Discuss the view that religious language has nothing to do with empirial facts
- This is a preview of the essay.
To view the full text you must login!
Discuss the View that Religious Language has nothing to do with Empirical Facts.
People study religious language because the verbal communication cannot be justified because there is no evidence that goes beyond it. So, the question goes, how can we justify something without empirical evidence, a belief only through words?
Logical Positivists believed that empirical evidence must be used to make a statement meaningful. Logical positivists considered that "the meaning of a proposition is the method of verification" this was that a statement is only meaningful if it can be verified by either analytic propositions, an a priori rationale by which knowledge is gained through logical reasoning or by synthetic propositions, an a posteriori argument by which could be proved true or false through sense experience. Therefore, there principle asserts that "we know the meaning of a statement if we know the conditions under which the statement is true or false."
Ludwig Wittgenstein was linked with Logical positivists as he initially agreed with them; his early belief was that the language of religion was seen as meaningless, unable to express anything about reality. Yet he later changed his opinion: he came to realise that the Logical Positivists' view on language was too limiting. He began to consider the way that language is defined by the functions it performs whist recognising the problems that religious language faced in terms of meaningfulness. Rather than asking questions about the meaningfulness of language, he looked at the way that language is used and at the functions of language...