Veri/falsi-fication & Wittgenstein: AQA A* grade notes

AQA RS
Philosophy

AO1: Cognitive vs non-cognitive

The issue of whether religious language is cognitive or non-cognitive.
When words come out of someone’s mouth, they express a part of their mind.
If you say “The table is made of wood”, that expresses the part of the mind that contains beliefs.
Such language is ‘cognitive’.
If you are in pain and say “ouch”, that word is not expressing the part of the mind which contains beliefs.
Such language is non-cognitive, to indicate a non-belief.
In this case, it is an expression of pain.
Some philosophers (Mitchell, Hick) argue when a religious person says “God exists”, they are expressing a cognitive belief.
Others (Hare, Wittgenstein) argue it expresses a non-cognitive feeling or attitude.
This is a psychological question about the mindset involved in religious utterances.
I.e., whether religious people intend to refer to reality, or just express some spiritual feeling or attitude.
When a religious person says ‘God exists’, do they believe that God exists, or feel that God exists?
The issue of whether religious language is meaningful or meaningless.
This is separate to the cognitive/non-cognitive debate.
Different philosophers have different theories of meaning.
Some think non-cognitive language can be meaningful, others think only cognitive language can.
E.g., Hare thinks religious language is non-cognitive but meaningfully because it affects people’s minds and behaviour.
However, Ayer thinks only cognitive language can be meaningful, claiming statements must verifiably refer to reality to have meaning.

AO1: Verificationism

Verificationism is the method of the logical positivists.
Positivism comes from Comte’s view that only empirical knowledge is valid, while ‘logical’ reflects the analytic focus on clarifying language through logic.
The verification principle claims that for a statement to be factually significant (synthetic), it must be empirically verifiable. We must know how to verify it as true or false through experience.
Ayer also allows analytic statements, such as those of maths and logic, as meaningful.
If a proposition is neither analytic nor empirically verifiable, it lacks ‘literal’ or cognitive significance.
Early verificationists held a ‘hard’ verification principle, where a statement is only meaningful if it can be conclusively verified through experience.
However, Ayer argues this is too strict, since universal scientific laws cannot be verified with certainty.
He therefore introduces ‘weak’ verification, where a statement is meaningful if experience can show it is probably true or false.
However, weak verification risks allowing too much meaning, as many claims, including religious ones, might appear indirectly supported by experience.
Ayer therefore refines his principle further into direct and indirect verification.
Direct verification involves immediate observation, such as ‘I see a key’.
Indirect verification involves statements connected to experience that can be tested in principle, such as ‘this key is made of iron’.
Ayer distinguishes between what is verifiable in practice and in principle.
A statement is meaningful if we know there is some possible way to verify it, even if we cannot currently do so.
For example, claims about the dark side of the moon were once unverifiable in practice but verifiable in principle.
Religious language, referring to a metaphysical God, fails these tests and is therefore not meaningful.

AO1: Strength & weakness of Verificationism AO2 summary

Strength: Verificationism provides an intuitive standard for meaning that its connection to reality be at least in principle demonstrable.
Weakness: Religious language may still be meaningful if it is verifiable in principle, though such verification cannot be established for the afterlife.
Weakness: The verification principle appears self-defeating, as it is neither analytically true nor empirically verifiable.
Strength: The principle can be defended as a methodological tool rather than a paradoxically self-referential claim about its own meaning.
Strength: Verificationism reflects the straightforward interpretation of religious language as making claims about reality which at least aim at cognitive meaning.
Weakness: Non-cognitive theories suggest religious language does not aim to describe reality, so cannot be criticised as a failed attempt at verification.

AO1: Hick’s eschatological verification

Hick argued that there is a way to verify God and religious language, because when we die, we’ll see God and then we’ll know. One strength of Hick’s approach is that he doesn’t need to actually undermine verificationism itself, only Ayer’s claim that religious language is unverifiable.
Hick illustrates this argument with the parable of the celestial city.
Imagine there are two travellers, one representing a theist, the other an atheist.
They are walking along a road, representing life.
One thinks that a celestial city is at the end of the road, representing an afterlife and God, the other does not.
Neither has reached the end of this road before.
Hick finishes with this sentence:
“Yet, when they turn the last corner, it will be apparent that one of them has been right all the time and the other wrong.” – Hick.
The strength of Hick’s approach is its making use of Ayer’s claim that something must be verifiable in practice or principle.
Ayer gave the example of mountains being on the dark side of the moon as something that was verifiable in principle.
They had not seen the dark side of the moon in his time, but they knew that in principle it was possible to go there and look.
Hick is arguing that religious language is also verifiable in principle because we also know that in principle it is possible to die and ‘see’ God.

