Eduqas Veri-Falsi-fication & Wittgenstein A*-A summary notes

Eduqas
Philosophy

This page contains A*/A grade level summary revision notes for the Verificationism, Falsificataionism & Wittgenstein topic.

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AO1: The inherent problems of religious language

The issue of understanding. There is a problem for religious language, which is that most theologians agree that God is beyond human understanding. God is typically thought to be transcendent, infinite, timeless – these are not quality we can really comprehend or understand. However, we normally think that to meaningfully talk about something requires an understanding of it. Yet, if God is beyond human understanding, then there is a problem for religious language. Religious theories of religious language aim at solving this problem.
Religious language would include sacred texts and religious statements, including everyday statements like ‘God be with you’ or ‘God exists’. If they are about something (God) beyond understanding then this is a challenge to them that they are unintelligible.
The issue of subjective interpretation. Religious language in texts can have multiple seemingly subjective interpretations, so there can be no shared understanding or experiences taken from religious language.
The issue of the requirement of shared experience. If you aren’t religious, or are of a different religion then you’re just not going to understand the religious language. It’s meaning is not universal, it depends on subjective experiences. If to understand language you have to be part of a shared experience (like a congregation) then that suggests that the language is not inclusive nor accessible nor objective. If it’s not objective then that questions whether it’s about reality.

AO1: Cognitive vs non-cognitive

Another problem of religious language is whether to understand it as cognitive or non-cognitive.
When words come out of someone’s mouth, they are coming from, being triggered by or, most accurately said, ‘expressing’ a certain part of their mind. If you say “The table is made of wood”, that is expressing the part of the mind that contains beliefs. Philosophers call such language cognitive.
If you are in pain and say “ouch”, that word is not expressing the part of the mind which contains beliefs. Philosophers call that non-cognitive, to indicate that it is a non-belief. In this case, it would be an expression of a feeling of pain.
The debate is where religious language fits into this distinction. When a religious person says “God is exists”, it looks like they are expressing a cognitive belief, but some philosophers argue that it is really more of a non-cognitive feeling/attitude.
When a religious person uses religious language and says ‘God exists’, do they believe that God exists, or feel that God exists?
This is separate to whether a statement is meaningful or meaningless. Different philosophers have different theories of meaning with different criteria for meaningfulness. Some philosophers think non-cognitive language can be meaningful. E.g., Hare think that, because religious language affects people’s minds and behaviour. However Ayer thinks only cognitive language can be meaningful, because he thinks statements must verifiably refer to reality in order to have meaning. If a statement is not about reality, it’s not about anything on Ayer’s view.
E.g., Hare & Wittgenstein are non-cognitivists
E.g., Hick & Mitchell are cognitivists

AO1: Verificationism

Verificationism is the method of the logical positivists.
Comte’s theory of Positivism claimed only empirical knowledge is valid.
Logical refers to Russell’s approach of focusing philosophy on language.
So a logical positivist is someone who thinks that only scientific language can be meaningful.
Ayer claims language can have all sorts of meanings, for which he used the term ‘significance’.
Verificationism claims that to be factually significant (synthetic), a statement must be empirically verifiable. We must know how to verify it as true or false through experience.
Another valid means of significance is that a statement is analytic. So Ayer allows that propositions of maths and pure logic can be meaningful.
If a proposition fails these two tests, it lacks factual significance. Ayer says it may have emotional significance, but no ‘literal’ significance.
Metaphysical language is about things beyond what we experience. So it is meaningless because we don’t know how to verify it.
This includes religious language. Ayer labels ‘God’ a ‘metaphysical term’.
Ayer concludes religious language does not express a ‘genuinely cognitive state’.
So, it is unverifiable and thus has no factual significance.
Ayer doesn’t explicitly say religious language is an expression of non-cognitive states as he does with ethical language.
His criticism is that supposed religious-knowledge cannot be put into propositions testable through experience.
He concludes that religious language fails to be cognitively meaningful.
Religious language attempts to express beliefs about ‘metaphysical’ entities, but is unverifiable and thus meaningless. So, it’s cognitive but meaningless.
Original verificationists believed in ‘hard’ verification, which is when we use experience to verify something for certain as true or false.
However Ayer didn’t think that was possible. So he created the ‘weak’ verification principle, which is when we use experience to verify that something is probably true or false.
But this opened up the issue that God could be verifiable through experience, e.g., as attempted by the design and cosmological arguments.
So Ayer rejected weak verification, admitting it could give meaning to almost anything
His final version involved direct and indirect verification. Direct is when we verify something in our direct experience – e.g. ‘I see a key’. Indirect verification involves something about what we directly experience that we know in principle how to verify, e.g. ‘this key is made of iron’.
To be empirically verifiable, a statement must be either verifiable in practice (direct), meaning we are able to verify it, or verifiable in principle (indirect), meaning that we know that there is a way to verify it even if we are currently unable.
Ayer illustrates with the dark side of the moon, unobserved in his time.
The claim that there are mountains there was verifiable in principle, because they knew it was a place that in principle one could get to and make the relevant observations.

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.

