 Ayer’s chief target is metaphysics and he rather ambitiously titled the first chapter of his book “The Elimination of Metaphysics”. Metaphysics is taken to be made up of statements that concern the nature of reality that falls beyond the scope of scientific inquiry. Examples include the existence of the external world, the number of substances that there are in the world, whether the world is made up of ideas and the reality of propositions or universals. Because theories on these issues are not empirically verifiable, Ayer takes them to lack “factual meaning”: they should be eliminated as a topic of debate. Other conspicuous victims of the application of the verification principle were ethical, aesthetic and religious statements all of which, so Ayer argues, are not susceptible to verification and are thereby similarly factually meaningless.