Explain Religious Language As Cognitive But Meaningless With Referemce To Logical Positivists Flashcards
What is logical positivism?
Logical positivism was a philosophical movement originating from the work of the Vienna circle, who considered it their task to be a philosophically driven systematic reduction of all knowledge to basic scientific, logical formulations.
What do logical positivists consider meaningful?
They maintain that anything outside of logical and scientific doctrines is meaningless because it is unverifiable. Thus what remains are tautological statements which can be verified by observations and empirical experience: religious language is held as cognitive yet meaningless.
Who is A.J. Ayer?
According to A.J.Ayer (1910-89) in his book ‘Language, Truth and Logic’, logical positivism outlines that there are only 2 forms of knowledge that could be considered valid: logical reasoning and empirical evidence.
What is the Principle of Verification?
Logical positivists accept statements that could be regarded as meaningful were tautological, analytic or synthetic and any statement falling outside of these is meaningless as they can’t be judged as true or false or verified by empirical means. This shows that the focus of logical positivists is language, ensuring it is precise and reflects the view that there can be a single common language for all of the sciences, this has become known as the Principle of Verification.
What does Ayer say about religious language?
Ayer developed the work of the Vienna Circle’s logical positivists. He set out the criteria for how language could be considered meaningful as well as rejecting metaphysics as there was no way of being able to determine their ‘truth’. This meant a rejection of religious language and any language relating to a form of abstract thought, such as ‘God is good’, since God is an external notion and not observable, thus unverifiable and therefore fails to meet the criteria of a synthetic statement. Ayer states “no sentence which purports to describe the nature of a transcendent God can possess any literal significance”, suggesting the language of the believer is meaningless outside the scope of science.
What limitation did Ayer find in the Principle of Verification?
it was not able to take into account those statements that were made about things that were accepted as meaningful even though they weren’t immediately verifiable.
What is practical verifiability according to Ayer?
He therefore developed the principle by adding practical verifiability and its principle. Ayer writes “An example of such a proposition is that there are no mountains on the farther side of the moon! No rocket has yet been invented which would enable me to look.. I am unable to decide the matter by actual observation…but I know what would decide it for me…therefore I say it’s verifiable in principle”. Thus, religious statements are considered cognitive but meaningless.
What are the strong and weak forms of the verification principle?
The strong form is accepting as meaningful those statements that could be immediately and practically verified. The weak form contains that as long as we know what experience could be used to establish the truth of the statement, it would be meaningful in principle, such as historical statements, we could see the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in 1953.
What is Anthony Flew’s principle of falsification?
As an alternative view of being able to establish the truth of a statement in order to render it meaningful, Anthony Flew’s principle of falsification took an almost opposite view: for something to be meaningful there has to be evidence to empirically refute it.
What is the parable of the Gardener?
For example Flew references the parable of the Gardener in which 2 explorers find a clearing with flowers and weeds. One believes it is tended to by a gardener, the other does not. Despite all tests, no gardener is detected. The believer continually qualifies the gardener as an “invisible, intangible, insensible”, which prompts the skeptic to ask “how does the gardener differ from no gardener at all?” Here Flew suggests religious claims are similar and unverifiable in that they could not be falsified.
What did Karl Popper contribute to the discussion of scientific theories?
This idea was championed by Karl Popper, if a principle was robustly scientific then it should be inherently disprovable “a theory is scientific if it is falsifiable”, Religious language isn’t structured in a way that allows it to be tested or disproven.
Why can’t religious statements be falsified according to Flew?
This scientific theory such as gravity; an object would float away from earth without it, the statement can be disproven. However this does not hold true for religious statements such as ‘God exists’ because there is no possible observation or experience that could prove it false.
What evidence did Flew use to challenge God’s existence?
Flew chose to challenge God’s existence due to the fact that there is evidence of evil and suffering in the world which which goes against ideas ideas of the traditional God of Classical theism, religious language becomes unfalsifiable - meaning, no matter what happens in the world, the believer still insists God exists and is good. Flew said that religious believers do not allow such evidence to count against their theistic beliefs ‘died a death of a thousand qualifications’.
What did Hynman say about God?
Hynman said “God is precisely that which is not empirical”
What quote goes in the Intro?
The Vienna circle claims that “Logical analysis is the method of clarification of philosophical problems”.
