Religious Language 2

Question 1

What is the difference between cognitive and non-cognitive language?

Answer 1

• Cognitive conveys facts and things that can be proved true or false via empirical evidence e.g ‘the table is made of wood’.
• Non-cognitive conveys information that isn’t factual; emotions, feelings, metaphysical claims e.g ‘I feel happy’.
• Expressionism- language expresses how someone feels about something
• Theological non-realism- God does not exist as an objective being, but to say God exists can be meaningful in someone’s life in a non-cognitive way.

Question 2

What is logical positivism?

Answer 2

• Logical positivists agree with the verification principle: scientific knowledge is the only factual knowledge and all traditional metaphysical doctrines are meaningless.
• Statements only meaningful if they are a priori and analytic (all bachelors are unmarried men).
• OR if they are empirical, synthetic and aposteriori (it is currently raining in Manchester).
• Believe religious language is non-cognitive, and therefore meaningless.

Named the Vienna Circle, gathered around philosopher called Moritz Schlick, heavily influenced by Wittgenstein.

Question 3

What is the verification principle? Who created it?

Answer 3

• Verification principle: ‘a sentence is factually significant if…we know what observations would lead us to accept it as true or false.’
• Believed that a statement only has meaning if it is an analytic truth (e.g. triangle has 3 sides) or empirically verifiable (water boils at 100 degrees).
• ‘To say god exists is a metaphysical utterance which cannot be either true or false’ (cannot deny it since that too would be a metaphysical claim).
• ‘No sentence which purports to describe the nature of a transcendent god cannot posses any literal significance’- God talk is evidently nonsense, AJ Ayer
• Strong verification
  o Statement is only meaningful if it can be verified empirically with sense experience e.g this chair is blue.
• Weak verification
  o This form developed to help historical facts have meaning.
  o Weak principle requires that we state what evidence would be enough to make a statement meaningful, or if there is some evidence which provides probability for it being the case. E.g historical documents and archeological findings are verifiable, so we can weakly verify the occurrence of certain events, and this is meaningful.
  - Realised this left the opportunity for religious belief being verified e.g God exists due to our experience of his creation, or the Bible. So he added DIRECT and INDIRECT verification- direct: ‘I see a key’ directly verifiable. Indirect: ‘this key is made of iron’. We know how to verify it but haven’t. We don’t know how to verify God, SO HE WOULD ARGUE RELIGIOUS BELIEF CAN’T BE VERIFIED.

Question 4

What are the criticisms of logical positivism and the verification principle?

Answer 4

• STRONG: very clear about what is meaningful or not - no grey area. Fits with scientific paradigm that only empirical and logical statements are meaningful and verifiable.
  o History and science may become meaningless- we haven’t necessarily witnessed these nor are they analytic
• Solved by WEAK: allows scientific and historical statements to be verified.o Is he just avoiding the question of whether or not God exists by saying that any discussion of God is meaningless? Not satisfying.o subjective definition of truth/contradiction: his claim that statements are only meaningful if they are analytic truths or empirically verifiable is neither an analytic truth nor empirically verifiable – therefore according to his logic, his own statement is meaningless
  - Empirical evidence might even suggest it was false: theologians and philosophers have been involved in debate over the existence of God or metaphysical realities for millennia: this must suggest its ‘meaningfulness’.
  - HOWEVER Ayer argued that verification is not a criterion of meaning, but a method of distinguishing empirical from non-empirical. Ayer clarified that verification is not the sole criterion of meaning. This means that verification is not the only way to determine if a statement is meaningful. Instead, Ayer viewed verification as a method used to distinguish between empirical statements (those that can be tested and observed) and non-empirical statements (those that cannot be tested or observed directly).o Hick: eschatological verification- there is a way to verify God (and thus religious language) when we die we’ll see God and then we’ll know. (Can’t falsify because if there’s no life after death there’s no one to know this). Religious language is verifiable in principle and therefore statements about God can be meaningful.
  § Ayer accepted that ‘there are mountains on the dark side of the moon’ was meaningful as it’s verifiable in principle (even though they hadn’t seen the dark side of the moon in his time). He knows how to verify it. Unlike the moon, we don’t know that an afterlife exists: it’s possible but not enough to claim it’s verifiable in principle.

Question 5

What is Wittgenstein’s theory of religious language?

Answer 5

Permits religious language to be both meaningful and non-cognitive.

• Wittgenstein explains that the meaning of words is in their use- the function they perform as agreed by the particular group/society using them. Language is like a game with its own set of rules and these games exist in all forms of human life.
  o It is a misunderstanding to uproot sentences from the religious language game and analyse them using the scientific language game. A non-religious person e.g Ayer could not find meaning in religious language because they aren’t part of that game.
  o The rules of the game are not necessarily conscious, they are often internalised without realising so it’s difficult to say what the rules of any one game are.

Question 6

What are the criticisms of Wittgenstein’s theory of religious language?

Answer 6

• Non-cognitive: doesn’t get caught in weaknesses of cognitive interpretations of language e.g does not reduce religion to a set of propositional claims.
• Context: captures the way meaning depends on social context- each social setting has rules governing what is acceptable or not e.g family gathering vs. Job interview
  o True?: according to Wittgenstein a religious believer saying ‘God exists in reality’ couldn’t possibly mean that in the scientific sense. However most religious people would say that’s what they do believe e.g Aquinas’ believes that the proposition ‘God’s goodness is analogous to ours’ cognitively and objectively true.
  
  • Maybe in the religious language game ‘reality’ has a different meaning.
• Exclusive: those not in the game will be unable to understand the language, can’t engage meaningfully with those who are. Implications for inter-faith dialogue?
• Difficult to divide human social life up into different groups: Wittgenstein’s characterisation of language games is imprecise. Religious language game, Christian, Catholic, Roman Catholic, specific congregation. They overlap and connect in ways impossible to calculate, it’s too messy.
  
