LANGUAGE, TRUTH &

LOGIC
Truth a dirty word?
• Entry to Oxford University depends not just an outstanding
academic results but also on an interview….
• Many today claim that the whole idea of absolute truth is an idea
whose time has passed. We live in a POST-TRUTH world….
• Everything depends on culture, on context, on sexuality and gender.
• Many are ‘postmodernists’ claiming that there is no single truth, no
‘meta-narrative’ which can serve as Truth for all human beings.
• Pope John Paul 11nd catalogued this development in a wonderful
encyclical title ‘Fides et Ratio’ (Faith and Reason)
What is reality
• Only the naive now think that reality is just what we see
and experience – it is far more weird and complex than
that.
• Our language and concepts have evolved like our senses to
deal with medium size physical objects but both languages
and our senses are inadequate when we change the scale.
• Language is very poor at expressing both the very large (for
instance black holes) and the very small (reality at the Plank
scale).
Most people.....
• Most people take ‘reality’ to mean ‘reality as we
perceive it to be’. Language seeks to mirror reality – but
WHAT REALITY?
• Once one looks at the universe as a whole, reality is
rather different and we are only dimly beginning to
comprehend ‘reality’.
• There may now be NINE or more dimensions – the
‘reality’ of our four dimensions is, mathematics shows,
clearly only part of the picture of the universe.
Prisoners of scale
• SO... If we are to talk of ‘reality’ we need to recognise
that:
• We are partly prisoners of scale... We see the world that
we would expect on the scale with which we are familiar
• We are partly prisoners of our senses – We see the world
through out sense organs and are limited by them
• We are prisoners of language
• Reality as a whole is something much broader than that.

•HOW MIGHT WE ACCESS IT??

PLATO RECOGNISED THE
PROBLEM!
Plato (on the left) has his feet in motion
(indicating the changing world) and points
upwards to the transcendent realm of
reality which we cannot experience
directly.

Aristotle (on the right) has his feet planted

on the ground – his book, ‘ETHICS’, is flat
to the ground and his hand emphasises
that this world is the only reality.
Empiricism
• One of the bi-products of the Protestant reformation was the rise of
empiricism. Philosophy returned to the methods of Aristotle and
started with what can be known through the senses.
• Religious philosophy had been more Platonic and thus concerned
with metaphysics.
• Metaphysics relied on higher logic, which was difficult for anyone to
check so people tended to rely on the authority of philosophers and
the Church.
•Protestant Christians encouraged people to question
the authority of the Church. This led eventually to the
whole basis of metaphysics being questioned.
• Some philosophers rejected metaphysics altogether and just relied on
experience.
David Hume
• Hume was as an Empiricist.
• He went back to Aristotle and argued that nothing
can be known that cannot be sensed.
• God and moral laws cannot therefore be known. Hume was
therefore an agnostic.
•Immanuel Kant read Hume when he was in his
40’s and claimed that Hume....
‘awoke me from my dogmatic slumbers and
gave a completely new direction to my enquiries’.
What can we know?
• Kant argues that human knowledge is subjective.

•We are limited by our perspective.

