4 the Frames of Truth and Reference

4 The Frames of Truth and Reference Religions were full of exclamations – hallelujah, evoe, hosanna, om, Jesus, Allah… – exclamations that overflow any sense the words bearing them might have had. Jean-Luc Nancy 4.1 How Important Is Reference? (Soskice and Wolterstorff) The question of truth takes many forms, and one of them concerns reference. I shall take up the philosophical attempt to dislocate truth from reference a little later on in this section, but first I shall deal with an issue that has taken up a prominent place in the Anglo-Saxon tradition of philosophy of religion. In the introduction I spoke about Habermas’s concept of myth as a closed worldview, that is, a way of conceiving the world which consists in reproducing otherworldly and totalizing frames of interpretation that leaves no room for independent learning processes. This may be seen, for instance, in Ronald W. Hepburn’s theological worries “whether or not the circle of myth, metaphor and symbol is a closed one: and if closed then in what way propositions about God manage to refer” (cf. Hesse, 1974, 290, italics mine). What might have been delimited to a discursive determination of myth is thus conceived by Hepburn as a challenge to a theological discourse in general, and is met as such by philosopher of religion Janet Soskice regarding the “cognitive and explanatory use in religious thought of models, analogues, and metaphors” (1985, 118). According to Soskice, Hepburn’s main mistake is to hold “that reference must involve unrevisable or exhaustive description” (op.cit. 141). Aligning herself instead with the critical realism of Mary Hesse, Richard Boyd and Hilary Putnam (at some point) as presenting a midway between positivism and idealism, her argument is that science has taught us in practice that by using models we can actually refer to “possible if necessarily unobservable structures of the world” (op.cit. 124). Against the stance of nominalism, she holds that scientific terms can be revised without losing their referential meaning (a point, however, that serves to emphasize the contextual confines of any descriptive vocabulary rather than the empirical conditions of rec- tification). Armed with this analogy, she drives home her main point, namely that religious metaphors manage to refer just as well as theory-based models. Corresponding to the scientific communities of interest, there are religious communities of interest (Christians for example) which are bound by shared assumptions, interests, and traditions of interpretation, and share a descriptive vocabulary (op.cit. 150). She is fully aware that the discursive constraints of valid references are not the same for the religious and the scientific community, but that doesn’t change the fact that both can be wrong and both are, in part, dealing with unobservables. The case Soskice How Important Is Reference? (Soskice and Wolterstorff) 62 is making is only slightly different from the argument Nicholas Wolterstorff is produc- ing (1995, 273–280), when he finds Virginia (a proclaimed acquaintance of the author himself) entitled to belief that God has spoken to her in her vision, since there is no scientifically informed reason to suggest that she is prone to suffer from delusion. The issue that connects the critical realism of Soskice’s philosophy of religion and the so- called Reformed Epistemology of Nicholas Wolterstorff is the commitment to reference, indebted to a long-standing tradition of empiricism (in an Anglo-Saxon context) with David Hume and John Locke as the founding fathers. The great divide that followed in the wake of these philosophical spokesmen of the time was that between positivism, on the one hand, and various kinds of realism, on the other, the main difference being that reality was either regarded as that which can be observed directly or that which fundamentally transgresses our senses and is thus knowledgeable only by indirect or insufficient means. It goes without saying that Soskice and Wolterstorff share the latter conviction. But where does this lead us in regard of religion? Should we take our point of departure in religious language (including metaphors and speech acts which are the topics dealt with by Soskice and Wolterstorff) as testifying to an engagement with the world by means of reference? (That it is a special kind of reference does not change the fact that is regarded as a reference). In order for this to make sense, we would be dealing with religious language as a set of meanings dependent on propositions which are either true or false according to external conditions (cf. Bedeutung in Frege’s sense).84 Obviously, Soskice and Wolterstorff find this conceivable (and they are not alone). Soskice may want to soften the criterion a bit by speaking about the referential confines of a religious tradition, but