Pre-theoretical Intuitions Research Articles

TRUTH AND MEANING IN GEORGE LINDBECK'S THE NATURE OF DOCTRINE

In this essay I analyse and criticize George Lindbeck's treatment of truth and meaning in his book The Nature of Doctrine. After an explication of his general project in this work, I turn specifically to his discussion of truth and of its interaction with his understanding of meaning. Although he is primarily concerned with these issues as they relate to religious doctrines and language, he insists that the distinctions he makes are not religiously derived. Rather, he borrows and adapts widely from philosophy, anthropology and social theory, bringing the insights adopted to bear on the issues of religion generally, and the development and change of religious doctrines in particular.I argue that his treatment of truth and meaning is very problematic on several counts: on truth, his theory fails as an adequate theoretical description of our pretheoretic intuition of truth, and it is finally parasitic on this intuition. On meaning, his reduction of meaning (and sometimes truth) to use or usefulness leads him to an incorrect categorization of doctrines as (essentially) performative utterances and second-order, non-assertive discourse, rather than as propositional attitude statements. I contend that they most properly fit in the latter category. Finally, I suggest the inadequacy of his treatment of truth and meaning redounds to the failure of his theory of religion and doctrine as a whole.

Was Meinong Only Pretending?

I am grateful to audiences at the Australian National University and the University of Queensland for useful comments on an earlier version of this paper, in particular J. J. C. Smart, D. Braddon-Mitchell, the late D. Mannison and T. Nuyen. I owe special thanks to Richard Sylvan for helpful criticism of both my own project and 'pretence' theories in general, and to Ed Zalta and an anonymous referee for numerous useful and incisive comments leading to substantial improvements in the main argument of the paper. 2 Meinong's most famous declaration remains Meinong (1904), although it is one of the contentions of the present paper that neo-Meinongians should also pay more attention than they standardly do to such works as Meinong (1910). The (growing) list of neoMeinongians include Hector-Neri Castafieda, Roderick Chisholm, Terence Parsons, William Rapaport, Ernest Sosa, Richard Sylvan/Routley, and Ed Zalta (see the partial bibliography at the end of the paper). 3 Pre-theoretical intuitions may, of course, differ, even in the case of neo-Meinongians. Zalta (1983) and (1988) is one who stresses the literal falsity of the unadorned 'Hamlet is a prince of Denmark', and argues for the literal truth of a form like 'In the Shakespearean play Hamlet is a prince of Denmark' (that is, the unadorned sentence prefaced by a 'story' or 'in-the-fiction' operator). Zalta thinks that the differing attitudes to these sentences marks an important difference between two opposing Meinongian camps, to be discussed in section 2. (See also note 22 below.)

Individuals in Narrative Worlds: An Ontological Perspective

which serves as a point of departure for most theoretical endeavors in the study of culture-provides us with four major components of this content aspect: plot, setting, ideas, and character. Each of these intuitive notions is, however, ambiguous and polysemic. The first theoretical step, accordingly, involves the explication and exactification of such notions by means of an explicitly defined theoretical vocabulary, which yields a model object or theoretical entity. The next step involves a delineation of the basic features of the model object, to be followed by a series of hypotheses about its relations with other form and content aspects of the narrative text. This theoretical stage is to be followed, in turn, by a historical-typological, that is, descriptive, stage and later on by empirical or reader-oriented research. The theoretical activity should strive to satisfy certain requirements of methodological adequacy, the most important of which are the following: (a) Sound logico-philosophical background beyond linguistics, as we are dealing here with what is being represented (sense and reference) and not with verbal means of representation. (b) Non-reductionist orientation: the goal of theorizing here is to account for or explicate pretheoretical intuitions, not to excise or exorcise them.