religious language 20th century perspectives Flashcards
(13 cards)
ludwig wittgenstein
1889-1951
raised the whole question of the meaning of language and inspired debates around the world.
Wittgenstein was keen to establish limits of human knowledge and imagination and to work out where the line should be drawn between what people could know and understand and what was beyond the grasp of human knowledge.
his writings were a strong influence on the vienna circle.
vienna circle
led by a writer called moritz Schlick (who incidentally, was murdered by one of his former students)
the group met reguarly discussing issues
they thought it was time to move away from seeing things as being designed or guided by God and time to develop more scientific ways of understanding the questions raised by 20th century life.
AJ Ayer + analytic and synthetic
1910-89
british philospher who spent some time at the University of vienna after graduating from Oxford
he become known for his support of logical positivism
he wrote the very influential book ‘language truth and logic’
taking up the ideas of wittgeinstein and the vienna circle he attempted to set down rules by which language can be judged to see whether it really means anything.
the main argument of logical positivism as articulated by ayer was that statements are only meaningful if they fall into one of two categories 1) analytic 2) verifiable using the senses
analytic - propositions that are true by definition - we do not have to go and check they are true eg ‘a rug is a floor covering’
logical positivists decided that analytic statements were meaningful
synthetic - these give infomation that goes beyond just defining our use of language, they give additional pieces of info. logical positives decided that in order for these to be meaningful they have to be verifiable using empirical evidence - it had to be possible to test the truth of a statement using the experience available to the 5 senses.
‘God’ is a metaphysical term according to Ayer, which means it is about something beyond the empirical world, so there can be no way to empirically verify it. Ayer concludes that he’s not even an atheist, since an atheist says they do not believe in God, but that is still to give the word meaning.
vertificationism
the verifiability theory says that if a statement is neither analytic nor empirically verifiable, it says nothing about reality and is therefore meaningless.
this way of thinking followed david hume who argued that if a statement does not contain any abstract reasoning or any experimental reasoning then it says nothing at all.
statements have to be verifiable in order to mean anything - this way of judging the meaningfullness of language is known as the verification principle
“A sentence is factually significant [meaningful] if, and only if, we know how to verify the proposition” - Ayer
if synthetic statements are only meaningful if they can be tested empirically , then religous claims could be considered meaningless
according to logical positivists claims like ‘god created the world’ and ‘the lord is my shepherd’ cannot be shown to be either true or false using the senses.
wittgensteins views on language games and forms of life
he was the youngest of 8 children in a very wealthy and influential viennese jewish family.
ludwig went to school with adolph hitler
in his early work ‘tractates logic philosophicus 1921’ he attempted to set out principles to demonstrate what could and could not be expressed in language.
advanced two significantly different theories of meaning in his life. The first was quite similar to verificationism and was called the picture theory of meaning. Words get their meaning by connecting to the world similarly to how a picture represents reality. The logic of our language somehow reflects the logic of reality.
Later in his life Wittgenstein significantly changed his mind and developed the theory of language games. This claimed that words get their meaning by connecting to the social reality, not the physical reality.
Our social reality is composed of different types of social interaction, which Wittgenstein described as different ‘games’ that we play. Game is meant in a very broad sense, a social practice governed by rules.
Throughout life, we are inducted into various social roles/games.
Think about the different ways people behave and speak when in an interview, talking with friends or with family. Imagine if we started talking in an interview like we do when talking with friends. That would be strange in that context. Meaning is therefore contextual. It depends on the social context, the ‘language game’ in which we are speaking. The meaning of language depends on how it is used in a particular social game, not on its reference to physical reality.
“Don’t look for the meanings; look for the use”. – Wittgenstein.
Uprooting a word from the religious language game and try to analyse it within the context of the scientific language game is to misunderstand how meaning works.
Wittgenstein argued that the scientific language game can be about reality, since it is about evidence, experience and reason, whereas the religious language game is about faith and social communities, conventions & emotions.
evaluating vertificationism
Strength: Verificationism cuts through the stalemate in the debate over God’s existence.
Religious philosophers find it difficult to prove that God exists, but similarly atheistic philosophers find it difficult to prove that God does not exists. Ayer’s approach attempted to break this stalemate with a new approach. We shouldn’t even start debating metaphysical questions like whether God exists, since metaphysical terms like ‘God’ are unverifiable and so meaningless.
Weakness: Eschatological verification.
-Hick argued that there is a way to verify God and religious language, because when we die, we’ll see God and then we’ll know. One strength of Hick’s approach is that he doesn’t need to actually undermine verificationism itself, only Ayer’s claim that religious language is unverifiable.