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.
All he can do is fall back on empiricism 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 verificationism is not a correct theory of empiricism.
Science doesn’t work by looking for evidence that verifies a theory. It works through making predictions which are falsifiable.
Popper illustrates with Einstein’s prediction about the orbit pattern of Mercury. Had the observations gone against that, Einstein’s theory would have been falsified.
Whereas Popper criticised Freudians and Marixists, who didn’t make testable predictions but instead interpreted everything as verifying their theory.
Antony Flew applied Falsificationism to religious language.
Flew thinks religious language is cognitive as it expresses beliefs which attempt to assert something about the world. But those beliefs are unfalsifiable, and so fails to say anything about the world. Flew doesn’t say it’s meaningless like Ayer does.
Neither Popper nor Flew are making categorical claims about meaning. So, the falsification principle doesn’t need to pass its own test. It is just a tool for identifying empirical statements about the world.
Flew argues:

Asserting ‘X’ is equivalent to denying ‘not X’.
So, all assertions could be imagined false, if we imagine discovering that what they deny is true.
If a statement can’t be imagined false, then it can’t be an assertion.
It therefore can’t be true or false.
So, unfalsifiable language fails to assert anything about reality.
Religious believers can’t imagine what could prove their belief in God false.
So, religious language is meaningless (in the sense that it fails to say anything about reality).
Some religious people sometimes seem to think there is something which could disprove their belief. Flew uses a parable to explain why he doesn’t trust such claims.
Flew appropriates John Wisdom’s ‘parable of the gardener’ to illustrate how unfalsifiable language fails to assert anything.
Imagine someone claimed a gardener (God) existed, but every time that was tested (through the advance of scientific knowledge), they diluted the original concept to avoid the falsification (by saying it’s not visible, not tangible, etc).
This dilutes the concept of God to the point of failing to assert anything, dying a ‘death of a thousand qualifications’.
There is no difference between a reality in which the gardener/God exists and one in which it doesn’t.
So, unfalsifiable language like religious language, clearly cannot actually be about reality. It attempts to refer to something for which it would make no testable difference to reality whether it exists or not.
Flew’s parable is partly intended to show how religious beliefs have been repeatedly modified in response to scientific discoveries (like evolution and Big Bang cosmology) so that they cannot be falsified.

AO1: Mitchell

Mitchell argues religious language does express a cognitive falsifiable belief. This means he rejects Flew and Hare, though for different reasons.
Mitchell does not contest falsificationism, but argues Flew was wrong to think religious language is unfalsifiable.
Mitchell argues some believers have unfalsifiable ‘blind’ faith, but most religious people base their belief in God on the evidence of their personal experience and relationship with God.
That evidence can be outweighed by counter-evidence, such as evil. This makes their belief falsifiable.
Encounter with God is a personal matter, which means the amount or type 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 is contesting that with his illustration of the problem of evil. Religious believers acknowledge contrary evidence, they just don’t think there’s enough of it to undermine their belief.
Mitchell’s parable:
A resistance soldier in a civil war is approached by someone claiming to be their leader.
They talk all night, leaving a deep impression on the soldier, who is convinced the stranger is their leader.
This belief is maintained despite counter-evidence, such as seeing them fighting on the other side for the government. Perhaps they have faith they are acting as a double agent.
Mitchell remarks that there must be some evidence where continuing faith would be ‘ridiculous’ and blind. But the type and amount of evidence may not be known in advance.
The parable illustrates how religious belief is based on the evidence of personal experience and relationship. Evidence against the belief is acknowledged, and for most believers there is some type and amount of evil that would falsify their belief. But they cannot say what it is 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. Ayer and Flew are wrong to call it a failed attempt, then.
Hare’s view is that religious language is a non-cognitive expression of our ‘Blik’, which involves attitudes, emotions & worldviews.
Our Blik affects our mind and behaviour, which makes it non-cognitively meaningful.
Hare 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.
Apparently rational thinking about God that seems cognitive is actually rationalisations of our emotions.

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 logical positivism

Argument for & strength of Falsif/verificationism: For a belief to be about reality, we must know how it could be true or false.
“we know the meaning of the statement if we know the conditions under which the statement is true or false”. M. Schlick, founder of logical positivism.
A cognitive belief about reality is factual, i.e., it concerns facts. Facts can be either true or false. This is the argument for logical positivism. Knowing the truth-requirements of a fact seem to be essential to knowing that fact. So, a fact is only meaningfully understood when it is known how it could be true or false.
For a statement to be about reality (cognitive), there must be a way to verify (Ayer) or falsify (Flew) it. If a person doesn’t know how their belief could be true or false, their belief isn’t actually connected to reality and thus is not factual, i.e., it is cognitively meaningless.

Counter:

Swinburne seems to have a more scientific criteria for meaning. If we understand the words in a sentence and the significance of their combination, then it is meaningful to us. We don’t have to know how to test it through experience.
Swinburne created an illustration of this. We know what toys are and what it would mean for them to come alive when no one was watching. We currently have no way to test whether that truly happens, nor can we even imagine such a test in principle. Yet, it is meaningful because we understand the concepts involved.
Similarly, we may not currently know how to verify or falsify God, but so long as the concept can be understood it is meaningful.

