Kantian Naturalist and I have been hopscotching from thread to thread, discussing the nature of religious language. The main point of contention is the assertoric/disclosive distinction: When is religious language assertoric — that is, when does it make claims about reality — and when is it merely disclosive, revealing attitude and affect without making actual claims?
I’ve created this thread as a permanent home for this otherwise nomadic discussion.
It may also be a good place for an ongoing discussion of another form of religious language — scripture. For believers who take scripture to be divinely inspired, the question is when it should be taken literally, when it should be taken figuratively or metaphorically, and whether there are consistent and justifiable criteria for drawing that distinction.
newton,
Ah, yes, you’re an uninspiring ‘skeptic’ fig cookie, not a theologian-scientist, like your namesake, right?
That’s a silly response.
I said nothing about “guess”. There can be (and are) ways to distinguish what is science, that do not depend on there being a distinctive “scientific method”. They might be imperfect at the margins, but life is full of making imperfect distinctions.
And you, my dear, have not demonstrated the slightest bit of comprehension of either existential phenomenology nor embodied-embedded cognitive science. Consequently, you’re not really in any position to determine whether or not I or anyone else has demonstrated competence or clarity.
By all means, prove me wrong. I’m always eager to discuss Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Levinas, Hubert Dreyfus, and others in the existential phenomenological tradition. In particular I think that Samuel Todes, Drew Leder, Tom Sparrow, and Lisa Guenther have made extremely important contributions. Which of them would you like to discuss?
In embodied-embedded cognitive science I’ve read Evan Thompson, Michael Wheeler, Alva Noe, Anthony Chemero, and I’m about to start Andy Clark’s latest. Would you prefer to talk about the debate been cognitivism and enactivism? Have you thought much about whether enactivism ought to be committed to anti-representationalism?
Of course, at this point I expect nothing less than complete silence from Gregory on this topic. When I pointed out that he’d misinterpreted a quote from Nietzsche by taking it out of context, Gregory has nothing to say. He lacks the humility and integrity to admit that he’s made a mistake or that his bluff has been called.
And speaking of calling bluffs . . .
There are 5,220,579 registered Native Americans, of whom 2,932,248 belong to one race and 2,288,331 are bi- (or more) racial. There are between 5.7 and 6.7 million Jews in the United States.
One would think that a supposed “sociologist” would actually take the time to look at actual census data before making up bullshit.
It’s also quite unclear whether Native American spirituality is of the sort of “vertical transcendence” that, according to Gregory, is the only alternative to nihilism and disenchantment. Insofar as Native American spirituality is “animistic” , it is at least arguable that it emphatically rejects “vertical transcendence” — for explication of this perspective, see for example, God is Red or The Spell of the Sensuous). Here too I look forward to more silence from Gregory when it is pointed out that he has made another blunder.
Oh, aren’t you a sweetheart for trying to show Gregory how to write insults without frothing and drooling on one’s keyboard. You make such a good example!
Gregory, pay attention. Erik is showing you how it’s done. Say thank you, Gregory, for his generous contribution.
FFS. The tower of Babel was not a real thing. It’s fiction. It didn’t happen in the world of real humans.
You can’t use that fictional event to challenge the “continuity of language” in actual history.
Thanks for the reminder about that one, KN.
I’m going to start it in a week or two, so I’d be interested in any thoughts you have on what he says.
(I suspect that your are looking in the wrong places for silence, although perhaps you meant that you expect only silence on particular topics.)
Paging Erik, paging Erik:
You’re urgently needed to give Gregory some more examples of the power to insult without flying spit.
Maybe you can give him private lessons.
Please help him, if you can!
BruceS,
You’re welcome. We can even start a new discussion topic on it if you’d like.
New cared for the cookie myself, prefer the Oreo, Is that pathological or just Oreoism?
Probably too little interest to justify that. But maybe we can sneak into Neil’s thread on Realism. Does not seem to be much traffic there now, so some somewhat OT posts might get by the moderator.
However, you read much, much faster than I do; I don’t expect to have much to say for some time.
Do you know of anyone working on the existing phenomenology area mutual co-adjustment and at the same time taking into account current psychological and neurosciences research in detail?
I think Clarke is doing that for the E&E program, and I’m looking forward to the references in his book for others who are doing so for E&E..
