Religious language: 20th century perspective and philosophical comparisons Flashcards
Intro to religious language: 20th century perspective and philosophical comparisons
o The logical positivists of the 20th century challenged religion by suggesting that, if language is to be meaningful, its claims have to be capable of being test using five senses.
o Philosophical discussions about meaning often identifies two different ways in which a word or phrase might mean something which are denotation and connotation
o These are different ways in which a phrase might mean something are linked to a division that’s made between cognitive and non-cognitive uses of language. When we make truth claims, asserting that we’re stating a fact, then we’re speaking cognitively. E.g. ‘It’s foggy outside’ is cognitive.
o There are also other kinds of statement and other uses of language that are different and aren’t meant to describe facts. These kinds of language are non-cognitive, and they can’t be determined to be either true or false. Statements such as ‘Happy birthday!’ express wishes rather than asserting facts, and are therefore non-cognitive.
What does denotation mean?
Denotation- this is when the word stands for something, as a label for it, such as the word ‘window’ means a piece of glass that’s on the wall. The word has a clear literal meaning, which can be taken at face value.
What does connotation mean?
Connotation- this is when a word carries other associations with it. So ‘window’ might carry association of finding a space in a busy period. Connotation can carry meaning beyond the literal sense of the words, and sometimes words can mean different things to different people or contexts. Sometimes they can also convey meaning that was unintended by the speaker.
What are the challenge to religious language from logical positivism?
o Inspired by Ludwig Wittgenstein’s questioning of the meaning of language, the Vienna Circle were a group of philosophers who met after WW1 during 1920s-1930s. They believed that theological interpretations of events and experiences belonged in the past, to an unenlightened age when ‘God’ was used as a explanation for anything that science hasn’t yet completely mastered.
o The Vienna Circle argued that empirical evidence was the key to understanding what was meaningful and what wasn’t. A claim was meaningful if it could be tested using sense experiences, and it was meaningless if it couldn’t. This position become known as logical positivism, and the members of the Vienna Circle were, therefore, known as logical positivists.
o In A.J. Ayer’s book ‘Language, Truth and logic’, he argued statements are only meaningful if they fall into one of two categories. They should either be 1) analytic or 2) verifiable using senses.
o Statements, if they go beyond giving mere definitions, have to be verifiable in order to mean anything. They have to be capable of being tested, to find out whether or not they’re true. This way of judging the meaningfulness of language is known as the ‘verification principle’.
o In A.J. Ayer’s book ‘Language, Truth and logic’, he argued that in order for any treatment to be meaningful, in principle it has to verifiable using empirical methods. For example, before we can judge whether our claims is meaningful, we don’t have to go as far as testing whether Rebecca had an allergic reaction after being in contact with nuts. We have to know what kind of test could be applied to find out whether our statement is true or false.
o In principle, our claim that ‘Rebecca is allergic to nuts’ is verifiable if she had some kind of allergic reaction after being in contact with nuts. So our claim passes the test set by the verification principle and can be considered meaningful.
o If synthetic statements are only meaningful if they can be tested empirically, then religious claims could be considered meaningless. According to the logical positivists, religious claims such as ‘God created the world’ can’t be shown to be either true or false using our senses. Religious believers can’t state under what circumstances they would call these claims true or false, and they can’t suggest what kind of test would settle the matter.
What does analytic statement mean?
Analytic statements- these are propositions that are true by definition. The logical positivists also include some other in this group, for example tautologies (statements that say the same thing twice, such as ‘ice is icy’) and mathematical statements such ‘2 X 2 = 4’. So an analytic statements define how a word is being used and don’t give us any extra information. The logical positivists decided that analytic statements where meaningful.
What does synthetic statement mean?
Synthetic statement- information that goes beyond just defining our use of language. E.g. ‘Rebecca is allergic to nuts’. The logical positivists decided that in order for these statements to qualify meaningful, they have to be verifiable using empirical evidence. So it has to be possible to test the truth of the statement using experience available to the five senses. We can test whether Rebeca is allergic to nuts which qualifies it as a meaningful statement.