AO1: Strength & weakness of eschatological verificationism AO2 summary

Strength: Hick’s theory aligns with Christian beliefs in resurrection and an afterlife where God could be encountered.
Weakness: The theory is limited in scope, as not all religious views include an afterlife capable of providing such verification.
Strength: Hick successfully challenges Ayer by showing that religious claims could be verifiable in principle through post-mortem experience.
Weakness: The afterlife is not verifiable in principle in Ayer’s sense, since there is no known method or evidence that such verification is possible.
Strength: Hick only needs to show that religious language is possibly verifiable to undermine the claim that it is meaningless.
Weakness: Verification may be the wrong framework for religious language altogether, as non-cognitive approaches like Hare or Wittgenstein suggest.

AO2: Hick’s eschatological verification

Hick argued that verificationism does not undermine religious metaphysical statements as Ayer had hoped.
He doesn’t attack verificationism itself, but argues religious language actually is verifiable in principle eschatologically:
When we die, we’ll discover whether there is an afterlife and a God or not.
We can’t do so in practice while alive, but we can in principle after death, which seems to satisfy Ayer’s criteria of verifiability in principle.

Counter

An issue for Hick is that the afterlife is not verifiable in principle.
Ayer knew the dark side of the moon existed and that a rocket could go there to make observations, making it verifiable in principle.
Conversely, we do not know an afterlife is a place which exists where one might find the observer conditions to verify religious language.

Evaluation

Hick is unconvincing because if death is annihilation, there won’t be a moment of realisation of that. Religious language would then be unverifiable.
It’s not sufficient to merely imagine the relevant observation-conditions.
We need to know that they exist and how in principle we could access them.
So, we do not know that there is a way to verify religious language in principle.
Hick overlooks the force of the verification principle in eliminating metaphysical speculation.
For Ayer, allowing imagination to run free of anchoring in empirical observation is where it trespasses into meaninglessness.
So, Hick hasn’t managed to show that Ayer’s principle could be pressed into the service of justifying religious statements.

AO2: Whether the verification principle passes its own test

The verification principle states that to be meaningful a statement must be analytic or empirically verifiable.
However, that means that in order for the principle itself to be meaningful, it must be analytic or empirically verifiable.
Carnap tried to defend the principle as analytic, but this appears to fail as it seems one could deny it without contradiction.
If we take it as an empirical statement about how meaning actually functions, it just seems false. Since, people find all sorts of non-verifiable metaphysical language meaningful.

Counter

Ayer responds by admitting that the verification principle cannot be a factual statement about the meaning of factual statements.
He claims instead that it’s not a statement at all, but a tool; a methodological stipulation, which the logical positivist adopts for methodological purposes.
It enables us to figure out whether a statement has empirical meaning.

Evaluation

However, this defense completely undermines the project Ayer deployed verificationism for.
He was trying to end the debate between rationalism and empiricism, as well as atheists and theists, by rejecting rationalist metaphysical language as meaningless.
After this defence, Ayer can’t say metaphysical or religious language is categorically meaningless.
It’s now only meaningless to the tools of empiricism. His original claim has been diluted.
He wanted to justify his epistemology over others, but in the end falls back on merely assuming it, rather than prove it superior.
Religious philosophers can simply adopt a rationalist epistemology, or just reject Ayer’s extreme formulation of empiricism, and thereby reject its tools.

