Speech acts and God talk

Abstract

Contemporary philosophers of religion have spent enormous amounts of energy and ink responding to the challenge brought against the meaningfulness of religious language by the use of the verification criterion of meaning first, by the members of the famed Vienna Circle and later by the other philosophers within what is now called 'the analytic tradition'. Responses have ranged from defenses of analogical language to attempts to construct unique logics of religious language. Amidst this flurry of activity, another challenge to the traditional analysis of the meaningfulness of religious language from within the analytic tradition has until quite recently been all but ignored. This second challenge arises from the "Oxford school of ordinary language philosophy" and more specifically from John Austin's theory of speech acts. In this paper I intend to explore the implications for religious language of Austin's theory of speech acts. First, however, I wish to suggest briefly what I take to be the crucial features of speech-act analysis and examine what it is about speech-act analysis which distinguishes it from other kinds of linguistic analysis, indeed, even from other forms of ordinary language philosophy.1 Essentialism was an essential feature of the positivism which arose from the Vienna Circle, as well as logical atomism. The claim that there is a unique and determinate meaning to every single proposition which describes some single determinate fact "in reality" is a philosophic notion that became so well entrenched within analytic philosophy that it has proven extremely difficult to displace. Even the early ordinary language philosophers themselves continued to speak of "the ordinary meaning" of a word, phrase or sentence. Such suggestions left the object of philosophical scrutiny on a notoriously