Religious Language: Logical Positivism Flashcards
Logical positivism
Philosophical approach adopted by the Vienna circle, avoided metaphysics (which was viewed as meaningless) and believed that the task of a philosopher was the logical analysis of sentences. The key view of logical positivists is that for a statement to be meaningful & capable of being true/false, it must be verifiable.
Ayers verification principle
States a statement is only meaningful if it is either;
- A tautology (A sentence which is true by definition) eg ‘a square has four sides’
- An empirically verifiable proposition (A sentence whose truth can be determined by observation). This can be separated into direct & indirect observations
Strong & Weak Verification
Strong verification: Requires conclusive empirical evidence, rejected by Ayer
Weak verification: One must be able to state what empirical evidence would make a sentence probable, adopted by Ayer
Ayer rejected strong verification as he viewed it to be impossible, as there are no statements that can be made conclusively about the world, as senses may be mistaken.
Verification Principle & Religious Language
When applied to religious language, Ayers verification principle says it is meaningless (there is no test to verify Gods existence). Ayer argued that “There exists no God’ has no literal significance’.
Ayers argument would suggest that not only when theists say ‘God exists’ is meaningless, so too when atheists argue the opposite is also meaningless. Ayer viewed all religious belief in God to always be without meaning, as was all disbelief in God, for him there was nothing to could significantly be said on the matter
General Criticisms
Foundationalism (Some ideas are so self-evident true they require no further justification). Logical positivists claim that there is an absolute foundation (the verification principle) which can be used to determine the meaningfulness of every other sentence, dependent on if they fall into one of two categories. However, the verification principle itself fails to fall into one of these categories, resulting in a circular argument that is essentially useless.
Additionally, logical positivism assumes that all informative language comes from scientific statements, however this is restrictive as it fails to to allow understanding of the world in a way the scientific language cannot express. For example, poetry reveals an aspect of the human experience that is unique to itself. Logical positivism, by reducing all significant language to two categories, leaves no place for valuable and significant contributions to human knowledge for other forms.
Vincent Brümmer
Argues that to treat sentences of faith as if they are scientific, is to commit an error of understanding. Just as it is inappropriate to use methods of scientific analysis with poetry, it is also inappropriate to use with faith. Brümmer comments that;
‘Many of us intuitively assume that all thinking is aimed at extending our knowledge’
Brümmers argument is that in modern times, if something is not scientific or measurable, then it is viewed as not very significant, however this view is inaccurate as it is based on the view that the entirety of reality is what is known to science, and there is nothing beyond this.
Dorothy Emmet
Emmet rogued that the claims of theology should be understood as analogies, not scientific accounts. She suggests that faith is not about having a complete explanation, instead it is an attempt to express and understand, as; ‘we can only say so much about the nature of the transcendent’.
This view suggests that the logical positivist characterisation of religion not only fail to understand the type of language involved, but the modes of thinking our sentences represent.
Richard Swinburne
He claims that there are sentences which have meaning, but are obviously not verifiable in any way. Swinburne give the example of toys that come alive when everyone’s asleep, and leave no traces of their activity.
However, Swinburnes views can be criticised as not only does it fail to satisfy the criteria of the weak verification principle, it fails to present how if the sentence is not meaningful in terms of the verification principle, it must be therefore be meaningful in some other way. The truth of his statement cannot be empirically grounded, because there is no given observations that would allow it to be verified.
Swinburne attempts to argue that the sentence is understood because each word within it is understood, but this also can be critiqued as just because each word in the sentence is understood, the sentence itself may be completely incoherent. For example, ‘we are sitting in the train’ is a sentence which may be completely factual, however it is extremely different from ‘the train is sitting in us’.
Additionally, even if Swinburnes toy cupboard example was meaningful, this does not then cause sentences about God to also be meaningful, as they are not the same kind of sentences. A toy can be described in factual terms, and the idea of a toy can be pictured and understood. However, understanding on the nature of God cannot be approached in the same way.
