Religious Language

M. Scott

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781137033192
• eBook ISBN: 9781137033208
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Sociolinguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

An original and accessible discussion of the nature of religious language that draws on the latest research in the philosophy of language. The historical background to research on religious language is also explored and connections are made with both Continental Philosophy and Theology.

Part I

Religious Language

1

Introduction

According to the face value interpretation of religious language, a religious sentence such as ‘God is omnipotent’ should be taken as saying – or as having the ‘semantic’ or ‘propositional’ content – that God is omnipotent, and in stating it a speaker conventionally expresses the belief that God is omnipotent. More generally, according to face value theory, the interpretation of religious language does not diverge from our interpretation of other descriptive areas of language. And that’s it. There’s nothing special about religious language other than its distinctive subject matter.

Despite the plausibility and simplicity of the face value theory, there is a long-standing and still enduring tradition of opposition, one that we explore over the next five chapters, ranging from those who argue that it is an incomplete story about the content of religious sentences to those who reject it entirely. The more radical opposition takes the form of denying that religious sentences represent religious facts or properties; this is often coupled with the theory that religious sentences are conventionally tied to the expression of non-cognitive states such as emotions, plans, stances, intentions, and so on. However, there are also more moderate lines of resistance to face value theory, such as the view that religious sentences do represent religious facts or properties and conventionally express religious beliefs but also express non-cognitive attitudes. On this latter view, face value theory is incomplete rather than substantially mistaken; it misses out the conative aspects of religious language. I will use attitude theory as a general term to refer to these theories.

In Chapter 5 and 6 we focus on contemporary views and arguments about attitude theory. In the following three chapters we look at some of the principal contributors to the historical development of this tradition, although we will also get into the details of a number of topics of live philosophical debate, in particular the reference of ‘God’. I have selected three contrasting lines of historical opposition to the face value theory of language. They are differently motivated, are taken from divers historical periods, and are applied to different regions of religious language. These are (a) the apophatic theologians – from whom I will draw in particular from Denys the Areopagite (late 5th and 6th centuries), Evagrius Ponticus (4th century) and the anonymous author of The Cloud of Unknowing (later 14th century) – who present a distinctive way of thinking about language that represents God, motivated by the transcendence of God; (b) George Berkeley, whose attitude theory, mainly developed in his 1732 work Alciphron, is aimed at addressing concerns about the intelligibility of key Christian ideas such as grace, the Trinity, original sin and is restricted to Christian doctrinal language; and (c) Richard Braithwaite, who in the mid-1950s developed a wide-ranging attitude theory for religious language motivated by general considerations about the requirements for linguistic meaning. The background to Braithwaite’s theory is the theory of meaning and critique of religion as ‘factually contentless’ developed by the logical positivists and popularised by A. J. Ayer (1936). Chapter 4 sets out this background and also takes up the question of why this critique remained such a central issue in the philosophy of religion into the late 20th century, despite the theory of meaning on which it was based being thoroughly discredited decades earlier.

If God is a transcendent being, as apophatic theologians supposed, then a problem arises as to how it is possible to refer to God. I look at this problem in Chapter 2 but defer a fuller discussion of theories of reference and their application in religious language to Chapter 7.

Varieties of attitude theory: surveying the field

For some readers the mention of ‘non-cognitivist’ attitudes may suggest a radical theory particularly associated with certain trends in mid to late 20th century Protestant theology and with such figures as Don Cupitt and Gordon Kaufman. However, we must be careful to distinguish between non-revisionary theories, which aim at giving an interpretation of religious language, from revisionary theories, which aim at modifying how religious language is used and at saying what it ought to mean rather than what it does mean. Face value theory and attitude theories are non-revisionary; they are put forward as accounts of the content and conventional use of religious sentences. But consider, for instance, the Sea of Faith movement, inspired by Don Cupitt’s work in the 1980s, which exemplifies this more radical theological position. It supports the pursuit of practices typically engaged in by religious believers – prayer, churchgoing, attempting to meet various moral standards, and so on – but without having religious belief.¹ Detractors judge this to be little more than atheism misleadingly presented as religious conviction (Plantinga, 2000). Proponents argue that one can legitimately gain access to the benefits of a religious life without being committed to superstitious beliefs (Cupitt, 1984). Some practising members of the Anglican Communion number among the movement’s supporters. Now, those sympathetic to the Sea of Faith movement may appear to be rejecting the face value theory. But instead they are encouraging a revision to religious attitudes – to continue to engage in religious practice and discourse but without commitments to what they perceive as ‘myths’ and supernatural entities. As such, we should expect them to endorse face value theory because they think that (until the community of believers is won over) religious sentences describe religious facts and conventionally express the beliefs of speakers. Determining whether an author is putting forward a revisionary or non-revisionary theory can sometimes be difficult. But the distinction is a critical one: the merits of a revisionary theory will rest in part on the plausibility of the metaphysical considerations that motivate them (in this case, the motivation is that belief in supernatural beings is indefensible). The merits of a non-revisionary theory will be largely assessed by linguistic evidence about the meanings of religious sentences and their use.