Explain Wittgenstein’s view on language games and forms of life
o In his book ‘Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus’ (1921), Wittgenstein attempted to set out the principles to demonstrate what could and couldn’t be expressed in language. However he alter rejected these ideas, claiming his criteria for determining meaningfulness might have been too narrow.
o Wittgenstein thought it would be useful to think of language in terms of a game, which we know to play once we understand the rules. He thought that the analogy of a game would be useful as a way of highlighting and expanding the scope and limitations of language.
o We can say that we know what a word means once we can use it in context. Learning a language is like learning a game, where we understand how and when to use particular words by seeing how they’re used. We accept that words are used in certain ways as we recognise the role they have in the whole game. Wittgenstein uses the example of a chess piece. We might learn that a certain piece is called a ‘king’, but we will not really understand this until we have played chess and understand the significance of the king within the game. There’s no point in arguing about how language is used. It might seem unreasonable that use certain words in certain ways, but if you want to play the language game you just accept the rules that have been agreed by everyone else.
o In ‘On Certainty’ (1969), Wittgenstein showed that language makes statements that are groundless. For example, we can’t justify the statement ‘this is a piece of paper’; we can’t find reasoning to support why we call it this, it’s just how we were educated to understand the word. He argued that religious belief shapes the way the world is seen in a similar way, and our religious beliefs will be groundless (whether we believe them or not) as we can’t produce evidence for or against them.
o Religious language wasn’t about facts, and his approach was non-cognitive. A statement such as ‘God loves us’ operates like a rule in a game. As you become more immersed in the community of Christianity you will develop a deeper understanding of what ‘God loves is’ means in this context, and you’ll be able to apply it to your own life and understand its implications.
Explain Antony Flew and ‘Theology and Falsification’
- -In a symposium of Oxford philosopher’s in 1950’s, Flew presented ‘Theology and Falsification’. He suggested that instead of insisting that a statement should be verifiable, it should instead be falsifiable.
- -Flew refers to a parable from John Wisdom’s paper ‘Gods’. In this parable, two explorers come across a clearing in the jungle, and in the clearing there are both flowers ad weeds. One of the explorer, called the Believer, is convinced that there must be a gardener who comes to the clearing and looks after it, but the other, the Sceptic, disagrees. They decide to settle their argument by waiting for the gardener and watching his arrival. But, he never appears. So he sets traps, but still no gardener is found. The Believer continues to quality his assertion that there’s a gardener, by saying that he’s invisible for example. However the sceptic asks how different is an invisible gardener different form an imaginary one or no gardener at all?
- -Flew point was that if religious believers keep on saying that ‘God is different from us, when they’re challenged, then they end up with a description of God that has no content.
- -When religious believers are challenged by evil and suffering, for example, they qualify their claims by saying that God’s love isn’t like ours or his plans are a mystery. With every challenge to their belief, religious people meet it with further modifications, until there’s nothing left of the original assertion. Flew concludes that the claims religious believers make about the God’s nature and activity die a ‘death by a thousand qualifications’- in the end the believers are saying empty statements that are ’vacuous’ (mindless).
- -When theists talk of God and his attributes, they refuse to rule out any states of affairs. If asked ‘under what circumstances would your statement that God loves us be false?’ they wouldn’t be able to think of any. No matter how bad the situation, a theist would also cling to their original assertion, and qualifying that God’s love is different to ours. For Flew, a claim that can’t be falsified isn’t really saying anything at all. In order for the claims ‘God loves us’ to have any meaningful content, we need to know what the world would look like he God didn’t love.
Explain R.M. Hare’s response to ‘Theology and Falsification’
- -R.M. Hare agreed with Flew and suggested when theist use religious language, they shouldn’t be interpreted as truth-claims in a cognitive sense but as expressions of what he called a ‘blink’.