For phenomenology, I did check the names you mentioned in another note (Sparrow, Leder, Guenther) but that does not seem to be their interest.
I think Thompson’s Mind in Life might be an example of what I am thinking of, although when I sampled it it seemed more phenomenology than science.
Wheeler does that in his Reconstructing the Cognitive World (2005), though he only uses Heidegger’s phenomenology to co-adjust with cognitive science. But he uses science more carefully than Thompson does. I think you’d like it. There’s some enactive cog sci in Sparrow but not much, and I called him out on it, because he himself admits that we need to co-adjust phenomenology and science.
Two other philosophers who try to co-adjust phenomenology and science are Sean Kelly and Shaun Gallagher. You might look into their work and see if it piques your interest.
ok. now you’ve confused me. mixing left to right and right to left like that. shame.
I think it’s probably even a safe bet that the story wasn’t even written by real humans either!
That’s a dumb thing to say. It certainly wasn’t written by god itself, so unless it was written by aliens and left lying around for us, the book of Genesis which includes the Babel fairytale was certainly written by humans.
Contains about as much real-world truth as Harry Potter, but hey, those are both definitely interesting examples of the power of human imagination.
Instead of “imperfect at the margins,” the more correct description is “non-existent” until you identify the ways to distinguish science. You say there are ways. So, what are the ways?
Good question, but in this discussion we didn’t manage to appreciate even folklore properly.
From one of your links:
A bunch of fundamental questions whether the theory is a theory at all. No answers provided by the theory. Like a materialist version of ID.
You are exactly like the (few) pragmatists I’ve encountered before: Problems – good. Solutions – bad.
Thanks.
“You are exactly like the (few) pragmatists I’ve encountered before: Problems – good. Solutions – bad.”
ROTFL! 😉
You understand what a question mark (?) means, right? There are many more First Nations people in Canada than Jews, so I guess that is another significant difference between Canada and the USA. Similarly, USA has had only 1 Catholic president (who they assassinated), while Canada has had 9 Catholic prime ministers, in a significantly shorter period. (Religious) Atheists in both countries, however, are largely unelectable because most people don’t trust them. That’s ‘religious language’ talk, after all.
As it turns out, I’ll be meeting one of Clark’s strongest critics next week at a conference on ‘extended mind.’ Clark is not much more vertical than you, KN, if at all. Neither of you can even get close to ‘dunking’. That was quite a huff & puff post, KN, as if the myopic and marginal themes you currently choose to work on with your hyper-isms are worthy of celebration.
Re: Nietzsche, KN seems like one of those philosophists nowadays in ‘the West’ who likes to quote Nietzsche as if that makes them ‘continental’ enough to seem intelligent. People are fronted with a ‘wow factor!’ that KN likes, aside from the devilish playfulness in much of Nietzsche’s work. I already responded to KN here: http://theskepticalzone.com/wp/the-varieties-of-religious-language/comment-page-18/#comment-86203
Hello, KN. Are you not listening? You’re an atheist (who sometimes calls himself a ‘pantheist’ along with many other -isms). Though you’ve ‘read’ much about Judaism, and even some about Christianity and apparently Islam too, none of it actually ‘resides’ in you. That’s what differentiates us “at the most fundamental level of explication.”
Nietzsche’s challenge to ‘western philosophy’ pales in comparison with Solovyev’s (and later Berdyaev’s). These were not ‘philologists’, but rather actual philosophers. It is no surprise at all that KN faults religious belief with ‘nihilism and disenchantment’ as the atheist philosophist that he is.
The truth is, I know very little of Erik’s religious belief. But it is obvious to me that he is not an atheist and also that his theism is involved in his ‘explication’ (a word you so enjoy philosophistrying at people). You will likely never ‘get’ this, KN, as long as ‘secular Judaism’ (which is a contradiction in terms) is your guiding worldview. It’s not something ‘intellect’ alone can convince you. But as I said some time ago, the ‘skeptics’ here at TA/SZ seem to like your philosophistic tricks, posturing and diversions, so perhaps that’s why you write here so much, puffing your ‘brain’ out (cf. bloating) for them.