  • But all human meanings have fuzzy indeterminate boundaries, unlike scientific concepts e.g water that refer to the physical world. Hard to define exactly what a chair is, but it still has meaning in our language.
• Can’t criticise: can reject any challenges to the theory as being part of a different understanding. Makes religion untouchable by external critique.
• Wittgenstein never actually applied language games to religion
  o Don Cupitt- suggests theological non-realism; God doesn’t exist as objective reality but as giving meaning to someone’s life (significant in a believers life). Bases this on a non-cognitive view of Wittgenstein. Everything said within the language game has no connection to games outside its own. However, this actually contradicts Wittgenstein who says we must study relationships between games
  o DZ Phillips- thought philosophers are supposed to comment on the meaning of statements instead of if they are true; their task is not ‘to settle the question of whether a man is talking to God or not, but to ask what it means to affirm or deny that a man is talking to God’. He doesn’t deny the objective existence of God- says this is not a religious matter but a scientific one, religious people should focus more on meaning. Believes in reality beyond the language game- cognitive view on Wittgenstein

Question 7

What is Karl Popper’s contribution to the falsification principle?

Answer 7

• Karl Popper: falsification is better, Marxist and Freudians only looked for confirmations of their views without ever admitting a way they could be falsified. Verificationism can’t capture empirical generalisations- ‘all swans are white’ would require knowing that all swans that have ever existed were white. For falsification we can just say what we know would prove it false: seeing a non-white swan- much simpler.
  o Science is concerned with finding hypothesis to be false, not verifying it.
  
  • Falsification also cannot be falsified (Popper had same response as Ayer about verification).
    o Religious assertions claim significant, objective truths and so must be tested on that level. Little point committing to a worldview that can’t stand up to scientific techniques.

Question 8

What was Anthony Flew’s contribution to the falsification principle?

Answer 8

• Anthony Flew: (influenced by Popper) argued language is only meaningful if we can conceive of some evidence which might count against it. Religious believers cannot assert what would render their belief false, therefore they are not asserting anything meaningful about reality.
  o Uses John Wisdom’s Parable of the Gardener to show religious believers don’t allow any evidence to count against their beliefs: two people see a garden, first says there’s a gardener who tends to it so they both wait to see if one appears. First person changes his statement: ‘an invisible gardener’, then set up a barbed wire fence and get bloodhounds etc. to detect it: ‘an invisible, intangible, insensible gardener’. Allows us to reject epistemic distance too.
   St. Paul: claimed that if Jesus’ body was found then faith in Christianity would be pointless. Paul’s religious language would pass Flew’s test of falsification and therefore be meaningful. (However if Jesus’ body was found many would likely claim that it isn’t evidence against Christianity e.g fake put there by the devil- see Mitchell)
  o Claimed religious believers ‘move the goalposts’ and that concept of God ‘dies a death of a thousand qualifications’. It is not falsifiable therefore doesn’t have cognitive meaning. Religious believer is blind to evidence.

Question 9

How would Mitchell criticise Flew’s version of the falsification principle? What are the criticisms?

Answer 9

• Mitchell: disagreed with Flew that all religious belief was irrationally blind to evidence that went against it. Many religious people do allow empirical evidence e.g problem of evil to count against their belief, but overall they judge to retain their faith. Therefore they do have meaningful beliefs.
  o Parable of the Freedom Fighter: member of the resistance in the WWII meets someone who claims to be the leader of said resistance but is pretending to be on the enemy’s side. The resistance fighter retains his trust in this stranger even when he sees him helping the government and other resisters don’t believe in him. He keeps his faith.
  o However: merely allowing evidence to count against your believe doesn’t make it falsifiable- Mitchell’s criteria is insufficient. You need to state what you would accept as proving it wrong, not just what ‘counts against it’.
  Problem of Confirmation Bias: Related to the above, Mitchell’s view may encourage confirmation bias, where believers give undue weight to supportive evidence while minimizing or ignoring evidence that challenges their beliefs. This can undermine the rationality of religious faith.

Question 10

How does R.M. Hare criticise verificationism and falsificationism?

Answer 10

• R.M Hare: if religious language is not an attempt to describe reality then it isn’t making a statement at all so wouldn’t make sense to attempt to verify or falsify it. Verificationism and Falsificationism fails to understand how religious language functions: it is non-cognitive but also meaningful.
  o Blik: this is what religious language expresses, their personal feelings, attitudes and frame of reference. Bliks affect our behaviour and beliefs so are meaningful. They may look like beliefs about the world e.g God exists but actually are rooted in attitudes and worldviews: this is what they convey as meaning, not empirical statements.
  o Parable of the Poisoned Man: paranoid student at university is convinced that all of his professors were trying to poison him, even when presented with evidence to the contrary. He would accept nothing to falsify his belief, but Mitchell says it’s meaningful to his Blik.

Question 11

How can Hare’s contribution be criticised?

Answer 11

o However: Hare has sacrificed the ability of religious language to have any factual meaning- most religious people would say that a statement of ‘God exists’ is actually an objectively existing God, not just an expression of their Blik. Maybe Hare actually has failed to capture the true meaning of religious language.
 Hare might respond that religious people feel that they are making cognitive statements but it’s just an aspect of their Blik. (Link to Ayer: religious language ‘gives us indirect information about the condition of the mind’). Was influenced by Hume’s believe that reason is a slave of our passions: this is rarely obvious to people. Religious language expresses the emotions a belief is rooted in, not a genuinely rational belief.
• But some people do change their minds on God, so cannot always be the case. Most of the time Hare is correct about the use of religious language.