-Hick illustrates this argument with the parable of the celestial city. Imagine there are two travellers, one representing a theist, the other an atheist. They are walking along a road, representing life. One thinks that a celestial city is at the end of the road, representing an afterlife and God, the other does not. Neither has reached the end of this road before. Hick finishes with this sentence:
“Yet, when they turn the last corner, it will be apparent that one of them has been right all the time and the other wrong.” – Hick.
Hick is arguing that religious language is also verifiable in principle because we also know that in principle it is possible to die and ‘see’ God.
Ayer gave the example of mountains being on the dark side of the moon as something that was verifiable in principle. They had not seen the dark side of the moon in his time, but they knew that in principle it was possible to go there and look so hick argued this applied to God too.
However, we can’t be sure that there really is a celestial city at the end of the road – that there is an afterlife where we can experience and verify God. It’s only a possibility.
The statement that there are mountains on the dark side of the moon was verifiable in principle in Ayer’s time because they knew how to verify it. They knew the moon existed, that travel in space was possible and knew they simply had to look once traveling there.
None of these requirements hold true in the case of the afterlife.
- So arguably Hick only shows that religious language is ‘possibly’ verifiable. He hasn’t shown that it is verifiable in principle.
Strength: Logical positivist theories like Verificationism are based a reasonable claim about meaning.
- For a statement to be about reality it must refer to reality. Its reference must be at least in principle testable. If someone claims to be talking about reality but cannot show that they are referring to reality, then it seems valid to deny that their language has cognitive meaning.
Weakness: The verification principle is self-defeating
- It states that to be meaningful a statement must be analytic or empirically verifiable. However, that means that in order for the verification principle itself to be meaningful, it must be analytic or empirically verifiable. It’s hard to see how it could be either.
This criticism was actually anticipated and discussed by the early verificationists themselves. Carnap was one of them who tried to defend the principle as analytic, but this fails as one could deny it without contradiction. There’s no obvious reason why it should be true by definition that a statement being meaningful means that it is either analytic or empirically verifiable.
- The alternative is to take the verification principle empirically. The problem is, if we test through experience what kind of meaning people use, it isn’t restricted to analytic or empirical statements. We find metaphysical talk of e.g., the world of forms or God.
- Overall, the verification principle seems self-defeating. It cannot pass its own test of meaningfulness.
Ayer responds by admitting that the verification principle cannot be a factual statement about the meaning of factual statements and claims instead that it is a methodological stipulation, a tool which the logical positivist adopts for methodological purposes. It is a tool which enables us to figure out whether a statement has empirical meaning.
falsification and Anthony flew
anthony flew in his article ‘theology and falisification’ returned to the debate begun by the logical positivists but suggested that instead of insisting that a statement should be verifiable it should instead be falsifiable.
Falsifiable means able to be false. A claim/belief is falsifiable if we can imagine how it could be false.
falsification has its roots in karl poppers philosophy of science
- “in so far as a scientific statement speaks about reality, it must be falsifiable; and in so far as it is not falsifiable, it does not speak about reality”
Flew believed that a statement is meaningful if it is known what empirical evidence could count against it. e.g. ‘All swans are white’ this can be falsified if we were to see a black swan.
Antony Flew applied Falsificationism to religious language. Religious people can’t say what could prove their belief in God false.
Flew concludes that religious language is meaningless. Religious language fails to assert anything about reality. Cognitive meaning requires expression of belief, but a belief is a mental representation of reality. In order for a belief to be about reality, for Flew it must be falsifiable. So, even though religious language expresses beliefs, since they are unfalsifiable beliefs religious language fails to have cognitive meaning.
Antony Flew’s parable of the gardener argues that religious language, specifically beliefs in God, becomes meaningless due to constant modifications and qualifications. The story involves two people in a forest, one asserting a gardener’s existence. As attempts to test this belief occur, the believer keeps changing the gardener’s characteristics. Flew’s critical question is: “What’s left of your original assertion?” He contends that continuous qualifications make the concept of God essentially meaningless, as it can adapt to any reality without making a difference. Therefore, belief in God becomes unfalsifiable and irrelevant to understanding reality.
Flew’s gardener parable fails to really capture the way religious belief functions. It isn’t a constant process of altering belief to protect it from rational testing. It is based on personal experience, and it is falsifiable.