That seems to be a problem for interpreting “Bible ” as folklore since folklore can be considered both as true and false ( there was a flood but there wasn’t just 8 survivors) and the divine does not do false. Isn’t that the literalist argument?
The use of empirical evidence. This includes the invention of new ways of getting empirical evidence.
When you consider folklore true or false, you are doing it wrong. You don’t consider a poem true or false, do you? This is one point where scripture differs from folklore.
And, I think, is why you prefer to talk about folklore and regularly skip away from questions about scripture.
What is the nature of truth do you think for scripture and how does it differ from folklore?
Revolution and Liberation: A Call for Secular and Religious Argumentative Engagement
A “radical critic of religion” investigates why three attempts at secular societies have led to strong religious fundamentalism.
Walzer outlines two reasons for secular-religious engagement — the first is pragmatic, and the second is based on the principle of pluralism. The religious will always be with us, Walzer maintains; secularists will not extinguish religious energies, now or in the future — attempts to do so will only lead to the “return of the negated” (56, 58). A more important reason Walzer offers for a secular-religious engagement is to fulfill his vision of pluralism; secularists need to appreciate the capacity of the religious to offer reason-based, humane, inclusive, and just action in the secular world.
BruceS,
What is the *character* of truth, BruceS? KN may be ideologically sold (Sell-ars-out) down the path of ‘naturalism’ from his childhood Judaism. Does that mean you are too, from whatever childhood ‘faith’ you were taught, in your current philosophical aspirations? Or are you open to something more personal, more human?
For your question, might want to check out Mircea Eliade. Just repeating Pilate’s “What is truth?” makes a rather ambitious question. 😉
That book looks pretty bad to me. Nothing good can come of trying to put as may occurrences of various genetic fallacies in one book as you can possibly squeeze in.
There are psychological facts of the world, sure, and people don’t change their minds when others yell at them. OK. But if he’s telling the Dawkins/Harris gang to try not to be such assholes, that it’s not really doing secularism any favors, fine. But that’s a two page open letter at most.
The point is, propositions are not made true by being comforting.
BruceS,
That looks really interesting, BruceS! I’ve admired Walzer’s work for a long time but haven’t followed his recent work on what might be called “post-secularism” (I think Habermas uses this term, and based on the review, Walzer’s position is very similar). Thanks for sharing!
I always suspected something fishy was going on when my mother told me she loved me.
Good question. For the bible, I would lean to some kind of truth pluralism for truth, based on how one was approaching the text. If you don’t want to read the SEP link, I will point out the truth pluralism does not mean relativism.
Even with pluralism, I doubt that a “CNN-reporting” type of truth or the type of truth appropriate to archaeology is appropriate for much of the text, if we are reading it as the author intended or was inspired to intend.
I’m not sure how you read the review, but I took the book to be about politics in secular societies and how some such societies have failed politically in the sense that they led to internal movements of radical religious fundamentalists. The author puts forward ideas for dialog to prevent that kind of “failure” (as judged at least from the author’s point of view which makes sense to me).
Dawkins and his crowd may or may not be right on atheism, but mostly they don’t do politics well at all.
One factor to consider here is that the reviewer is a professor of rhetoric. He might be more sensitive to how people express themselves than in the content of what they say. So I’d hesitate to attribute these errors to Walzer himself, who is a solid and well-deserved reputation as a political thinker.
(Much like Arendt, who has been a strong influence on him Walzer is more of a perceptive and philosophically informed critics of contemporary political issues than a ‘theorist’ who has a coherent, explicit, and systematic theory from which he works. Hence I’m more inclined to call him a “political thinker”, a term that Arendt applied to herself, than a “political theorist”. But this might be a distinction without a difference.)
Based on the review, and what little I know of Walzer, I would suggest that he is simply does not think that inquiring into which propositions are true is a useful and productive way of resolving the tension between the secular and the religious.
(I would also add that his intellectual formation did not involve any contact with analytic philosophy — he has a BA in history from Brandeis and a PhD in government from Harvard. Hence the whole “analytic attitude”, in which we think about “propositions” as having “truth-values” as determined according to some “theory of truth”, isn’t at all how he thinks.)
Instead Walzer seems more interested in what is likely to work, and I take it that part of his strategy is to show that overly aggressive secularism as social policy has tended to undermine itself. Working through the details (for those interested) requires more than a two-page open letter, I would think. (Whether it merits publishing an essay as a book is another question.)
