Ayer's Theory Of Sensory Materials

Due to the modern British empiricism development in the history of western philosophy,perception becomes the focus in the field of epistemology. In order to solve this problem, Ayer, combining British empiricism and linguistics, put forward his own sense-data theory. He believes that to solve the problem of consciousness in epistemology, one can't see it as a matter of fact, but rather regard it as a language problem. In his view, the task of philosophy is the logical analysis of language. According to the principles of positivism, our knowledge must be limited to experience. The language is used to describe the experience, thus the language of describing experience must be limited to experience. Only in this way can we judge whether a statement is meaningful or not based on the principles of positivism. Only when experience can be confirmed, he thinks, statements are meaningful; otherwise, they are metaphysical nonsense.To make a certain basis for empirical knowledge, he thinks, our understanding and even all knowledge are from sensory experience. But it's about sense – data, not about material things. However, we can't deny the existence of material things like Berkeley and Hume. Because sense data is the presentation of the materiality, we can know materiality indirectly with sense data. Believing only by means of language can we do it, Ayer concludes that the relationship between sense data and materiality becomes the relationship of the two statements. "Consciousness, as skeptics proposed, is a confirmation of our belief on the rightly perceived objects."In his philosophy career, Ayer proposes two thoughts concerning the relationship between sense data and materiality, namely early "Reductionism" in Language, Truth and Logic and later "Tectonics" in The Basis of Empirical Knowledge. Early being affected on Russell's "Logic Structuralism”, Ayer put forward the so-called "Reductionism" which he reckons will turn statements of materiality into statements of sense data. Further more, the key to realizing the "Reduction" is the definition of materiality in usage. However, later he points out that we are unable to achieve the "Reduction" based on the existing terms. So he gives up "Reductionism" to the thought of "Tectonics" in his The Basis of Empirical Knowledge. "Tectonics" means we can construct materiality with sense data according to some rules. Ayer's thought of "Reductionism" and "Tectonics" constitutes the main content of this thesis.Lastly, the thesis evaluates the positive meaning and its deficiency on Ayer's sense-data theory.