• Human knowledge is gained through the senses, through the lens of time
and space.
• We experience the ‘phenomenal world’, a series of cross sections through
reality.
• Reality as a whole, seen from outside time and space,
Kant called the ‘noumenal world’.
• Human beings cannot access noumenal truth, cannot know things in
themselves (‘ding an sich’) independent of experience.
• The closest we can get to understanding the greater, objective,
truth of things is through judgement.
Millais (d. 1896)
• This pre-raphaelite painting explores
the idea that our understanding of the
world is limited by our senses.
• The woman is blind and can not
experience the rainbow but she can
touch her daughter’s hair and hear the
music.
• The beauty still exists however and
she can sense something of the sunset
from the warmth on her skin and the
brightness of the light.
Anthony Gormley
•Showed an installation called ‘Blind
Light’ at the Hayward Gallery in London
in 2007. There was a rectangular glass
room, brightly lit and full of dense white
smoke.
•People walk around inside without being
able to see anything.
Anthony Gormley gives us a reminder of our human condition
which can illuminate Kant.
The human experience of reality is always limited and
incomplete. We experience the world through our senses and
these give an incomplete picture.
Over time we all begin to put our experiences together and
begin to understand the bigger picture, how things would look
from outside and what it all means – but we struggle to put
any of it into words.
Shared experience is better than any individual explanation at
producing shared understanding.
Kant and Plato
• Kant’s world view is Platonic, but he was influenced by Hume’s Aristotelian
metaphysical scepticism.
• Like Plato, Kant believed that ‘the truth is out there’, and exists in
perfect totality, independent of the human perspective.
• Like Plato, Kant prized reason as the best route available to us to come closer to
truth (and he believed that as individuals and societies human beings should be
guided by reason rather than the other human qualities of emotion or instinct).
• Like Plato, he believed that reflecting
on beautiful and good things can bring the
reason closest to understanding the way things really are beyond time and
space.
• Yet unlike the Neo-Platonic
and Religious Philosophers who used Plato’s work,
Kant did not enter into metaphysical speculation, but confined himself to the
discussion of what can be known from experience.
Hammer and nail
•“If the only tool you have is a hammer,
you tend to see every problem as a nail.”
(Abraham Maslow)
•WHAT DOES THIS MEAN???
• Our language is adapted for medium size physical objects and our
understanding of language, therefore, tends to be dominated by this
viewpoint.
• If the only tool we have is language and language is good at picturing
physical reality, then we will see all reality in these terms.
Four key figures underpin the modern tension between
science and religion

FEUERBACH

DARWIN MARX FREUD

VERIFICATIONISM
• The materialist approach gave rise to VERIFICATIONISM
with the work of Schlick, Ayer and the logical positivists.
• They argued that in order to be MEANINGFUL (Notice
not True!) a statement had to be capable of being
verified empirically (effectively by sense experience).
• Any statement that cannot be verified empirically
(unless it is related to mathematics) is meaningless.
Language about God meaningless?
• Verificationists argue that language about God is meaningless.
• On this view, religious language may convey some emotional
content to the people who use it – nothing more. This gave rise
to EMOTIVISM in ethics.
• Richard Dawkins would take this view and so would many
atheists.
• Science can, in principle, explain everything and religion is
redundant – perhaps a refuge for the naïve or those who
cannot cope with a universe without purpose or meaning….
FALSIFICATIONISM
• This is the other side of verificationism and claims that,
in order to be meaningful, a statement must be capable
of being falsified by empirical means.
• Effectively this is the basis for much science. If
NOTHING will falsify a statement then the statement
has no content.
• Ethical and religious language, therefore, becomes
MEANINGLESS.
THE KEY ISSUE
• When discussing language about God, the key issue is
what is meant by God!
• There are two basic understandings of God:
• 1) GOD AS WHOLLY SIMPLE: TIMELESS, SPACELESS,
BODILESS AND UTTERLY UNCHANGEABLE
• 2) GOD AS EVERLASTING: IN TIME BUT UNCHANGING
IN GOD’S CHARACTER. WITHOUT BEGINNING AND
WITHOUT END.
Philosophers have discussed religious language for
2500 years….
• The first and crucial issue is which model of God one is working with:
• 1) THE WHOLLY SIMPLE, TIMELESS, SPACELESS AND BODILESS GOD
is the God arrived at through philosophy – whether Aquinas’
Cosmological arguments and William Lane Craig’s Kalam argument.
• 2) THE PERSONALIST, TEMPORAL, EVERLASTING GOD is the God of
revelation in the Bible, Qur’an and Torah
• St. Augustine, Boethius, Aquinas and mainstream Catholic theology
argued that God must be beyond human conceptualisation – since God is
(1) above. Language about God cannot be taken literally.
• How can language drawn from the world of space and time be applied
to a totally transcendent God?
• Most Protestant theologians as well as Franciscans argue that God must
be (2). Language about God in the Bible should be the starting point.
 Al-Ghazali rejected
ISLAM AND RELIGIOUS LANGUAGE this as this position
• When the Islamic armies swept across North Africa, they would mean that
captured the great library of Alexandria. Many might have only the trained
expected them to destroy the library. philosopher could
understand the
• However the Qur’an exhorts Muslims to use reason and
Qur’an correctly.
learning and the books were transported back with great
care to the great Islamic centres of learning in Mekka,
Medina and Damascus where they were translated into He concluded that
Arabic. the revelation of the
Qur’an was final and
• For the next three centuries, great Islamic philosophers reason could not be
studied Aristotle and agreed that Allah must be timeless and given supremacy.
spaceless. God could not be within the spatio-temporal
world. From the late C13th
• So anything in the Qur’an which indicates that God has a onwards Islamic
body or can change must be understood metaphorically or philosophy became
analogically. marginalised.
MOSES MAIMONIDES
• Maimonides is one of the great Jewish philosophers. He wrote in Arabic
and was strongly influenced by the Islamic, Aristotelian philosophers.
• Maimonides argued that, since God must be wholly simple, timeless and
space, God cannot be spoken about univocally.
• NOTHING, he argued, in the Hebrew scriptures can be taken literally
when applied to God
• Better to remain silent before the Mystery that is God.