- -In ‘New Essays in Philosophical Theology’ (1955), Hare asks us to imagine a ‘lunatic’ who’s convinced that all Uni dons want to murder him. No matter how many nice dons he meets, he believes this is an act and they actually want to kill him. There’s nothing that the dons could ever do to persuade him that he’s wrong in his belief.
- -Hare invented the word ‘blik’ to describe this man’s unfalsifiable conviction. Hare’s argument is that we all have our own ‘bliks’, with which we approach the world and make judgements about it: we’ll have unfalsifiable ways of framing our understanding of our experiences which help us by chance is just as much as a ‘blik’. Theist and atheists have bliks and use them as a framework for understanding the world and finding meaning to it.
- -For Hare, religious claims are expressions of personal attitudes or commitments to particular ways of life. They’re not testable assertions that x or y is the case, but they’re a way of saying how the speaker intends to view the world and frame their interpretations of it.
Explain Basil Mitchell and the ‘parable of the partisan’
- -Basil Mitchell responded to Flew with the ‘Parable of the Partisan’. During the time of a war a Partisan meets a stranger claiming to be the leader of the resistance. The stranger urges the Partisan to have faith in him, even if he is seen to be acting against Partisan interests. The Partisan is committed to a belief in the stranger’s integrity, but his friends think he is a fool to do so. The original encounter with the stranger gives the Partisan sufficient confidence to hold onto his faith in him even when there is evidence to the contrary.
- -Mitchell makes a parallel between this and belief in a loving God. While this world shows evidence for evil and suffering where a loving God seems false, according to Mitchell there’s still factual content to religious assertions of the existence of a loving God. ‘God loves us all’ is either true or false, even if we can’t offer definitive test for it and just have to choose whether or not to trust the claim. In this respect, Mitchell also differs from Hare in that he claimed that our bliks are groundless whereas for, for Mitchel, the partisan’s trust in the stranger isn’t groundless. The partisan makes a deliberate choice to trust the stranger because of the impressions made on him when they first met.
Does the verification principle successfully demonstrate that religious language is meaningless?
- -The most significant criticism was that the statement of the theory itself doesn’t pass the test and so isn’t a meaningful statement. The verifiability theory can’t be verified by sense experience and so isn’t a meaningful synthetic statement. And if it’s analytic, it’s giving a new sense to the world ‘meaningful’, a new definition that we don’t necessarily have to accept.
- -The logical positivists wanted to dismiss religious language, while keeping scientific statements as meaningful. But, many claims made by science, such as the existence and nature of black holes, aren’t be verifies by sense experience. The human senses are with the use of artificial ‘senses’ such as X-rays. The science of psychology, for example, often depends on people explaining and describing our feelings and symptoms, but a doctor can’t use their sense to verify a claim such as ‘I feel something bad is going to happen’.
- -Similarly, historical statements, where claims are made about events that happened in the past, can’t be tested using evidence. We can’t use our senses to find out if Henry VIII died in 1547, we can only read books about his death.
- -Ethical claims also present problems of meaning. For example, the claim ‘stealing is wrong’ can’t be proven empirically. We can see the outcomes of stealing and that it produces an undesirable result, but we can’t tell whether stealing itself is right or wrong.
- -John Hick says religious truth-claims are verifiable as they’re ‘eschatologically verifiable’. By this, he meant we can’t test and see whether the sinful will be punished in the afterlife, for example. After death these claims will be verified.
- -Critics of Hick have argued that ‘eschatological verification’ isn’t an acceptable way out of the problem, as even if there’s an afterlife and even if we do have physical senses in it with which to perceive things, they will not necessarily be the same sense that we have now and so it’s likely they’ll not count as ‘empirical’. So if there’s no afterlife, no one will verify it.
Did any participant in the falsification symposium presented a convincing approach to the understanding of religious language?
- -Flew is against Hare’s assessment of religious language as non-cognitive. If religious language is just an assertion of ‘picture preference’, talking about how someone chooses to view the world rather than making claims about facts, then there doesn’t seem to be much difference between a religious claim and a non-religious claim. Also, religious believers intend their claims to be cognitive. When Christians say Jesus rose the dead, they mean he really did.
