserved planets with large masses that were shifting the orbits of the outer planets. This, of course, ended up being correct. And then there is the issue of multiple bodies, which shows the laws to be an idealization, although but maybe that insight is easier to fold into the positivist project.

This user has been deleted and all their posts removed.

The quote you couldn't find is actually from "An Autobiography" not the "Essay on Metaphysics". Apologies for misleading. It is on page 33 of my 1970 edition, which has the same pagination as the first edition available at archive.org. I have checked the wording, and it is as I quoted it above.

I'm not convinced either by the principle of the logic of question-and-answer, or by the passage I misattributed. In the latter case, for the reasons I gave, asserting that truth is independent of context. On the former point, a little further on in the autobiography, Collingwood expands on his dispute with propositional logic, and with "various well-known theories of truth" (p. 36). I think my assertion means that I adhere to the correspondence theory of truth, and maybe I need to review that.

I haven't read much of the Essay on Metaphysics, as you rightly detect. That's why I said that chapter XVI appears to rest on his theory of absolute presuppositions. I intend to look at this sometime, since I am interested in his critique of Ayer, and vice versa. But its melodramatic title, and the (apparent) fact that it is couched in RGC's personal theoretical framework, are both, to me, the reverse of encouraging.

This user has been deleted and all their posts removed.