• The only meaningful thing that can be said of God is what God said to
Moses in front of the burning bush: “I AM THAT I AM”.
• God is what it is to be God. Now remain silent.
•The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy says:
•“Maimonides' negative theology is a barrier to
ascribing anthropomorphisms to God but it is
not a barrier to knowledge of God's existence or
knowledge of features of the world God made.
This is a strongly philosophical conception of
religion.”
•BUT it places major restrictions on the meaning
of language in the Torah, Bible or Qur’an.
APOPHATIC AND CATAPHATIC THEOLOGY
• APOPHATIC THEOLOGY (from the Greek – ‘to deny’)
holds that it is only possible to speak about IN PRACTICE, MANY
what God is not… THEOLOGIANS TAKE
• So God is NOT in time, NOT in space, has NOT A MIDDLE PATH…
got a body, does NOT change, etc. GOD IS BOTH
• This would be close to Moses Maimonides’ IMMANENT AND
view and was the view of Gregory of Nyssa (325 TRANSCENDENT –
– 395ce) who emphasised the unknowability of LANGUAGE ABOUT
God. Kierkegaard and Karl Rahner sj are in this GOD IS INADEQUATE
tradition. SO are some forms of mysticism. BUT SOME THINGS
• CATAPHATIC (or KATAPHATIC) THEOLOGY CAN BE SAID ABOUT
claims that it is possible to speak directly about GOD PROVIDED THE
God. LIMITED CONTENT IS
• So God is love, God is good, God is wise, etc. RECOGNISED.
THE PROBLEM AQUINAS FACED…
• St. Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century faced the challenge
from Islamic philosophy and from Maimonides:
• 1) God, he agree, must be timeless and spaceless.
• 2) This means that any language that implied potential or a
body to God cannot be understood in any sense literally.
• 3) Maimonides had called for people to be silent about God
since nothing meaningful could be said.
• 4) Aquinas rejected the conclusion, yet the logic of the above
position seemed clear.
• AQUINAS FACED THE PROBLEM OF HOW TO
RESPOND TO THIS INTELLECTUAL PROBLEM!
Univocal language
• Language only dimly reflects the reality of the quantum world.
It is also inadequate for grasping notions such as black holes; the
square root of minus one or the quantum world.
• One approach is to say that there is no problem – that God is
essentially like a material object and language can represent God
just like material objects are represented.
• On this view, religious language is UNIVOCAL.
• This would clearly be wrong about the quantum world and
Catholic theologians say it is wrong about God as well.
• If God is personal, in time and space, univocal language is
possible.
Blake – The
Ancient of Days
Michaelangelo – The Sistine chapel
THESE IMAGES ARE
NONSENSE!
No serious theologian
thinks that God is an old
man with a beard!
So ‘WHAT IS GOD?’ is a
serious question today and
directly affects religious
language.
Univocal language - 2
• If religious language is univocal, then this means that God is
another object within the spatio-temporal universe.
• It is for this reason that Ibn Sina, Ibn Rushd, Moses Maimonides
and St. Thomas Aquinas all rejected univocal language.
• God is beyond space and time and cannot be spoken about as if
God was a physical object.
• SO UNIVOCAL LANGUAGE ABOUT GOD IS RULED OUT.... At least if
God is wholly Simple…
• Religion has always recognised the limitations of language and
this is now being shown to be true in science.
Equivocal language
• One alternative to univocal language is equivocal
language.
• This says that language about the quantum world and
God is totally unrelated to language we know and
understand.
• The meaning of words used about God is, therefore, totally
different from any meaning that we can understand.
• So we can make statements about God but we have no
idea what they mean.
• SO AQUINAS RULED OUT EQUIVOCAL LANGUAGE...
Where do we go from here?
• If God cannot be talked about in univocal or equivocal language...
• WHAT CAN BE SAID?
• Moses Maimonides said that the answer was ‘nothing’.
• God cannot be meaningful talked about at all.