- -Paul Tillich argued God is symbolic. Symbols aren’t the same as facts, and therefore it’s wrong to criticise them if they were as they can’t be verified or falsified. The saying ‘my love is like a red rose’ wouldn’t make sense if we asked whether it was true or false.
- -Symbols need not be meaningless, even if they’re unverifiable; they can be effective and ineffective ways of drawing religious believers to ‘the power of being’. Just like bliks are meaningful to the person who has it.
- -In his book ‘Philosophy of Religion’ (1982), C.S. Evans points out that Hare gives us no way of being able to judge whether a blik is correct. If there are no facts to support religious claims and they’re just expressions of a preferred world view, the whole idea of ‘right and wrong’ become meaningless.
- -Mitchell’s response to Flew arguing we have to place your trust in things sometimes, and give them our commitment even when we lack sufficient evidence to know what they’re true. We don’t know the point at which the partisan ought to stop trusting the stranger. Similarly, although there’s evil and suffering in the world, as Flew indicates, Mitchell argues that we can’t know when we can disbelieve in a good and loving God.
- -However the partisan and the Stanger doesn’t totally correspond to the believer’s trust in God as the partisan does have grounds for his trust. Religious believers claim they had a direct encounter with God, but perhaps not in the same sense as when two physical people meet (like in the parable).
- -The religious believer might want to respond to him with a similar question: ‘what would have to occur or to have occurred to constitute for you a disproof of the primacy of empirical evidence?’ If Flew couldn’t think of any circumstances under which he would be prepared to say that empirical evidence wasn’t needed, so perhaps his assertion that we need empirical evidence is also empty.
How do the ideas of Aquinas on religious language compared with those of Wittgenstein?
o Aquinas and Wittgenstein share concerns about the extent to which our language is adequate to convey ideas about God and how such language might be meaningful.
o While Aquinas was Christian, he believed (like Wittgenstein) that God is unknowable because of our finite human mind which limits our understanding of God’s nature. While Wittgenstein wasn’t religious, he too believed that questions of God are beyond the limitations of what we can know.
What do both Aquinas and Wittgenstein argue about the way religious language has to be understood?
They both argued that religious language has to be understood in a particular way:
o Aquinas’ argument was that religion have to be understood analogically. When we use religious terms or truth-claims, we talk analogically, giving us an indication of God but not giving us such a clear picture that God can be completely comprehended, Aquinas was using religious language cognitively.
o Wittgenstein’s argument was that religious language is best understood by those within the ‘game’ of religion. Those who use religious language regularly, within a community of believers, find meaning in the language, which others outside that language-game might think meaningless. Wittgenstein’s approach is non-cognitive, where the assertion made in religious language aren’t assertions that can be identified as true or false, relating to facts, but which are more like the rules of a game.
Does a cognitive approach or a non-cognitive approach present the better way of making sense of religious language?
- -A cognitive approach to religious language, such as Aquinas’s analogy, is popular amongst religious believers. When Christians make assertions about their faith, they usually mean to imply that they’re referring to facts. When they talk about God’s existence or love, they are saying that there’s actually a real being whose love for humanity can be experienced in this world.
- -However how would a religious believer prove such a truth claim without evidence to support it and doesn’t know what would count as evidence either for or against it?
- -Wittgenstein’s approach to religious language suggests there’s nothing meaningful or meaningless about religious language. Meaning is something given towards and phrases by those who use them in a context (Lebensform). In his view, those who aren’t participating in the ‘game’ of religious language aren’t in a position to determine the meaningfulness of the language.
- -However if a claim such ‘God loves is’ isn’t a fact, and can’t be subjected to the question ‘is that true or false?’ It’s difficult to see exactly what such a claim is worth. Wittgenstein’s approach doesn’t help us to resolve the ‘big questions’ of whether there’s a God, for example. So it places questions outside of the realm of what can be known. But religious people counter this- saying revelation from God does give us facts that can be known, even if they have to believe with faith rather than empirical evidence.