AO1: Falsificationism

Popper argued that verificationism is not a correct account of empiricism.
Science does not work by looking for evidence that verifies a theory, but by making predictions which are falsifiable.
He illustrates this with Einstein’s prediction about Mercury’s orbit. If observations had contradicted it, Einstein’s theory would have been falsified.
By contrast, Popper criticises Freudian and Marxist theories for interpreting all evidence as confirmation, making them unfalsifiable.
Antony Flew applies falsificationism to religious language.
Flew agrees religious language is cognitive, as it expresses beliefs which attempt to assert something about the world.
However, these beliefs are unfalsifiable and so fail to say anything about reality.
Unlike Ayer, Flew does not claim religious language is meaningless in all senses, but that it fails to make genuine assertions.
Flew argues:
Asserting ‘X’ is equivalent to denying ‘not X’.
So, all assertions could be false (in principle we can imagine discovering that what they deny is true).
If a statement can’t be imagined false, then it doesn’t deny anything, which means it doesn’t assert anything either.
Religious believers can’t imagine what could prove their belief in God false.
So, religious language is a failed attempt to speak about reality (at cognitive meaning).
Flew illustrates this through John Wisdom’s ‘parable of the gardener’.
A believer claims a gardener exists, but as tests fail to detect one, they qualify the claim (invisible, intangible, etc.).
This leads to a ‘death of a thousand qualifications’, where the claim becomes indistinguishable from there being no gardener.
Thus, religious language fails to make a testable difference to reality and cannot meaningfully assert anything about it.

AO1: Strength & weakness of Falsificationism AO2 summary

Strength: Falsificationism coherently identifies that falsifiability is a condition for a statement to be about reality, intuitively explaining why those with blind faith cannot admit they could be wrong.
Weakness: Mitchell points out religious belief is based on evidence (personal experience) and could be falsified by evidence (sufficient evil); ultimately Flew has assumed that falsifability requires that the believer can specify in advance what would falsify their belief.
Weakness: Religious language can still be meaningful without falsification conditions, as understanding a concept (e.g., toys in cupboard) may be sufficient for meaning.
Strength: Falsificationism ensures that statements meaningfully relate to reality by requiring identifiable conditions under which they could be false.
Strength: Falsificationism reflects the view that religious believers intend to make cognitive claims about reality, especially in arguments for God’s existence.
Weakness: Non-cognitive theories such as Hare’s bliks suggest religious language expresses attitudes rather than factual claims, so cannot be criticised as unfalsifiable assertions.

AO1: Mitchell

Mitchell argues religious language is cognitively meaningful and falsifiable.
Some theists have unfalsifiable ‘blind’ faith.
But he argues most theistic belief is based on evidence (personal experience) which can be falsified through being outweighed by counter-evidence (evil).
Encounter with God is a personal matter, which means the amount of evil required to undermine faith will depend on the individual.
Crucially, Flew’s mistake was to think falsification requires that a person must know “in advance” what would falsify their belief.
But ‘falsifiable’ just means that a belief could be overturned by some possible evidence.
Mitchell also disagrees with Hare, who portrays theists as analogous to the paranoid student who just interprets counter-evidence through their worldview.
Mitchell claims believers acknowledge contrary evidence (evil), they just don’t think there’s enough of it to undermine their belief.
So theism can be a rational assessment of the balance of evidence.
Mitchell’s parable:
A resistance soldier in a civil war is approached by someone claiming to be their leader.
They talk, leaving a deep impression, and the soldier becomes convinced the stranger is their leader.
This belief is maintained despite counter-evidence, such as seeing them fighting for the government.
E.g., perhaps they’re a double agent.
Mitchell remarks there must be some evidence where continuing faith would be ‘ridiculous’ and blind, but the amount may not be known in advance.
The parable illustrates how religious belief is based on personal experience.
Evidence against the belief is acknowledged, and there is some amount of evil that would falsify their belief, even if they cannot specify it in advance.

AO2: Mitchell vs Flew

Flew attacks Mitchell’s claim that theistic belief is falsifiable by some unknown amount or type of evil.
He invokes the logical problem of evil, which argues the existence of evil is inconsistent with the God of classical theism.
This would show that any amount of evil falsifies belief in God.
Theists thus fail to acknowledge the falsification of their belief, showing it to be unfalsifiable.

