What Characterizes Religious Language?

Abstract

THIS paper was motivated by the desire of many members of this society at last year's meeting to define Some of us, whose primary interest is philosophy, tried to suggest that it is impossible to come up with a satisfactory definition of religion which is not too narrow or too broad. Contemporary linguistic philosophers, especially those in England, have abandoned the craving for definition of such terms as religion, for what appears to be a more promising task, namely, an attempt to characterize the nature of religious language, how it is used, how it functions, and what kind of meaning it may be said to have. My suggestion in this paper is that by examining religious language we may gain some insight into the manifold complex of human experiences which we call religion. This very concern by philosophers with the nature of religious language represents a change in philosophical orientation, for until quite recently logical positivism seemed to dominate the philosophical scene. You may recall that according to logical positivism all statements which may be said to have cognitive meaning are either analytic or are reducible to empirical facts. Religious utterances were said to possess only emotive meaning-that is, they were not really held to be statements, but rather were considered to be expressing the emotions of the speaker, and to be attempting to arouse similar emotional responses in the hearers of the utterances. Ludwig Wittgenstein in Philosophical Investigations did much to awaken philosophers to the nature of this claim of the logical positivists. Wittgenstein suggested that the logical positivists had constructed an artificial criterion of meaning; they had drawn a boundary line clearly marking off cognitive from emotive meaning when, in fact, such a boundary line was not found in the ordinary use of language. To put this same point more simply, the logical positivists began with a theory of meaning which excluded ethical, metaphysical, and religious statements by definitional requirements from those statements which could be said to have cognitive meaning. Then to explain why it seemed to many that statements of ethics, metaphysics, and religion did have a meaning, they devised a category of emotive meaning into which these sentences could be neatly placed. Hence, religious utterances were cognitively meaningless and nonsensical, according to this criterion of the logical positivists. However, following Wittgenstein's suggestions, I shall try to indicate that this system of classification is too simple, too neat, and too artificial to help us in our attempts to understand the nature of religious language. Let us follow the practice of contemporary linguistic philosophers and look at the use of words, sentences, and paragraphs in the contexts in which they occur as a better procedure for discovering their meaning. When one uses this approach to religious language it does not seem surprising to discover that religious language is not meaningful in a straight-forwardly scientific or logical sense, for I doubt if religious people ever claim that it is meaningful in these senses.