Religious Language Flashcards
Linguist Roman Jakobson noted six functions of language…
1) referential
2) expressive
3) conative
4) poetic
5) phatic
6) metalingual
Referential
Describing situations or things (‘the leaves are falling’)
Expressive
Describing feelings or emotions (‘Wow! Look at that!’)
Conative
A command or request (‘Come here’)
Poetic
A poem or saying/slogan (‘Easy come, easy go’)
Phatic
Greetings or casual conversations (‘Hi. Nice weather we’re having’)
Metalingual
Talking about yourself (‘I feel fine’)
What does realism, or realist language deal with?
Statements that can be proved to be either true or false
An example of an empirically provable sentence
‘The sky is blue’
An example of a phrase that has meaning for some people, such as religious believers…
‘God exists’
What is an anti-realist statement?
Those that should not be taken literally, but are understood in other ways.
Who came up with the Verification Principle
AJ Ayer
Criticisms of the Verification Principle
- Statements that express opinions or emotions have meaning.
- Ethical and moral statements are not empirically verifiable, but certainly have meaning.
- The verification principle cannot itself be verified
- Historical statements are meaningful even when there is no one alive who could claim to have experienced the events.
What is the falsification principle?
Almost the reverse of the verification principle, it asks what would be needed to prove a religious language statement to be false.
Criticisms of the falsification principle
- When believers use religious language, they are using it in a special way.
- Religious language can be meaningful because it expresses an intention to follow a certain code of conduct.
