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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 June 2011
So much commentary and discussion concerning the significance of religious language has been marketed for consumption during the two decades since Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations first altered the grounds of inquiry in contemporary philosophy of religion that any new contribution to the subject is apt to kindle as much excitement as the average Sunday sermon. The progressive exhaustion of the topic, it may be argued, has resulted largely from this shift, inasmuch as philosophers of religion have thereby so narrowed the horizons of their researches in pursuing the “logical” dimensions of religious utterances that, once this side of the issue has been thoroughly charted, nothing substantial is left to explore. It does not require any prophetic cry in the wilderness to contend, therefore, in the manner that I propose here that (1) the “logical” or neo-Wittgensteinian approach to the problem of religious language must be transcended and that (2) any new perspective need not renounce with counter-revolutionary animus the achievements of analytic philosophy in this field, but merely attempt to arrive at a more subtle understanding of how religious language is employed.
1 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, The Blue and Brown Books (New York: Harper & Row, Torchbook Edition, 1965), 1.Google Scholar
2 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Philosophical Investigations, trans. Anscombe, G. E. M. (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1953), #197ffGoogle Scholar. Hereafter abbreviated PI.
3 Waismann, F., The Principles of Linguistic Philosophy (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1965), 130.Google Scholar
4 PI, #23.
5 Alston, William, The Elucidation of Religious Statements, in Reese, William and Freeman, Eugene (eds.), The Hartshorne Festschrift: Process and Divinity (Lasalle: Open Court Publishing Company, 1963), 442f.Google Scholar
6 The preoccupation of language philosophy with theology and its lack of sensitivity to the whole of man's religious life can be illustrated through a brief analysis of the writings of three important Anglo-American philosophers of religion: Alasdaire MacIntyre, I. M. Crombie, and William Alston.
(i) MacIntyre, in his article, Is Religious Language so Idiosyncratic that we can Hope for No Philosophical Account of It?, Santoni, Ronald (ed.) Religious Language and the Problem of Religious Language (Bloomington; Indiana University Press, 1968)Google Scholar, poses the cavil that religious language all too often is dismissed as lying beyond the pale of ordinary language systems. On the contrary, religious language does, according to MacIntyre, fit within the grammar of ordinary discourse. The problem arises when religious people introduce such odd proper names as “God” into the system, terms which outwardly resemble other proper names like “Joe” or “Sally,” but which curiously have their own grammar. MacIntyre would seemingly want us to take for granted that “most religious language … is of a thoroughly familiar kind” (ibid., 50), and treat the strains which religious utterances lay on everyday grammar merely as an aberration, not as an index to a wider province of meaning. MacIntyre focuses his investigations mainly on theological statements, because they can be ground down to straightforward linguistic conventions that he regards as normative in some sense.
(ii) Crombie in The Possibility of Theological Statements, Santoni, ibid., also tries to account for religious language in terms of ordinary “logical” criteria. These criteria do not necessarily constitute rules of day-to-day speech, but they are sufficiently consistent and regularly applied in certain situations to view them as a form of logical principles. Sometimes these rules are characterized as the “logic of perfection,” a logic which Crombie thinks is capable of explaining talk about God. For example: “the conception of the divine is indeed in one sense an empty notion; but it is the notion of a complement which would fill in certain deficiencies in our experience, that could not be filled by further experience, or scientific theory-making; and its positive content is simply the idea of something (we know not what) which must supply those deficiencies” (ibid., 106, emphasis mine). Crombie is attempting to justify all religious language as a logical form of discourse about God — a move which severely constricts the boundaries of “religious” talk in general.
(iii) Alston in the article cited above (cf. supra, n. 5) gives the impression of having challenged the contention that religious language can be transposed into ordinary language games. Alston criticizes what he calls the “whittle-down method” of accounting for religious utterances. On the other hand, Alston is not about to give up ordinary language as a standard or reference for illumining the nature of religious speech. He thinks that the “basic trouble” with religious utterances is that they “etherealize” and twist the rules of ordinary grammar so that they become puzzling and vexatious. Thus, instead of reducing religious language to another species of language, Alston pleads nescience and bafflement about how one would proceed in making sense out of religious talk. The article concludes on a note of befuddlement. What Alston seems to be attempting is to show how theological talk (his use of examples springs solely from dogmatic Christianity) has the logical form of ordinary discourse, but that when we examine the ways in which both types of speech are carried out in practice, we note discrepancies between the two. Alston suggests that there may be a paradigm which accounts for religious talk as something other than theological talk (and hence as nonproblematical), but he is willing to leave that discovery for future researchers.
7 Henry Fielding, Tom Jones, bk. iii, ch. 3.
8 The “situational” concept of meaning is best expressed by Ralph Ross: “That meaning is in the situation as a whole and the words, though central to the situation, cannot be disconnected from it and still retain their function.” Cf. Ross, Ralph, Symbols & Civilization: Science, Morals, Religion, Art (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1962), 159Google Scholar. Such a view of meaning roughly approximates the particular use of the term “meaning” which Wittgenstein describes as “a definite conscious process [of interpretation] accompanying, preceding, or following the verbal expression,” Blue and Brown Books, op. cit., 35. Wittgenstein himself, however, tends to disparage the importance of this view of meaning and suggests that there can be no functional distinction between “to say something” and “to mean something,” op. cit. It is possibly this kind of attitude which has been responsible for the overemphasis in linguistic philosophy on verbal significance. A recent attempt to recapture (though perhaps not to the optimal extent) the situational view of meaning as it pertains to religious language is found in a book by Van Buren, Paul, who reminds us: “Understanding language, therefore, means understanding what is going on when people talk. This is the living context of words,” The Edges of Language (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1972), 54Google Scholar. By “living context” we might read “form of life,” though Van Buren doesn't really develop the necessary ramifications of what he means by such a context.
9 PI, #43.
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39 Cf. Gendlin, Eugene, Experience and the Creation of Meaning (Toronto: The Free Press of Glencoe, 1962), 70f.Google Scholar and passim.
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