There are clearly many examples of religious people abandoning their belief due to evil. This fact/observation is the greatest strength of Mitchell’s critique of Flew. It simply looks like a fact that many religious people have faith based on their personal relationship with God until a certain level of evil outweighs it – E.g. their child dies.
R.M Hares response to ‘theology and falsification’
gave the first and probably the most radical response to flews article. he agreed that flew had succeeded in demonstrating the failure of religous langauge to make meaningful truth claims. however hare suggested that when people use religous language they should not be interpreted as truth-claims in a cognative sense but as expressions of what he called a ‘blik’.
hare responded to flew, in the journal ‘new essays in philosophical theology 1955’ , with a parable of his own. he asked us to imagine a ‘lunatic’ who is convinced that all University dons want to murder him. no matter how many kind ones he meets there is nothing they can do to persuade him that this belief is wrong.
Hare called this mans unfalsifiable conviction a ‘blik’. hares argument is that we all have our own bliks with which we approach the world and make judgements.
- the belief that everything happens by chance is just as much a ‘blik’ as the belief that things happen by the will of God. religous people and athiests both have ‘bliks’.
R. M. Hare disagreed with Verificationism and Falsificationism, arguing that those theories had failed to truly understand how religious language functioned.
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. The expression of attitudes is not an attempt to describe the world, therefore they cannot be true or false. Hare thinks that since Bliks affect our beliefs and behaviour, they are meaningful.
D.Z phillips ,who was greatly influenced by wittgenstein, developed hares thinking, by claiming that religous statements are not cognitive truth claims at all but fall into a different category of language usage.
ayer and flew VS Hare
Hare’s argument is unsuccessful because although he 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 do mean that ‘there objectively exists a God’, irrespective of their attitude. Aquinas wrote many long books attempting to prove the seemingly cognitive belief in God true. So arguably Hare fails to capture the true meaning of religious language
Hare’s argument is successful because although many religious people may indeed feel that they are making factual claims about reality, their conception of reality is really just an aspect of their Blik. Saying God exists therefore really serves to add psychological force and grandeur to what is actually just their attitude.
Basil Mitchell
Strength of Falsificationism: a good test of rationality
Falsificationism seems like a perfect test of whether a person’s belief is about reality or not. If someone seems like they are just holding onto a belief because of faith without any reason or evidence, you can ask them what it could possibly take for them to change their mind. A person with a rational belief based on evidence will be able to answer that question.
Weakness: Basil Mitchell’s response to Flew
responded to flew with his own story known as the ‘parable of the partisan’ - A soldier is fighting for the resistance against the government in a civil war. One day someone comes to them and claims to be the leader of the resistance. They stay up all night talking and the stranger leaves a strong impression on the soldier. As a result, the soldier decides to have faith in this person, even when they see them fighting for the government. This is analogous to the way Christians have an initial experience/relationship with God which justifies their faith.
mitchells view is different from hares because he is arguing that religous beliefs and statements do have a factual content (are cognitive). the partisan might find out if he survives the war whether or not he shld’ve of trusted the stranger because there is truth and falsity to be found.
Mitchell makes a parallel between this and belief in a loving god - evidence for god can seem incomplete but there is still a factual content to religous assertions. ‘god loves us’ is in the end true or false even if in the moment we cannot offer a definitive test.
in this respect mitchell also differs from hare in that hare claimed that our ‘bliks’ are groundless wheras for mitchel the soildiers trust is not groundless.
“it will depend on the nature of the impression created by the stranger in the first place … on the manner in which he takes the stranger’s behaviour.” – Mitchell
however a religious person’s ‘experience’ of and personal relationship with God is not really evidence.
- in the parable, meeting an actual person counts as evidence. However, religious encounter with God only happens inside people’s minds. That’s not really analogous to actually meeting a person in reality and weighing whether they are on your side.
- Experience of and relationship with God is not valid empirical evidence.
swinburne response to logical positivism
Argument for & strength of Falsif/verificationism: For a belief to be about reality, we must know how it could be true or false.
“we know the meaning of the statement if we know the conditions under which the statement is true or false”. M. Schlick, founder of logical positivism.
A cognitive belief about reality is factual, i.e., it concerns facts. Facts can be either true or false. This is the argument for logical positivism. Knowing the truth-requirements of a fact seem to be essential to knowing that fact. So, a fact is only meaningfully understood when it is known how it could be true or false.
- For a statement to be about reality (cognitive), there must be a way to verify (Ayer) or falsify (Flew) it.
Weakness: Swinburne attacks this claim.
- “Surely we understand a factual claim if we understand the words which occur in the sentence which expresses it, and if they are combined in a grammatical pattern of which we understand the significance.”