Attitude theories come in a variety of forms and have been defended for several different areas of language, notably ethics (Blackburn, 1984; Gibbard, 1990), subjective judgements of degrees of certainty (Schneider, 2010), the self-ascription of mental states (Logue, 1995), aesthetics (Todd, 2004), the modal language of necessity and possibility (Thomasson, 2007) and truth (Strawson, 1950). What is the range of theoretical options available to the religious attitude theorist? There are three main positions. According to the most radical version, which I will call non-cognitivism, religious sentences do not report facts (religious or otherwise) and do not conventionally express beliefs (let alone religious beliefs); they instead express only non-cognitive states. However, while non-cognitivism constitutes a form of attitude theory, since it rejects the face value account of religious language in its entirety, it is on the extreme end of a range of theoretical options. There are two other options that are more modest and offer much more plausible ways of disagreeing with the face value theory. I will call these moderate attitude theory and expressivism. Moderate attitude theorists agree with the face value theory that religious sentences represent religious facts; they also agree that affirming those sentences conventionally expresses religious beliefs. However, they argue that this is not the whole story about their content; religious sentences also conventionally express attitudes other than belief. To see how this might work, the following example from Simon Blackburn is useful:

If I say that someone is a Kraut, or blotto, I may express an attitude of contempt towards Germans, or of wry amusement at drunkenness, but I also say something true or false about their nationality or sobriety ... You should not use those terms unless you also sympathize with those attitudes. But in each case it would be wrong to infer that no description is given from the fact that an attitude is also expressed. (1984, p. 169)

Saying that someone is blotto is both representational and expressive; it expresses belief in the fact that is being represented (that the person is drunk) as well as an attitude other than belief (amusement about the person’s condition). The moderate non-cognitivist is making a comparable point about religious language: it is similar to other areas of descriptive language insofar as its sentences represent facts and are used to express beliefs in those facts, but it is different insofar as it is also expressive of non-cognitive attitudes.

The face value theorist may reasonably wonder whether there is a genuine point of disagreement with moderate attitude theory. For it seems that we can use any descriptive and belief-expressing claim also to express a non-cognitive attitude. Suppose that you are being driven dangerously fast along a narrow road. You tensely tell the driver:

1.You are driving too quickly.

All that is said by (1), according to face value theory, is that you are driving very quickly and in uttering (1), you express belief in that content. However, in saying (1), you also communicate the non-cognitive attitude of alarm about the speed of the car. But we surely don’t need an attitude theory for language about driving. More generally, it seems that we could in principle imagine circumstances for any given indicative sentence – descriptive or otherwise – in which it expresses a non-cognitive state. If this is all that the moderate attitude theorist is proposing, then the theory looks trivially true and fails to identify anything distinctive about religious language; it does not tell us anything about religious language that it does not equally tell us about language about driving or any other area of language. However, this overlooks a critical component of attitude theory. The expression of non-cognitive attitudes is taken to be tied to the use of religious sentences as a matter of linguistic convention. While the utterance of (1) may express a feeling of alarm, this is because of the context in which it is uttered (a nervous passenger in a fast-moving car) and the manner in which it is said. This marks an important distinction between (1) and Blackburn’s examples. A term like ‘blotto’ or pejorative expressions are tied to the expression of attitudes towards the people to which they are directed in all circumstances in which they are used. This, Blackburn suggests, seems to be part of the meaning of these words rather than something that the words are merely used, under certain circumstances, to imply or communicate. In contrast, (1) does not express alarm in all circumstance in which it is used – for example, when calmly uttered by a driving instructor to a learner going marginally over the speed limit. For the moderate attitude theorist, the expression of non-cognitive attitudes is not an incidental, context-dependent feature of the use of religious sentences but is built into their meaning along with their representational content. Moderate attitude theory finds some defenders in ethics (Copp, 2001) but has hitherto not been defended in the philosophy of religion.