Counter

However, Flew relies on the soundness of the logical problem of evil, which is contested.
Plantinga’s free will defence claims it is not logically possible for God to remove evil without removing the greater good of free will.
Most philosophers atheist philosophers turn instead to the evidential problem instead.
The trouble for Flew then is, this version does not imply that any amount of evil disproves God.

Evaluation

Mitchell successfully shows that religious belief is sensitive to evidence.
It’s based on personal experience, and falsifiable by an amount of evil which is personal to the individual.
Observations of religious psychology validate Mitchell here.
People really do abandon faith due to evil, e.g. if someone’s child dies.
If asked beforehand whether that evil would have undermined their belief, they may not have known.
So, belief can be falsifiable even if it can’t be imagined false ‘in advance’.
Those who retain belief might use theodicy reasoning, e.g, God allows evil for soul-making, or to allow free will.
Mitchell also makes sense of this.
The more evil there is, the more such justifications seem ‘ridiculous’.
E.g., the world wars caused many to lose faith, and if they had been even worse, say if Hitler had won, even more would have lost their faith.
It’s the evidential extent of evil that matters.
This shows how religious belief is dependent on evidence, falsifiable, and thus cognitively meaningful.

AO1: Hare’s non-cognitive ‘Bliks’

Ayer and Flew regard religious language as a failed attempt to describe reality because it’s unverifiable (Ayer) or unfalsifiable (Flew).
Hare says they are wrong in their foundational assumption that religious language actually is an attempt to describe reality at all.
It cannot be a failed attempt, then.
Hare’s view is that religious language is a non-cognitive expression of our ‘Blik’, which involves attitudes, emotions & worldviews.
The way we perceive the world is shaped by our Blik, affecting our thoughts, behaviour and expressions.
Hare thinks this makes the expression of blik non-cognitively meaningful.
He illustrates: a student with an attitude of paranoia about their professors trying to kill them. He meets the professors and sees they are nice, but is paranoid that they are pretending.
Similarly, religious belief occurs despite lack of, or contrary, evidence.
Ayer/Flew would argue that this student, like religious people, have an unverifiable/unfalsifiable belief.
But Hare’s illustration shows how seemingly unempirical beliefs can be rooted in non-cognitive attitudes.
When the student says ‘my professors are trying to kill me’, they are expressing their attitude of paranoia.
Similarly, when religious people say ‘God be with you’ or ‘God exists’, it looks like an unempirical belief. But the foundational cause of the expression are non-cognitive states like feelings/attitudes.
Hare is influenced by Hume’s theory of psychology, that our reason is a slave of our passions.
What seems like cognitive rational expression about God is actually rationalisations of our emotions.

AO1: Strength & weakness of Hare AO2 summary

Strength: Hare’s paranoid student analogy does shows how what seems like cognitive language can really be rooted in a non-cognition like an attitude.
Weakness: Mitchell criticises Hare for overlooking the way personal experience and evil operate as evidence for and against God, which believers rationally weigh and thus express cognitively.
Strength: Hare successfully explains how religious language can still be meaningful through its powerful influence on attitudes, behaviour, and worldview.
Weakness: Hare’s theory fails to reflect that religious believers typically intend to make factual claims about reality, such as the existence of God or historical events.
Strength: By drawing on Humean psychology, Hare grounds non-cognitive theistic expression and explains religious diversity as expressions of differing cultural ‘bliks’.
Weakness: The view that belief is primarily driven by non-cognitive attitudes is controversial, as reason can shape or revise beliefs, suggesting religious language is not purely expressive.

AO2: Whether Hare is too reductionist

Flew criticised Hare, arguing that theists intend to express cognitive beliefs.
They might be expressing some attitudes, but they are also expressing a cognitive belief that God exists.
Flew’s point can be most clearly seen in God argumentation.
Aquinas’ cosmological argument involves premises based on observation which are reasons for believing the conclusion that God exists.
We could doubt the soundness of the argument, but it’s hard to think that it’s just an expression of Aquinas’ personal feelings/attitudes.

Counter

However, Hare’s appeals to Humean psychology
It’s well known that our emotions can control our reason.
Psychology since Freud has accepted the role of the unconscious in determining our mental processing, which bears Hume out.
Human minds are more like lawyers than scientists, and reason is more like a rationalising advocate, providing the justifications we need for our biases and attitudes.

