Religious Language Flashcards
What does cognitivism argue?
Argues that a sentence is meaningful as far as it makes a claim about the world and specifies certain truth conditions, and that these conditions can be explicitly and clearly stated and communicated.
Given the division of language, we can be cognitivists about certain areas of language while failing to be about others.
What does non-cognitivism argue?
That some expressions and clusters of language do not express beliefs or propositions or claim facts to be the case. A non-cognitivist will state that such propositions are not the kind of thing which can even be true or false; it would not make sense to call them true/false. To do so would be to commit a category mistake; we are mistakenly classifying it as falling under the category that they can be true or false.
Important to remember that an individual can hold both non-cognitivist and cognitivist theory, i.e. moral language is cognitivist, religious language is non-cognitivist.
What do logical positivists argue?
That the expressions of logic and mathematics were, to them, in fact senseless; note that they made a distinction between an expression being senseless and it being nonsense. Logical and mathematical statements, i.e. analytic, and a priori statements, as per Hume and his relations of ideas which have nothing to do with matters of fact, are essential for the expressive powers of language, but do not, themselves, actually express anything; they do not in fact make claims about facts in the world.
To a logical positivist what language is meaningful?
Language, to the positivists, was only meaningful if it could be connected to, or understood in terms, of empirical experience. A key feature of the expressions of empirical science is that they are taken to be verifiable, on the logical positivist account. In other words, a necessary and sufficient condition for a sentence to be meaningful, for the logical positivists, is that the sentence express something which can be verified if true, or disconfirmed. In other words, they held to the verification principle.
What would Ayer classify as a meaningful sentence?
A sentence is meaningful if, and only if:
1. It is a tautology, meaning true by definition (e.g. every unmarried man is a bachelor); the sentence/proposition in this case is called analytic, and the knowledge acquired is called a priori,
2. Or, it can be demonstrated/proven/confirmed, i.e. it can be verified. Ayer thinks that statements are meaningful if verifiable, in principle, by observation; by experiencing something thaty shows/demonstrates, provides information for the fact which the proposition claims to be the case. To know the meaning of a sentence is therefore to know its truth conditions. The sentence is called synthetic, and the knowledge is called a posteriori.
What example could be given to counter the verification principle?
By considering scientific language we can see a possible flaw with Ayer’s verification principle.
In example, ‘Water boils at 100 degrees Celsius’. This statement is talking about all water, it is making a general statement, and the making of such a statement is essential to the activity of science as a knowledge. Yet such a general statement can never be absolutely demonstrated beyond any doubt; we can only observe a finite number of instances. This statement, thus, would fail condition (1) as it is not a tautology; it is not true by definition. It would also fail condition (2) as it cannot be conclusively empirically proven through observation.
How does Ayer respond to science counter-example?
Distinguishes between a strong and a weak version of the verification principle.
Strong - A proposition is meaningful if we can directly verify it either as analytic and a priori in virtue of it being true by definition, or directly by an observation and thus confirm its truth/falsity for certain.
Weak - A statment is meaningful if it is analytic, or if there are observation relevant for determining the truth/falsity of the statement or our confidence/degree of belief in it.
So what of religious language’s meaning to Ayer?
Religious language fails the verification principle: it is neither a tautology (e.g. ‘God exists’ is not true through its own meaning), and it is not empirically demonstrable or falsifiable. For Ayer, while these expression carry emotional and literary significance, they are not factually significant.
Ayer rejects the arguments for God, whether a priori or posteriori, using Hume’s fork and the verification principle. Ayer thinks that the whole debate about God is meaningless, as it is, for the same reasons, equally meaningless to state ‘God does not exist’.
What is a criticism of the ‘weak’ form of the verification principle?
That it is too strong of a condition. It precludes the meaningfulness of a great deal of other language as well, beyond religious language to include ethical (e.g. murder is wrong). Given that we might feel these types of language as essential to everyday life and to serve important functions, and therefore to be meaningful, one might reject Ayer’s position on this basis.
What is a criticism of the verification principle as a whole?
That, by its own conditions, it is meaningless. It is neither true by definition, or to express a proposition that could be verified or falsified by experience.
How does Hick’s eschatological verification differ from Ayer’s?
Hick thinks that we treat a proposition as verifiable and therefore factually significant if we can engage in activity that would in effect remove any reasonable doubt.
What does Hick think of religious language?
Hick accepts that religious statements cannot be falsified. We cannot falsify the belief if God, he thinks that if God exists then the belief cannot be falsified, and if God does not exist, then we cannot confirm it by dying as there would, presumably, be no afterlife.
Hick still, however, believes that religious statements are verifiable. That their un-falsifiability does not preclude their verifiability, in the sense that all effective rational doubt can be removed.
What is Hick’s Parable of the Celestial City?
‘Two men are travelling together along a road. One of them believes that it leads to the Celestial
City, the other that it leads nowhere; but since this is the only road there is, both must travel it
… During the journey they meet with moments of refreshment and delight, and with moments
of hardship and danger. All the time one of them thinks of his journey as a pilgrimage to the
Celestial City. He interprets the pleasant parts of the journey as encouragements and the
obstacles as trials of his purpose … The other, however, believes none of this … Since he has
no choice in the matter, he enjoys the good and endures the bad … When they do turn the last
corner, it will be apparent that one of them has been right all the time and the other wrong.’
What is Hick’s point behind the Parable of the Celestial City?
