A. J. Ayer claims that fundamental ethical concepts:?

Question

a.)function as mythic symbols.
b.) are derived from basic testable internal observations.
c.)are pseudoconcepts that add nothing of factual content.
d.)have different meanings in different contexts and cultures.
e.) function as definitions.

Answer 1

AJ Ayer was a logical positivist, believing that facts only have meaning if they have a procedure to verify if they are true or false, such as in logic. Since metaphysical or ethical questions can not be verified, they are meaningless. For AJ Ayer, things are tautological or metaphysical. So C would be the answer.

Answer 2

Ayer was a known metaphysician,as such he believed in
(their so-called) facts which we now know are group led and
are not facts at all.
Fundamental ethical ideas are not usually
observable,factual definitions; Nor are facts for that matter-
simple facts maybe,but whether Ayer wanted to keep his
readers childlike,so to speak,others will decide.
Likely he was carrying-on his insular and uncritical oxbridge
training,and thats truely a job for the social scientist to unravel.

Answer 3

I need a description for his 'fundamental ethical concept' concept.

http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/hl/hlteleol.htm#HL3_735
'§ 1595

The more the teleological principle was linked with the concept of an extramundane intelligence and to that extent was favoured by piety, the more it seemed to depart from the true investigation of nature, which aims at cognising the properties of nature not as extraneous, but as immanent determinatenesses and accepts only such cognition as a valid comprehension. As end is the Notion itself in its Existence, it may seem strange that the cognition of objects from their Notion appears rather as an unjustified trespass into a heterogeneous element, whereas mechanism, for which the determinateness of an object is a determinateness posited in it externally and by another object, is held to be a more immanent point of view than teleology. Of course mechanism, at least the ordinary unfree mechanism, and also chemism must be regarded as an immanent principle in so far as the external determinant is itself again just such another object, externally determined and indifferent to such determining, or, in the case of chemism, the other object is one likewise chemically determined; in general, an essential moment of the totality always lies in something outside it. These principles therefore remain confined within the same natural form of finitude; yet though they do not seek to go beyond the finite and lead only to finite causes in their explanation of phenomena, which themselves demand a further progress, at the same time they expand themselves, partly into a formal totality in the concept of force, cause, and similar determinations of reflection which are supposed to denote a primariness, and partly also through the abstract universality of a sum total of forces, a whole of reciprocal causes. Mechanism shows itself to be a striving for totality in the fact that it seeks to grasp nature by itself as a whole that for its Notion does not require any other — a totality that is not found in end and the extra-mundane intelligence associated with it.'

http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/li_terms.htm

Answer 4

So what?Ayer was part of the logical positivism movement and was a leading humanist and his ideas are interesting but not widely accepted.

Answer 5

C...You might like to compare this with the works of Bertrand Russel in refute

Answer 6

I would say (c) in view of what Ayer writes about emotivism.