According to the expressivist version of attitude theory, religious sentences conventionally express non-cognitive attitudes and in many cases also express beliefs. However, religious sentences do not have religious content, and the beliefs that they express are not religious beliefs. To see how this might work, consider a toy version of expressivism for funniness. Comedic expressivism is the theory that sentences about what is funny – that is, sentences in which the predicate ‘funny’ or related predicates of comicality are used – do not represent facts about what is funny but instead conventionally express amusement towards the object to which the predicate is directed. Take the sentence

2.Rowan Atkinson’s performance at the London Olympics opening ceremony was funny.

The comedic expressivist argues that this sentence has an expressive meaning, which we can give as

3.HA! (Rowan Atkinson performing at the London Olympic opening ceremony).

Where ‘HA!’ stands for an attitude of amusement towards the bracketed content. What is particularly notable is that the predicate ‘funny’ disappears in the expressivist interpretation of (2) so that the sentence does not attribute a genuine property to Rowan Atkinson’s performance. Now, the comedic expressivist believes that sentences about what is funny are conventionally tied to the expression of attitudes and are not used to express beliefs about what is funny. Talk of funniness, for the expressivist, does not pick out a genuine property of objects and speakers. However, expressivism is not thereby reduced to non-cognitivism because (2) also expresses this true proposition:

4.Rowan Atkinson performed at the London Olympics opening ceremony.

And someone who sincerely says (2) believes and says (4). So expressivism allows for sentences about what is funny to have representational content that the speaker also believes, provided that what is said does not express a proposition about what is funny. However, there are also cases like

5.That was funny.

The expressivist interprets (5) as expressing only a non-cognitive attitude:

6.HA! (that thing).

So no complete proposition is expressed by (5) on the expressivist interpretation of its meaning. According to the comedic expressivist, saying (5) does not conventionally express a belief, only an attitude of amusement.

Returning to the position of religious expressivist, we can see from the example of expressivism about funniness that there will be a similar division between religious sentences that also report non-religious facts and those that do not. Religious expressivists grant that the former may express beliefs in (non-religious) propositions and also express non-cognitive attitudes, while the latter are interpreted as purely expressive. Expressivists do thereby concede that religious language may describe non-religious facts and be used to express non-religious beliefs; however, this is consistent with their position that religious sentences do not represent religious facts and are not used to express beliefs in religious facts. Moreover, this concession looks unavoidable. There does not seem to be any plausible interpretation of (7), for example, that denies that it represents the facts described in (8) and (9).

7.Ten plagues were inflicted on Egypt by God to persuade Pharaoh to release the Israelites from slavery.

8.Egypt underwent ten plagues.

9.Pharaoh held the Israelites in slavery.

Examples such as these make it difficult to see how non-cognitivism, which denies that religious sentences conventionally express any beliefs, is a remotely tenable position.

We can see the main options as follows:

Face value theory. Religious sentences represent religious facts and are conventionally used to express beliefs that those facts obtain.

Non-cognitivism. Religious sentences do not represent facts and are not conventionally used to express beliefs; they express non-cognitive attitudes.

Expressivism. Religious sentences do not represent religious facts but do conventionally express non-cognitive attitudes; insofar as they represent non-religious facts (if they represent any facts at all), they may be used conventionally to express belief in those (non-religious) facts.

Moderate attitude theory. Religious sentences represent religious facts and are conventionally used to express belief in those facts and they conventionally express non-cognitive states.

Because of the problem with non-cognitivism raised above, expressivist and moderate versions of attitude theory are those I will evaluate as rivals to face value theory.

Contemporary treatments of religious language have not always done attitude theories justice. Among the misconceptions about attitude theories are the following: attitude theories are a modern phenomenon and in particular an upshot of the verificationist theories of meaning developed by the logi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Part I  Religious Language
• Part II  Religious Truth
• Part III   Religious Discourse
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index