(Sorry for all the parentheses.)
Actually I consider some folklore as being both true and false, using facts are subject to dramatic license to evoke common emotional truths. The problem is separating which facts are intended to be true and which are just to aid the narrative. Can you trust a God who has to polish the narrative to make His point?
And how do we determine how one was divinely inspired to intend?
It was a trick question. He was asking about the essence of truth. What do sentences have to do with it?
They are supposed to convey it?
BruceS,
I think that something like truth pluralism is correct, and I’m not so sure it would be a problem even if truth pluralism did meant, or entailed, relativism.
Unfortunately, the SEP article is written in “the analytic idiom” — graceless prose, neologisms at every turn, and unreflective intellectualism on full display — I wasn’t able to handle it beyond the first few sentences. But I’m more than happy to develop my version of truth pluralism grounded in the pragmatist tradition.
Getting back to the thread’s original purpose regarding your exchanges with Keith, perhaps some of the bible should not be considered true/false at all..
Erik was alluding to this in mentioning poetry as well, I think.
But perhaps we can speak of an extended notion truth (or falseness) to mean resonating with or expressing wisely human nature or needs, or to mean expressing moral truths even in the absence of moral facts.
On the SEP link: I had just finished Wrenn’s introduction to truth, so I was really thinking of how he describes it it. I had only skimmed the SEP article.
Wrenn does not give much credence to either James’s or Peirce’s theory of truth in that book, but he does not deal with modern treatments of truth in pragmatism. If you had a pointer beyond the books on pragmatism you’ve already mentioned which do a better job of this, please do pass them along. Or if you had the time for a posting your thoughts, I’d find that interesting.
Of course I understood that Erik meant that poetry is not usually meant to be read as true or false in the same way we read a newspaper story. Is that what you mean by a trick question?
But perhaps we can take something true away from reading the bible in different ways, and I was wondering if Erik cared to comment on that.
A simple example: if you believe there are moral facts, then the bible includes true or false sentences about them. But that is a very obvious example. I’m sure there are more interesting ones.
Yes, that is a good question. One Erik did not attempt when you asked him, unfortunately.
I personally am an atheist, so I don’t think there are any divinely inspired texts.
But many intelligent people believe otherwise and I find them worth trying to understand.
For example, James Kugel has written a fascinating (but long) book on what some modern scholars say about the bible as folklore and archaeology, (and not as divinely inspired text). Yet he remains an observant orthodox Jew, describing some of his reasoning here and here.
It may be worth repeating, since only a half answer was given by BruceS:
Trust me, as a Canadian trained in SSH, I’m aware of pluralism vs. relativism (the SEP article you cite doesn’t do a good job of distinguishing them, mind you). 😉 Of course you *could* choose to talk about CBC-reporting instead of that other media channel you cited. But that’s your regional-global choice of focus as a ‘skeptic’ Canadian. The skepticism you display here and figures you cite seem rather USAmerican status quo.
Does that mean you had none and were taught no ‘faith’, ‘religion’ or ‘theology’ in your childhood?
I agree, that is why I am curious. It does seem like there is a lot of having your cake and eating too.
You didn’t reply to my question about which god you happen to believe in, Gregory.
I’m not terribly happy with an extended notion of truth — I’d be happier with keeping truth more or less confined to declarative statements about contingent matters of fact and to the results of deductive systems, but then say that (if you will) “one cannot live by truth alone”.
For there is a deeply human need for forms of expression that do resonate with or wisely express the various needs of human beings. Some of these forms of expression can be found in works of literature, art, music, poetry, etc., both classical and contemporary, that I am perfectly happy to call “spiritual”. There is the Bible, and there is also the Tao De Ching, the Bhagavad-Gita, the Sutras of Buddhist teaching, the wisdom of various Native American tribes, the moral teachings of Talmud, and indefinitely many more.
On pragmatism, I have very recently taken a strong interest in Joseph Margolis’ reconstruction of what pragmatism was, is, and can be. Earlier today I finished Pragmatism’s Advantage — it’s advantage relative to both analytic and Continental philosophy — and just started the next volume, Pragmatism Ascendent.
