Please enable JavaScript.
Coggle requires JavaScript to display documents.
Religious Language: 20th century perspectives and philosophical…
Religious Language: 20th century perspectives and philosophical comparisons ~ Philosophy of Religion
Spec Requires:
- Logical positivism
- Wittgenstein's views on language games and forms of life
- Discussing the factual quality of religious language in the falsification symposium
Key Terms:
- Logical Positivism: a movement that claimed assertions have to be capable of being tested empirically if they are to be meaningful
- Cognitive: Statements about God that can be known to be either true or false
- Non-Cognitive: Statements about God are not subject to truth or falsity.
- Empirical: available to be experienced by the 5 senses
- Verification: providing evidence to determine something is true
- Symposium: a group of people who meet to discuss a particular question or theme
- Falsification: providing evidence to determined that something is false
- Demythologising: removing the mythical elements from a narrative to expose a central message.
-
INTRO:
Involves whether statements about God are cognitive or non-cognitive. When we make cognitive statements about the world, we are able to establish whether they are true or false using our senses. Logical positivists note that this is not the case for religious statements; there is no way to prove they are true. This leads thinkers such as A.J. AYER to use the weak verification principle to argue that religious language is meaningless. ANTHONY FLEW says that if a religious statements were false, we would be able to establish that it was untrue which R.M. HARE and BASIL MITCHELL respond to this. LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN suggests that the verification and falsificationists are looking as the question the wrong way. Religious language is non-cognitive and is able to be proved or disproved; statements only has meaning within certain language games. This approach by WITTGENSTEIN can be contrasted against AQUINAS' Cataphatic Way using an analogy.
-
-
-
METAPHYSICS: Branch of philosophy dealing with the nature of reality, things that are 'beyond' or 'after' the physical realm.
are we able to tell the difference between the work of this gardener and there being no gardener at all? therefore, religious statements cannot be falsifiable and overall, not statements at all.