Evaluation

Hume’s psychology certainly has a point about the way emotions control our reason.
However it’s going too far to call reason a ‘slave’ of the passions. Aristotle pointed out that we can clearly sometimes control and change our emotional habits to align them with our reason through the development of virtue.
More recently, psychologist Jonathan Haidt has argued similarly that Hume went too far. Our reason, like the rider of an elephant, is often dragged around by emotions but in the long run and overall can exert influence over them.
So, Hume & Hare are wrong about non-cognitive emotional influence being the root of our beliefs. Reason has at least some influence.
God argumentation is the clearest case of cognitive religious language. There may be a spectrum down from there to cases of completely blind faith.
But cognitivists would accept that. Non-cognitivists like Hare are the ones making the overgeneralised claim about all religious language.

AO2: Swinburne’s critique of Ayer & Flew

Swinburne argues for a less restrictive account of meaning.
If we understand the words in a sentence and their combination, then it is meaningful.
We don’t have to know how to test it through experience.
He illustrated:
We know what toys are and what it would mean for them to come alive when no one was watching.
We cannot test this nor even imagine how to.
Yet, it is meaningful because we understand the concepts and the syntax.
Similarly, we may not know how to verify or falsify God, but if the concept is understood it is meaningful.

Counter:

However, the restrictiveness of meaning (logical positivists) and of assertions (Flew) can be defended:
As Schlick put it, we only know the meaning of a statement if we know the conditions under which it is true or false.
If we don’t know the truth-conditions of a claim, we don’t know how it relates to reality.
This makes our belief disconnected from reality.
So, for a statement to be about reality, there must be a way to verify (Ayer) or falsify (Flew) it.
Otherwise, it is meaningless (Ayer) or fails to assert anything (Flew).

Evaluation:

However, Swinburne’s account is more convincing because science is closer to his approach.
Ayer and Flew are too radical in their empiricism even for many scientists.
Physicists hypothesise about inflation theory, dark matter, string theory, or what’s inside black holes.
These are scientifically meaningful even though we don’t know how to verify or falsify them, and it may be impossible.
Such theories are constructed on the basis of the information about the world.
Similarly, Swinburne’s project is to create a cumulative case for God, including fine-tuning (design), religious experience and miracles.
If we allow that theoretical physics is meaningful, it’s hard to consistently deny meaning to the God hypothesis.
So, religious language can be cognitively meaningful even if it is untestable.

AO1: Wittgenstein’s language games

Wittgenstein argues religious language can be meaningful even if it is not cognitive.
He thought Ayer and Flew misunderstood religious language as a failed attempt to describe reality due to being unverifiable or unfalsifiable.
Wittgenstein initially held a similar view to Ayer, that language ‘pictured’ reality.
He later significantly changed his view with his theory of language games.
Ayer and Flew think statements get their meaning by referring to reality through verification or falsification.
Wittgenstein disagrees, arguing that meaning consists in the way statements are used, so that their meaning is acquired through its participation and function in social contexts.
Essentially, the meaning of a statement is what it ‘does’ in a social context.
Social reality consists of different types of interaction.
Each type is like a ‘game’ because it follows rules.
The way we speak depends on context; for example, we speak differently with friends, family, or in a job interview.
So, words get their meaning from the context in which they are used.
A language game is a rule-governed form of activity.
We usually learn these rules unconsciously.
Religion is its own language game, so religious language is meaningful within that context to those who understand its rules.
It is only if someone is socialised into a language game that they find it meaningful.
Science is a different language game from religion, so religious language may seem meaningless within the scientific context.
Those not socialised into the religious language game may struggle to find it meaningful.
Language-games are like environments we are trained into, which shape what counts as meaningful, but unlike Plato’s cave, they are not illusions to escape from, and there is no higher, more real perspective outside them.