either does this not make any difference in principle or she would have to embrace the constructivist view (under the name of idealism) she sets herself up against. Moreover, an exacting focus on reference would imply that we regard myth – or religious language in a broader sense – as anything but a closed system of meanings. Contrary to what Habermas holds (speaking from a Kantian tradition), a mythical discourse would then, in principle, be as open to learning processes as would a scientific one. In fact, I have found nothing in Soskice and Wolterstorff that suggests that they should think otherwise. Yet, I find it wrong-headed. I grant that the theories, models, and vocabularies employed in science do not have to refer directly to empirical data, and even when they do, they are not facts, but statements. Nonetheless, they are part of learning processes that depend on the objective accessibility of an exterior world. The criteria of validity in science, even in regard of the most provisional working models, differ profoundly from a (mythical/religious) system of meaning in which the trans-empirical reference is not a necessary inconvenience (as, for instance, in Atomic Theory or Theoretical Astrophysics), but rather an underlying (and therefore unchallenged) principle. Kevin Schilbrack has recently made a similar point about religion (2014, 134), but seems to 84 I shall specifically with issue below, chapter 5.6 63 The Frames of Truth and Reference ignore the fact that science is also occupied with ‘realities’ which are not ‘available to our senses’ (cf. ibid.). Thus, he doesn’t take the critical procedure of dealing with predictable effects of non-observables into account, and the latter seems, in my view, to be one of the most prominent aspects in which science differ from religion. Contrary to a religious interpretation of the world, the constitutive principle of science is to construct a picture of the world which is, as far as possible, in accordance with empirical criteria of justification. Hence, it may well be our long-standing habit- uation to an overall scientific worldview that prompts us to put so much weight on the issues of reference and evidence in the first place.85 This is what Schilbrack rightly sees a long-standing commitment to focus on “a gap between the human subject and the world” (2014, 155). Instead, he argues for regarding the ways in which human beings make sense of the world as instances of ‘unmediated experience’.86 This hits a promising note, though the perspective is not entirely worked out and may seem almost gratuitous when, at the same time, Schilbrack refers to the false character of religious accounts inasmuch as “they get things wrong” (op.cit. 171). From a scientific point of view he is right, of course, but can science allow itself to dispense with a gap between the explanans of the observer and the explanandum of the observed? I think not. Wittgenstein, to whom Schilbrack also refers, has brought out the point, rather forcefully, that the general notions of reference and evidence are deeply imbued with aspects of a scientific discourse (philosophically harking back to Hume and Kant, we might add) and that we are looking in the wrong direction if we try to determine the meaning of the word ‘God’ on account of its reference. But this has to do with under- standing, not with making judgments according to empirical truth.87 In order to understand the word ‘God’ we will have to apprehend how it is used and what place it takes up in the lives of those who use it (Wittgenstein, LC, 59 f; 63). Another of Wittgenstein’s examples is the belief in a Last Judgment (op.cit. 53). If a person, who holds this belief, is asked by another person, who doesn’t hold it, to 85 Take, for instance, Bruce Lincoln’s introductory remarks to his ‘Critical Explorations in the History of Religion’ where he declares to have “encountered little direct evidence” that gods and demons fill the cosmos as ‘the religious’ believe, 2012, xi; cf. my comment on his approach, Albinus, 2013a. Contrary to this familiar focus, Steven Engler and Mark Gardiner opine that religious studies need to pay attention to pragmatic as well as referential uses of language (2010), while holding on to Davidson’s truth-condition for propositional meaning, cf. below (chapter 4.3). 86 By using this specific concept, Schilbrack borrows especially from Jean Luc-Marion, whom he also mentions in passing (op.cit. 156), but otherwise he refers to Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty for a notion of embodied experience, op.cit. 158. 87 To be fair this may be what Schilbrack has in mind when he balances his judgment about the falsity of religious metaphysics with conceding that even if they are wrong religious accounts are still “in touch with reality”, op.cit.

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