• We should be silent about God. “SHUT UP!!”
• Even the language of the Jewish Scriptures, The Torah is
untranslatable into ordinary language.
• But this does not help when applied to science and it is
not much help in religion either…. Christians could not
longer say anything about God!
St. Thomas Aquinas
• Aquinas recognised that language breaks down if it seeks
to talk about anything beyond the spatio-temporal world.
• Language about God cannot be univocal, but he did not
want to argue that it is equivocal either.
• The alternative is to claim that religion language is
ANALOGICAL and METAPHORICAL.
•It seeks to reach out beyond the spatio-temporal
world to talk about what language is not designed
to talk about!
Analogy
•There are two main types of analogy:
• 1) ANALOGY OF ATTRIBUTION
• A) The bull is healthy
• B) The bulls urine is healthy
• PARALLELS…..
• A) God is Good
• B) Charlotte is good
•But this leaves us with little idea of what it means to say that God is good.
• 2) ANALOGY OF PROPORTION
• Something is good if it fulfils its nature. It is good in proportion to what it is
intended to be.
• A dog is good; a whale is good; an ostrich is good – if they fulfil their natures
• A Snark is good
• God is good (THIS MEANS THAT GOD IS FULLY WHAT IT IS TO BE GOD)
• God may be good but we do not know what this means!
 But what about evil???
• ‘God is Good’
• ‘Charlotte is good’
• BUT WHAT ABOUT
• ‘God is evil’
• ‘Peter is evil’
• THE LOGIC OF THESE IS THE SAME!
• Aquinas has to block this move and he does so by defining evil in a
particular way which stems from Aristotle and St. Augustine. EVIL IS A
PRIVATION OF GOODNESS.
• Evil CANNOT, therefore, be applied to God.
An alternative approach
• There is an alternative approach to language which has been
influential for the last 20+ years.
• This stems from Ludwig Wittgenstein (although almost certainly
from a misplaced use of Wittgenstein).
• To understand this it is important to understand something of
EPISTEMOLOGY – this is the study of how we know things.
• Traditionally, knowledge has been held to have foundations –
something must provide a bedrock, a strong foundation for claims
to knowledge.
Foundations for knowledge
• For more than 2000 years, almost everyone agreed there
must be foundations for knowledge.
• There has to be a bedrock of certain statements which
underpin all our claims to know anything.
• Philosophers differed as to what these foundations were,
but they agreed they existed.
• Some, such as John Locke, thought that the foundations rested
on sense experience
• Others, such as Rene Descartes, though that the foundations
rested on ideas in the mind…
SO WHERE DOES THE DEBATE GO FROM HERE???
•Wittgenstein rejects the whole debate by
claiming that FOUNDATIONS for
knowledgeable do not operate in anything
like the way that has classically been
assumed.
•He turned the whole debate on its head….
IN DEFENCE OF COMMON SENSE
• The philosopher G.E. Moore in 1925 wrote a paper with the above
title. (It was one of the most important papers of the C20th!). He was
trying to argue for the obvious truth of certain foundational
statements in the face of sceptics.
• Moore maintained that it simply did not make sense to doubt
statements like:
• “This is a hand”
• “There is a human body that is my human body”
• “That is a window”
• “I have never been to the moon”
• Moore maintained that it did not make sense to doubt these banal
statements and, therefore, they were therefore true.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
1948, Wittgenstein’s ‘On Certainty’ dealt with Moore’s
• In
article.
• Incidentally he was taken on as a staff member at Cambridge
without having done an undergraduate degree!
• He said that Moore was right to say these banal
statements could not be doubted but wrong to say they
were true.
• We are educated into a FORM OF LIFE – we learn
language at our parents knee...
LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN

• In ‘On Certainty’, Wittgenstein examined the

peculiar logical status of the statements put
forward by G. E. Moore.
• Wittgenstein agreed with Moore that these
statements could not be doubted – but he did not think
they could therefore be regarded as true.
• Understanding Wittgenstein’s argument is vital for
understanding much modern philosophy – and why
epistemology may no longer be a subject worthy of study.
Education into a form of life
• Wittgenstein argued that we are all educated into a ‘form
of life’. Defining a form of life is not straightforward – but
it represents our whole cultural world including that of
our parents, schools, religion, race, place and the
prevailing assumptions of this form of life.
• As very young children we are educated into this form of
life by our parents. We learn to use language – we learn
the meaning of words. We learn what ‘Daddy’, ‘chair’ and
‘table’ mean – not by having anything proved to us but by
being shown the role that these words play in our form of
life.
Indubitable foundations
• Scepticism and doubt, for Wittgenstein, is something that comes later
in life. As we grow, we may become philosophers and seek
justification for our beliefs and practices.
• However there comes a point when this search for justification comes
to an end. As Wittgenstein puts it “When I have reached bedrock, my
spade is turned and then we simply say ‘This is what we do’.”
• G.E. Moore’s statements represent bedrock – the basic statements
that ground any form of life. They represent the point where
justification stops.
• In order to have disagreements, there must first be agreement about
the basic statements within any form of life.
Indubitable… but not true..
• In order to disagree, we must agree about tables and chairs and
hands and the existence of human bodies. These banal, basic
statements ground our form of life and doubt about them is
impossible.
• HOWEVER THIS DOES NOT MEAN THAT THESE STATEMENTS ARE
TRUE……..
• This is where Wittgenstein parted company with Moore.
• Wittgenstein agrees that these banal statements
• A) cannot be doubted, and
• B) they represented the point where justification comes to an end
• BUT THIS DOES NOT MAKE THEM TRUE.
“MEANING DEPENDS ON USE”
• Wittgenstein argued that the meaning of language
depends on the way it is used. There are no fixed
meanings.
• Language is dynamic and meanings change over time.
• In order to understand language it is necessary to
recognise the language is embedded in action.
• “JOHN IS GAY”
• “THERE ARE NUTS ON MY TREE”: “A NUT ON MY CYCLE”
• “MINECRAFT IS COOL/ WICKED/UNREAL”
ANTI-REALISTS
• Anti-realists are philosophers who often claim to owe a debt to
Wittgenstein and see truth as being internal to the form of life we
inhabit.
• Truth and meaning then becomes what is accepted with a
given form of life.
• Truth and meaning is based on coherence - on how
statements fit it with other statements within the jigsaw of
language.
• However this was not Wittgenstein’s view – he held that we
simply have to accept the banal statements on which our
language rests and can then, within the form of life we inhabit,
enquire about meaning.
Three major positions
• NAÏVE REALISM
• Statements about God can be understood literally to refer to the Being
or Spirit called God.
• CRITICAL REALISM
• Statements about God can be understood metaphorically to refer to
the Being or Spirit called God (Janet Martin Soskice).
• ANTI-REALISM
• Statements about God are true within the form of life of the believing
community and cohere with other such statements. There is no
independent reference.
• NOTE that it is not the content of the statement but its truth value and
meaning that is affected.