Religious Language: Key Terms

Frage	Antworten
The Verification Principle	The idea that statements which are neither analytic nor empirically testable are meaningless.
The Vienna Circle	The group responsible for the VP.
Logical Positivism	The philosophy that the Vienna Circle launched
Wittgenstein’s Tractatus (1921)	Constructed the picture theory of language, a big influence on the Vienna circle.
The picture theory of language	The idea that language is only meaningful if it pictures the world in a 1 to 1 relationship.
AJ Ayer (1910-89)	A leading supporter of the VP in Britain.
Language Truth and Logic (1936)	Ayer’s book.
An analytic statement	One in which two descriptors of equal meaning are joined by a copula (an ‘is’).
An empirically testable statement	One that you can test to find out whether they are true or false.
Karl Popper (1902-94)	Critic of the VP. Founder of the Falsification Principle.
Eschatological verification	John Hick’s claim that ‘There is an afterlife’ is verifiable since, if there is an afterlife, we’ll verify it.
The Falsification Principle	The idea that statements are meaningless if they are not falsifiable.
‘Parable of the Gardener’	John Wisdom’s parable to show that religious beliefs are unfalsifiable.
Anthony Flew	Professor of Philosophy at the University of Reading, in the 1950s. Agreed with Wisdom.
RM Hare (1919-2002)	Argued that religious statements such as ‘God is love’ and ‘God exists’ are what might be called ‘Bliks’
A blik	A statement of a deep conviction so basic to the person’s world-view that it isn’t capable of being falsified.
Univocally/ Equivocally	With exactly the same meaning/ with completely different meanings.
Analogy upwards/downwards	Where something corresponds to the thing in a greater/ lesser way than the original.
Analogy of Proportion	Where a being has such a characteristic in proportion to the level of being it possesses.
Analogy of Attribution	When a term is used of something because it is caused by something else, where that term applies more properly
Language Games	The idea that there are as many types of meaning as there are areas of human discourse. The meaning of a word or sentence is, mostly, its use.
Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951)	The founder of language game theory, in his Philosophical Investigations (1951).
Noncognitivism	Non-cognitive uses of language are uses that do not intend to deal in knowledge.
The Via Negativa	The view that only negative statements can be made about God, not positive.
Apophatic theology	After the Greek verb apophemi, another word for the Via Negativa.
Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite	The main ancient proponent of the Via Negativa.
Cataphatic theology	“Cataphatic” is a combination of the two Greek verbs cata (‘to descend’) and femi (‘to speak’), and roughly means, ‘to bring God down so that we can speak of Him’.
The Via Positiva	Cataphatic theology. The idea that God can be spoken of in positive, informative terms.
-RB Braithwaite -JH Randall -DZ Phillips	Three non-cognitivist philosophers of religious language.
Myth	A story in which religious truths are encapsulated and from which they may be inseparable.
Rudolph Bultmann (1884-76)	A proponent of ‘demythologisation’ – getting rid of the more deeply mythological aspects of religion.
Symbol	Something that represents something else by association, resemblance or convention.
Paul Tillich (1886-65)	A proponent of the idea that all religious language is symbolic.

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