Religious Language: Verification Falsification Blik And Games Flashcards
What is cognitivism
Cognitivism– language that expresses beliefs about reality which can therefore be true or false.( verifiable )
What is non cognitivism ?
Non-cognitivism– ethical language expresses some non-cognition like an emotion, does not attempt to describe reality and therefore cannot be true or false.
What is the Verification principle
Verificationism was invented by the logical positivists of the Vienna Circle, a group of philosophers that included A. J. Ayer. They believed that metaphysical claims (a priori reasoning about reality beyond empirical investigation), including religious language, is meaningless. BECAUSE If a claim cannot be verified by sense experience, then it is not factually significant and only has a non-cognitive emotional significance. This allows Ayer to avoid having to make the metaphysical claim that metaphysics is impossible. Instead, he can say that metaphysical utterances are meaningless because they cannot be verified in sense experience.
What does Ayer say about God talk?
” God talk is evidently nonsense “
AS he is by definition transcendent and unknowable and we cannot speak meaningfully of something we do not know or understand.
Strengths of Verificationism
Strength: Logical positivist theories like Verificationism are based a reasonable claim about meaning. For a word to have meaning that we can all agree on it must surely refer to a thing in the world that we can all in principle test. If someone is talking about something that does not refer to anything in public experience then we can’t know what they are talking about and it seems valid to call that meaningless.
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. So, it looks like a stalemate with neither side managing to completely win. Ayer’s approach breaks this stalemate, claiming that we shouldn’t even start debating metaphysical questions like whether God exists, since metaphysical terms like ‘God’ are unverifiable and so meaningless. Eg even atheist statements about God not existing are meaningless.
Weaknesses of verificationism
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. Parable of the celestial city. He uses Ayers own distinction between Verification in principle ( weak verification) and in practice to say that eschatological verification is weak verification.
Weakness: The verification principle cannot be verified. 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. If we try to take the verification principle empirically then it would be an empirical claim that if we investigate what kind of meaning people use then we will see that it is either analytic or empirical. But that appears to be false since empirical evidence shows that people have meant something else by meaning throughout history e.g. Plato found it meaningful to talk of the world of forms and theologians find it meaningful to talk of God, both of which involve unempirical metaphysical terms.
Outline the Parable of the celestial city and give concluding quote.
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.
The Falsification principle
Popper thought verficationism couldn’t capture empirical generalisations, which he illustrated with the claim ‘all swans are white’. To verify that would require knowing that at no point in time nor at any place in the universe did a non-white swan ever exist. However, the claim is falsifiable because we can say what would prove it wrong; seeing a non-white swan. As a psychologist he disliked others like Freud who would continually change his theories so they could never be falsified. Pseudo-science. Flew agreed and said this could be applied to religious language.
The parable of the gardener.
Flew illustrated his approach of applying Falsificationism to religious language using belief in a gardener as an analogy for belief in God.
Two people are walking and see a garden. One claims there is a gardener who tends to it, so the other suggest waiting and seeing if that is true. After a while, the other says ‘actually, they are an invisible gardener’, so they set up barbed wire fences and so on to try and detect this invisible gardener, at which point they then say ‘actually, it’s a non-physical gardener’. This continues and every test failed the gardeners characteristics change. Untill the believer says- A gardener does exist he is just invisible, unsmellable, untouchable and can walk through walls. And the other replies : “ But what remains of your original assertion? What is the difference between this gardener and none at all?”
Key quote from parable of the gardener.
‘But what remains of your original assertion?’
How does your gardener “ differ from an imaginary gardener or even no gardener at all?”
Strengths and weaknesses of eschatological verification
Strengths of eschatological verification
Strength: Hick’s argument fits with Christian theology. He believed in the possibility of physical resurrection, for example. Hick was a pluralist however, he believed different religions were different cultural manifestations of human awareness of the same higher divine reality.
Strength: Hick directly targets Ayer’s theory. Ayer makes it clear that a statement is meaningful even if it is only verifiable in principle. So, Hick only has to show that there is a way to verify God’s existence in principle for statements about God to be meaningful.
Weakness: 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. Eg what if we are re encarnated and our memories wiped.
Weakness: verification might not be the correct way to view religious language in the first place. The approach of Hare or Wittgenstein might be more accurate.
Hare: Religious language as a Blik
Hare believed religious language was non-cognitive but still meaningful. He claimed everyone has a fixed attitude to the world that is how we uniquely perceive the world, based on unshakeable beliefs founded from childhood about reality. He called this our Blik. A religious person’s blik is centred around their religious beliefs. Hare said Ayer and Flew misunderstood religious language as scientific language instead of something else. They influence all our thoughts and actions.
The Parable of the Lunatic.
An Oxford student who believes all his Don’s are our to murder him. Despite many attempts of peers to show him even the nicest professors, he can not be convinced otherwise.
Though logical positivists have interpreted this parable against theists as lunatics, Hare himself argued a different point: that everyone has a blik and this is an example of an insane blik, but sane bliks exist more often.
Whether or not religious Bliks are sane or insane is debateable.
Strengths and weaknesses of Hares theory
Strength: Hare’s analogy of the paranoid student works well. There is no evidence that could persuade them to change their belief. In the case of the student, we can clearly see that this is because their ‘belief’ is actually rooted in a paranoid attitude. Similarly, religious believers cannot imagine evidence that could persuade them that God does not exist. Hare is accepting that religious belief is unfalsifiable, but his student analogy shows that this is actually because it is an expression of non-cognitive attitude. This means we shouldn’t regard religious language as an expression of belief but of what the belief is really rooted in – attitude or ‘Blik’.
Strength: Hare allows religious language to be meaningful, which does seem to make more sense of its influence on people’s lives.
Weakness: Religious belief is actually falsifiable: St Paul claimed that if Jesus’ body were discovered then belief and faith in Christianity would be pointless
Weakness: Theists.
Religious language still has factual claims and has cognitive aspect.
Wittgenstien
Early life- his supporters were Ayer and Flew. He was a strict logical positivist.Religious language non cognitive and completely meaningless, developed picture theory to show when we speak it is descriptive.
Later life- Completely contradicted early self, religious language meaningfull as its own language game.