(Note: the one major flaw of his conception of history is that he privileges certain strands of analytic philosophy and Continental philosophy over other strands. When he talks about “analytic philosophy” he means logical positivism and its vicissitudes in Quine, Davidson, and Putnam rather than the revival of (pre-Kantian) metaphysics in the wake of Kripke, David Lewis, and David Armstrong. Likewise when he talks about “Continental philosophy” he means only transcendental and existential phenomenology; though he has some sharp and penetrating criticisms of Habermas and Apel, he does not carefully engage with the Frankfurt School or with “the French Nietzscheans”.)
Margolis’s central argument is that both analytic reductionistic scientism (as he defines it) and the ‘extra-naturalism’ or ‘transcendentalism’ of Husserlian and Heideggerian phenomenology are dead-ends. The alternative to both, and the best idea of pragmatism, is a ‘naturalism without scientism’. He locates the best insights of pragmatism in how pragmatists have taken up Hegel’s critique of Kant but shorn of Hegel’s own peculiar metaphysics and supplemented with Darwinism.
I agree with him on all these points and demur only at his characterization of Sellars. Though I agree with Margolis that the Sellarsian project utterly fails, I still think that Sellars got closer to the truth than Margolis acknowledges, and there’s more to be learned from Sellars’s failure than Margolis admits.
I haven’t read this, but I’ve had recommended to me Misak’s Truth, Politics, Morality: Pragmatism and Deliberation. She defends a Peircean notion of truth as central to democratic deliberation. I think that something like this could well be right, though Margolis nicely points out that Peircean truth is a ‘rational hope’ — a ‘regulative ideal’ — rather than a constitutive principle of any possible discourse (contra Habermas and Putnam).
Got to get him in one of your four pigeon holes, right Gregory? Otherwise matters will just be too confusing for you!
Thanks for the recommendations in this note and others. I’ll add to my list.
I agree that my point on truth was not well thought out and I prefer they way you put it.
I enjoyed your post although I don’t really have the background to fully understand it.
Actually, I just used CNN as I thought it would be most familiar to readers here. I personally never watch news on TV, only visit CNN site rarely, and rely more on Globe and Mail, BBC, Guardian, Economist, New Yorker, and Atlantic. Plus MacLean’s for election news and the Star for local elections.
I did not spend my childhood in Toronto, however.
The answer is that there are criteria. Methodical people, such as myself, go by criteria.
Then there are people, such as Neil Rickert, who say with a straight face (as much as is possible to determine from written text) that there’s no such thing as scientific method, yet there sure as hell is science which can be recognised by the use of empirical evidence. Well, somehow modern science rejects some empirical evidence, e.g. that heavy bodies fall faster than light bodies. Somehow this experimentally verifiable evidence does not yield a good scientific claim. For some reason artificial vacuum must be created, and what happens in vacuum is taken as the correct scientific claim, instead of what really happens in everyday life. Go figure.
Now, what to do with such people? One way would be to patiently step by step go through the lengthy proof that there’s something more to science than mere empirical evidence, and that this “something more” is actually crucial to our matter at hand. Another way would be to let people believe what they want to believe, because nobody appreciates this philosophical babysitting anyway – not even the babysitters. Reasonably, we can have a conversation only within the confines of your beliefs. If your beliefs are too silly, then we can only talk about silly things.
Since KN took a solid stance that philology – which is the science that provides the method of determining the distinction between folklore and scripture, as it does between other genres – is not science and that sensus divinitatis or spiritual intuition – by which one can tell a divinely inspired text apart from non-inspired text (by interpreting the spiritual sense of the text, beyond the literal sense) – is not a thing, then it makes no sense to continue.
I am not the kind of guy who says “Let’s suppose that this-and-that-and-such (none of which you believe or understand) is true, then…” In my view, it only makes sense to continue when we have established this-and-that-and-such, when you understand what we are talking about and where we are going. But in this case it makes no sense to continue, because you don’t believe that philology is science, you don’t believe that there are criteria by which genres can be told apart, and you don’t believe that there is such a thing as spiritual sense of the text. And you recognise one and only one way of text interpretation.
You could just as well believe there’s no future. After all, there’s no empirical evidence for it. In order to properly discuss scripture, we should be far beyond silly things like this, but no hope.