Hick is pointing here, beyond the soul-making trials and tribulations of the world, to the possibility of an eschatological verification, i.e, the possibility, essential to the mainstream opinions of the monotheistic religions, that there is an afterlife, and the point that this would serve as a possible means of verifying the existence of God.
Such an ‘experience’ would of course remove any rational doubt as the existence of God. Hick argues that, while verification of religious truths may not happen in this life, they are still meaningful because they can be confirmed in the afterlife.
Issue with eschatological validity?
Could maintain that the universe has existed for 13.7 billion years, mostly without the, known, existence of life. That it would seem implausible to posit that the afterlife exists when the creator, if there is one, created the universe without life.
Counter: This argument is quite weak. It hinges on the presuppositions that the afterlife is a singularly human concept, that we are the only life forms/entities to conceive of such a concept, that life starts from a human perspective, or that ‘life’ is a necessity to afterlife. These are not proveable in any way and are, in fact, wildly speculative and improbable.
What does Antony Flew argue distinctly to Hick and Ayer?
That it is primarily falsifiability that determines the meaningfulness of a proposition.
What parable does Antony, inspired by John Wisdom, use? and what does he mean with this?
Imagine two individuals encounter a garden of flowers. The first, seeing what they perceive to be the organisation of the flower arrangement, concludes that some artificier and planner is responsible and has been tending them. The second, seeing the disorder, and overgrown weeds, concludes that no one has been tending the garden.
The point being that the same evidence can lead distinct individuals to arrive at different conclusions, depending on their prior assumptions, beliefs, knowledge, attitudes, and the mode of presentation, etc. A key point is that empirical evidence and experiences are not themselves sufficient for definitive conclusions.
What is Flew’s own version of the parable?
Here two individuals find a clearing in a jungle, filled with flowers and weeds. One companion thinks there to be no gardener. The other companion, having hope, thinks the gardener comes at night. They stay up all night to check, but no gardener appears.
The first companion takes this as evidence that there is no gardener. The believer takes this as evidence that the gardener is invisible. They then put up an electric fence, assign sniffer and guard dogs, but still get no sign. The believer now asserts that they are odourless and intangible. So, at each step, the believer refuses to accept that the lack of evidence for the gardener means that they should cease to think there is a gardener at all, at time modifying their assertion to retain the possibility that they are correct.
What is Flew’s point?
Flew thinks that believers do not have an idea of what would falsify their claims, or if they continue to alter their beliefs to avoid falsification, then in pragmatic terms, they are not making genuine claims at all, as he thinks there to be no genuine falsifiability in these cases. The purported propositions are not factually significant and conclusively, therefore, are not meaningful.
How does Basil Mitchell respond to Flew’s argument?
Argues that the believer’s position is more nuanced and defensible than Flew makes it out to be. Mitchell accepts that religious propositions are falsifiable. He gives the example of a partisan, fighting for the independence of their occupied country, who encounters an individual claiming to be their new leader asking that they put their trust in them. The partisan does, despite having doubts, and over the coming months, sees evidence which contributes to convincing him that the leader is genuine, while also seeing evidence that seems to suggest that he could be undermining the movement, and that they are a traitor. The fact that the partisan is experiencing this doubt, Mitchell maintains, is evidence that the belief is falsifiable. Mitchell holds that something similar applies to the experience of the religious individual.
People lose their faith, this would suggest that belief is falsifiable.
How does R.M.Hare respond to Flew’s argument?
Hare is a non-cognitivist, unlike Mitchell and Flew.
Provides the Paranoid Student paradox. Hare agrees with Flew that this fails the test of falsifiability, and cannot be a genuine assertion. However, he does not think that statements such as this, which he groups with religious statements, function as genuine claims. He thinks that we should rather see them as expressions of the general worldview of the individual, in this case the student. These can be seen as viewpoints or interpretations which are foundational to the overall worldview of the individual.
Flew would claim that it appears like the student is stating a view (blik): ‘the tutors are trying to kill me’, but that it is not falsifiable, and therefore not a genuine assertion, and that when someone tells him ‘the tutors are not trying to kill you’ they are making a genuine and true assertion.
Hare would claim that the blik is in fact an expression of a fundamental perspective or worldview, not a claim about the way the world is, and that the expressions of those who appear to tell him the contrary are also bliks.
How does Flew respond to Hare’s blik argument?
‘If Hare’s religion really is a blik, involving no cosmological assertions about the nature and activities of a supposed personal creator, then surely, he is not a Christian at all?’
What does Ludwig Wittgenstein think that the primary function of language is?
To disentangle the confusions that arise out of our mistaking the grammar of language, which is to say the rules of how that language or expression is used, where these rules are what makes the language or expression meaningful.
What does Wittgenstein see language as?
He sees language as a form of life in that he sees it as a lived, dynamic, and concrete activity.
What is meant by ‘language games’?
Language game is used to highlight the rule-governed nature of language, much like games have rules. He draws attention to how language functions within different contexts, each with its own set of implicit rules. Just as there is no defining feature common to all games, language does not have a single essence but rather a network of overlapping similarities, what he calls ‘family resemblances’.
What is meant by ‘form of life’
A ‘form of life’ refers to the broader cultural and social background that gives language meaning. Language is not merely representational but is deeply embedded in the ways humans live, interact, and understand the world. To grasp the meaning of words, one must look at how they are used in real life, within specific forms of life.
