religious language 2 Flashcards
verificationism
Verificationismwas invented by the logical positivists of the Vienna Circle
They believed that a priori reasoning about reality beyond empirical investigation), including religious language, is meaningless.
The idea is that words get their meaning by connecting to things in our shared experience, or by being true by definition. If a word connects to the world, that connection should be verifiable.
Ayer
If someone is talking about something that does not refer to anything in public experience then we can’t know what they are talking about and it seems valid to call that meaningless.
verificationism criticism
However, verificationism states that meaningful statements must be either analytic or empirically verifiable.
Yet, this criterion for meaning is not itself analytically true or empirically verifiable.
This paradox highlights a limitation of verificationism—its inability to justify its own criteria for meaningfulness.
ifwe accept empiricism, we will find the results of a non-empirical approach meaningless.
wittgenstein
Ludwig Wittgenstein introduced the concept of language games.
He argued that words gain their meaning through their use in specific social contexts or language games.
Each language game has its own set of rules, and meaning is inseparable from the rules of the game being played.
For Wittgenstein, attempting to analyze religious language outside of its language game context is misguided. The meaning of religious words like ‘God’ arises from their usage within the religious language game.
wittgenstein criticism
Wittgenstein fails to capture religious meaning.If Wittgenstein is right, it means that when a religious person says ‘God exists’ they aren’t actually claiming that there objectively exists a God. Really, they are just speaking in a certain way based on how they have learned to speak by internalising a set of behavioural rules. However, most religious people would object that they really do mean that there objectively exists a God.
It struggles to explain how individuals convert to a religion or engage in inter-faith dialogue when they supposedly cannot understand the words of a language game they are not part of.
- lang games are circular - meaning of word comes from lang game, but lang game gets meaning from the words that constitute it
- how do you treat the entire theory of lang games? why should this be priviledged over any other? the truth of the theory lies in an assertion underlying the entire theory, but beyond justification
popper
Popper thought verificationism couldn’t capture empirical generalisations, which he illustrated with the claim ‘all swans are white’.
the claim is falsifiable because we can say what would prove it wrong; seeing a non-white swan.
if there is a belief that is unfalsifiable – that we can’t imagine how it could be wrong – then it cannot be about reality.
anthony flew
Anthony Flewapplied this to religious language. He claimed that because religious people can’t say what logically possible state of affairs is incompatible with their claim that God exists they are not actually asserting anything about the way things are
Religious language fails to assert anything about reality.
Flew illustrated his approach using belief in a gardener as an analogy for belief in God. Two people are walking and see a garden. One claims there is a gardener who tends to it, so the other suggest waiting and seeing if that is true. After a while, the other says ‘actually, they are an invisible gardener’, so they set up barbed wire fences and so on to try and detect this invisible gardener, at which point they then say ‘actually, it’s a non-physical gardener’.
At this point the other person asks “But what remains of your original assertion”. The religious person claims to believe in a God, but in order to protect that belief from empirical testing they continually add qualifications to the belief. eventually, it’s going to be nothing, causing the concept of God to ‘die a death of a thousand qualifications’.
what is the difference between a world in which this gardener (God) exists, and a world in which it doesn’t exist. If belief in God is consistent withany possiblediscovery about reality, then its existence surely can make no difference to reality. It cannot be about reality. Flew claims Religious language therefore ‘fails to assert’ anything.
R M HARE
Hare argues that religious language does not express an attempt to describe reality but is instead a non-cognitive expression of a person’s ‘Blik’, meaning their personal feelings and attitude.
Hare thinks that since Bliks affect our beliefs and behaviour, they are meaningful.
Hare illustrated his theory with the example of a paranoid student who thought his professors were trying to kill him. Even when shown the evidence that they were not trying to kill him, by meeting them and seeing they were nice people, the student did not change their mind.
despite being unfalsifiable, Hare argues that bliks are still meaningful to the person who holds them.
Hare criticism
Although Hare saves religious language from being disregarded as a meaningless failed attempt to describe the world, nonetheless he only does so by sacrificing the ability of the meaning of religious language to have any factual content.
So when a religious person says ‘God exists,’ for Hare they are really expressing their attitude rather than actually claiming that there objectively exists a God. Many religious people would claim however, that they really domeanthat ‘there objectively exists a God’, irrespective of their attitude.
So arguably Hare fails to capture the true meaning of religious language.