Swinburne seems to have a more scientific criteria for meaning. If we understand the words in a sentence and the significance of their combination, then it is meaningful to us. We don’t have to know how to test it through experience.
Swinburne created an illustrates of this. We know what toys are and what it would mean for them to come alive when no one was watching. We currently have no way to test whether that truly happens, nor can we even imagine such a test in principle. Yet, it is meaningful because we understand the concepts involved.
- so we may not currently know how to verify or falsify God, but so long as the concept can be understood it is meaningful.
- Swinburne’s point is strengthened by the fact that science often operates using his criteria, not Ayer’s or Flew’s. Physicists use their current knowledge & concepts to create theoretical mathematical models such as inflation theory (how the big bang started), dark matter or string theory.
The logical positivism of Ayer/Flew is actually too radical a form of empiricism even for many scientists. They are wrong about scientific meaning. It can involve ideas we don’t know how to test. So, Religious language is cognitively meaningful even if it’s untestable.
Hume’s argument for non-cognitivism
Hare was influenced by Hume’s psychological argument for non-cognitivism. The cognitive part of our mind is controlled or enslaved by our non-cognitive feelings.
- Psychology after Freud accepted this premise to a degree. We are often unaware of the way in which our supposedly reasoned judgements/beliefs are actually controlled by our unconscious socially conditioned feelings/attitudes.
- This explains why people refuse to accept or evidence which goes against their deeply held beliefs, such as with Hare’s paranoid student and also religious belief. Religious language has an appearance of cognitive meaning but is actually expressing the emotions/attitudes (Blik) their belief is rooted in.
Weakness: Hume’s theory of human psychology is controversial.
Kant famously rejected it, arguing that humans were capable of putting their emotions aside and acting out of purely rational motives.
Psychologist Jonathan Haidt thinks Hume was closer to the truth than Kant, but still think that Hume went a bit too far by saying that reason was always a slave to the emotions.
Religious belief clearly involves strong emotions and attitudes, but arguably it is still based on reason in some ways. For example, Flew actually changed his mind about God and became religious after being convinced by a modern version of the design argument. This suggests that although religious language might often be rooted in non-cognitive attitudes, nonetheless reason can affect our cognitive attitudes.
evaluating language games
Strength: Wittgenstein’s theory captures and explains the disconnect between religious and scientific meaning in a way that accords with important strands of Christian theology. -
religion is purely a matter of faith. It is a totally separate language game to science which is a matter of a posteriori reason. This has a long tradition within Christian theology.
Tertullian (3rd century) asked “what has Athens to do with Jerusalem”, implying that the philosophical reasoning of the ancient Greeks has nothing to do with Christian faith.
As Pascal put it, the “God of the philosophers” that philosophers argue about is not “the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob”.
One weakness of Wittgenstein’s language games theory is that it leads to theological anti-realism. According to Wittgenstein, when religious individuals express beliefs like “God exists,” they are not making factual claims about objective reality. Instead, they are participating in a cultural language game. However, many religious people reject this interpretation. They genuinely believe that their statements about God’s existence are objective and reflect a cognitive stance.
For instance, Aquinas, a prominent theologian, presented empirical proofs for God’s existence. Even if these proofs fail logically, they demonstrate a cognitive belief in God. and The anthropic fine-tuning argument suggests that the intricacies of the universe are best explained by God’s design, challenging Wittgenstein’s strict separation between scientific and religious meaning.
Strength: language games does seem to accurately capture the way that social life works.
- It makes eminent sense to think of different types of social interaction as different games and that what differentiates them is their rules. Each social context has rules governing what is acceptable and not acceptable. These rules will be constantly changing as society changes.
Weakness: there are elements of religious differences that Wittgenstein struggles to explain.
- Wittgenstein claims one can only understand a language game by knowing the rules. So to understand religious language one would have to be a member of that religion. However, it’s hard to explain how people manage to convert to a religion, then. It’s also hard to explain how inter-faith dialogue is possible.
furthermore, dividing up human social life into different language games seems very messy. Wittgenstein’s characterisation of language games is imprecise. For example, the ‘religious’ language game can be divided into different religions. Those can often be sub-divided, such as into the ‘Catholic’ language game. - . It looks like language games actually overlap and connect in all sorts of ways which ultimately seem impossible to calculate or characterise.
defending Wittgenstein - Arguably interfaith dialogue and conversion do not require complete proper understanding. It seems true that only a Christian can truly appreciate the depth of what it means to have faith in Christ