AO1: Strength & weakness of Wittgenstein AO2 summary

Strength: Wittgenstein’s language games explain the independence of religion from science and philosophy by locating religious meaning within a distinct form of life grounded in faith rather than reason.
Weakness: Wittgenstein’s separation between science and religious meaning struggles to explain how natural theology and ordinary religious belief treats religious claims as describing the same reality investigated by science.
Strength: Wittgenstein convincingly explains religious language as meaningful through its role in communal practices such as worship, prayer, and moral formation.
Weakness: Wittgenstein risks reducing religion to social construction, which struggles to account for its apparent reference to a transcendent reality beyond human activity.
Weakness: Wittgenstein’s view struggles to explain how conversion and interfaith dialogue are possible if religious language is only fully meaningful within a specific form of life.
Strength: Wittgenstein’s view could explain interactions between different faiths as involving partial degrees of understanding which develops through engagement and conversion.

AO2: Aquinas’ natural theology vs Wittgensteinian Fideism

A strength of Wittgenstein’s theory is that viewing religion and science as separate forms of life explains their apparent independence.
This has theological precedent in Fideism, the view that Christian belief is based purely on faith, not reason..
e.g., Tertullian’s questioning of what ‘Athens’ (Greek philosophy) has to do with Jerusalem (Christian faith).
Wittgenstein has influenced a brand of Fideism called Wittgensteinian fideism.
This seeks to account for religious language through claims religion is a totally separate language game to reason-based language games like philosophy and science.

Counter

However, Fideism is opposed by other strands in Christian thought.
Natural theology claims that reason and evidence supports religious belief.
Aquinas wrote 5 a posteriori proofs of God’s existence.
This influenced anthropic fine-tuning arguments, which claim God, not science, can explain why the laws of nature are so fine-tuned for human life.
This clearly fuses scientific

Evaluation

So, Wittgensteinian Fideism goes too far.
Scientific and religious meaning can be fused together.
The arguments for God’s existence show it most clearly,
We could think these arguments are false, but it’s hard to argue they don’t express cognitive belief in God which was empirically inferred from evidence.
Criticising Wittgenstein here don’t require settling whether natural theology or Fideism is more theologically legitimate.
We can look not just at the technical arguments of religious philosophers, but at the beliefs of the average theist about the natural world.
When theists say God created the world, they mean the same world their scientific beliefs are about.
Aquinas argues we can understand such theistic utterances as functioning analogically, attributing qualities like ‘creator’ to God that are analogous to our qualities, but proportionally greater.
So, religious belief makes truth claims about the same reality as science.
Aquinas’ approach of natural theology is more convincing than Wittgenstein’s in understanding religious language.

AO2: Wittgenstein’s non-cognitive theological anti-realism

Wittgenstein seems more convincing than other non-cognitive approaches because his sociological approach avoids overly individualistic reduction.
Religion is ultimately a social phenomenon.
Locating meaning in the communal practices of a religious “form of life” explains prayer, scripture, liturgy and confession as rule-governed activities whose meaning derives from use.

Counter

However, language games is still accused of reductionism in leading to theological anti-realism, disconnecting religious language from objective reality.
It strips religion of its essential “vertical dimension.”
Religious practices present as responses to a transcendent reality, not solely human behaviours.
Worship and scripture-reading are lived as engagement with a reality beyond the human sphere.
Religious experience is seen as the most direct encounter with the divine.
Human life is considerably constructed, but constructed around and in response to something transcendent.

Evaluation

It’s technically possible the self-understanding of most theists is wrong and Wittgenstein is right.
The idea that religion is more than mere construction could be what gives it its authority as a construction.
However, the key evidence against Wittgenstein is the universal features of religion.
E.g. mystical experience, conscience and the ethical insights of religious texts.
These have significant cross-cultural features, which is evidence against pure construction.
Traditionalists would take that as evidence for connection to God.
Hick’s pluralism would take it as culturally-conditioned phenomenal responses to the same transcendent noumenal reality.
This better explains universality and the tension between culture and truth claims.
Naturalism (Ayer or Flew) would explain universality through sociology or evolutionary psychology.
Crucially, this critique of Wittgenstein doesn’t depend on deciding which of these alternatives is right.
They all agree religion is inextricably linked to something objective outside itself.
That could be God, a pluralist higher divine reality, or just naturalistic forces.
In any case religion cannot be reduced purely to a constructed form of life.