Evaluation:

Swinburne’s point is strengthened by the fact that science often operates using his criteria, not Ayer’s or Flew’s. Physicists use their current knowledge & concepts to create theoretical mathematical models such as inflation theory (how the big bang started), dark matter or string theory. We currently don’t know how to verify or falsify those theories. Nonetheless, they are still meaningful to these scientists.
Such theories are constructed mentally through theorizing on the basis of the information about the world.
Providing that evidence is Swinburne’s general philosophical project, to create a cumulative case for God’s existence. This included the apparent design in the laws of physics (design arguments) and religious experience.
The logical positivism of Ayer/Flew is actually too radical a form of empiricism even for many scientists. They are wrong about scientific meaning. It can involve ideas we don’t know how to test (such as dark matter, or what’s inside black holes etc). So, Religious language is cognitively meaningful even if it’s untestable.

AO1: Wittgenstein’s language games

Wittgenstein argues religious language can be meaningful even if it’s not cognitive.
Wittgenstein thought that Ayer and Flew had misunderstood religious language.
Ayer and Flew thought that religious language was a failed attempt to describe reality.
Religious people try to speak about reality when talking about God – but since their language is unverifiable (Ayer) or unfalsifiable (Flew), their belief actually fails to be about reality.
Wittgenstein initially somewhat agreed with Ayer’s theory, but later in his life changed his mind and created the language games theory.
Ayer and Flew think that words get their meaning by being scientific, by referring to reality.
Wittgenstein disagreed with this, claiming instead that words get their meaning by participating in the social reality.
The social reality is the set of different types of social interaction that exist.
Every different type of social interaction is like a ‘game’, Wittgenstein argued, because it follows rules.
The things a person says depends on the social context they are speaking in. We speak very differently when with friends verses family verses at a job interview.
So, words must get their meaning from the social context in which they are spoken.
A social context or type of social interaction is a language game. Wittgenstein means game in a broad sense – an activity governed by rules. If we started speaking at a job interview the way we spoke to friends, we would probably not get the job. This is because there are rules to behaviour and speech in a job interview. The same is true for all social interaction – there are things is normal and not normal to say.
Most of the time we learn rules unconsciously.
Religion is its own type of language game – religious language is meaningful within the religious language game to people who are religious – i.e., know (consciously or unconsciously) the ‘rules’.
It’s only if someone is socialised into a language game that they find it meaningful.
Science is a different language game to religion – so religious language is meaningless in the scientific language game.
However, religious language is meaningful to religious people within the religious language game.
If you haven’t grown up religious, you’re simply not going to find it meaningful.
Analogy with Plato’s cave: different language games are like different caves.

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
It also has theological precedent in Fideism, e.g., Tertullian’s questioning of what ‘Athens’ (Greek philosophy) has to do with Jerusalem (Christian faith).
Wittgensteinian fideism claims religion is purely a matter of faith, a totally separate language game to science, which involves a posteriori reason.

Counter

Most religious people would object that religious language is cognitive.
The view that reason plays a role in religious belief is called natural theology and it is opposed to Fideism.
Aquinas wrote 5 a posteriori proofs of God’s existence on the basis of empirical observation.
Building recently on Aquinas, the anthropic fine-tuning argument argues God, not science, can explain why the laws of nature are so fine-tuned for human life.

Evaluation

Wittgensteinian Fideism goes too far.
We could think that arguments for God fail, but regardless they clearly fuse scientific and religious meaning together.
Religious belief makes truth claims about the same reality as science.
It strains credibility to deny that such arguments express cognitive belief.
Aquinas’ natural theology underpins his theory that statements about God function cognitively by attributing qualities to God that are analogous to ours but proportionally greater.
Wittgenstein is wrong to understand religious belief as its own language game.

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 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.
Braithwaite adds that religious doctrines and stories function to express and motivate a believer’s moral intentions.

Counter

However, this is still accused of reductionism.
It seems to lead to theological anti-realism, disconnecting religious language from objective reality.
Language games strip religion of its essential “vertical dimension.”
Religious practices present as responses to a transcendent reality, not solely as human communal behaviours.
Practices such as worship and scripture-reading are also lived as engagement with a reality beyond the human sphere.
Religious experience is seen as the most direct encounter with the divine.
This accepts human life is considerably constructed, but constructed around and in response to something greater.

Evaluation

It’s technically possible the self-understanding of most theists is wrong and Wittgenstein is right.
In fact, the idea that religion is more than a mere construction could be exactly what gives it its authority and power as a construction.
However, the key evidence against Wittgenstein is the universal features of religion.
Cross-cultural elements are evidence against construction.
E.g., mystical experience and to some degree conscience.
Religious texts also have similar ethical insights, wisdom, and stories.
Hick’s pluralism understands such universalities as culturally-conditioned phenomenal responses to the transcendent noumenal reality.
This better explains universality and the tension in religion between culture and truth claims.
Naturalism (e.g. of Ayer or Flew) is also a contender for explaining such universality through sociology or evolutionary psychology.
Crucially, this critique of wittgenstein doesn’t depend on deciding whether universality is explained by God or not.
It shows 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.