Summary Philosophy - Twentieth Century perspectives and philosophical comparisons
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Course
G581 - A2 Philosophy of Religion
Institution
OCR
This includes The famous philosophical debates from the Vienna Circle need to pass RS
Includes - Falsification theory, weak and strong Verification principle, RM hare's blinks theory, Flew and Mitchell.
Twentieth Century perspectives and philosophical comparisons
Verificationism
The logical positivists of the Vienna Circle, a group of philosophers,
created verificationism. They felt that metaphysical assertions, including
religious terminology, were meaningless since they could not be proven
true or wrong.
The verification principle
According to Aj Ayer's application of the verification principle, "a
statement that cannot be conclusively verified... is simply
meaningless." A claim is not factually important if it cannot be
supported by evidence. Ayer refrains from making the philosophical
claim that metaphysics is fallacious by doing this. Instead, he can assert
that since metaphysical assertions cannot be supported by sense data,
they are meaningless. The theory contends that words acquire meaning
either via linkages to aspects of our shared experience or through their
absolute truth. A word's relationship to the outside world should be able
to be verified.
Aj Ayer & Religious Language
Language can only have significance in Ayer's perspective if it is
analytical, cognitive, or verifiable. Ayer believed that because religious
statements are non-cognitive and impossible to verify, they are
completely meaningless and cannot provide any valuable information.
He contends that the term "god" has metaphysical connotations.
Furthermore, since "god" is a metaphysical concept, it is impossible that
God even exists. Because declaring that "God exists" is a metaphysical
assertion that cannot be both true and false. By the same standard, no
language that claims to explain the attributes of a transcendent deity is
capable of having any literal meaning.
, Strength - The arguments of Locke and Hume support the verification
principle. They maintain, like empiricists, that truth and knowledge
should be discovered by our senses. And the Vp provides clear
boundaries for confirming a proposition; it can be empirically validated
by experience or whether it is a tautology. Likewise, truthful assertions
by definition are verifiable by sensory experience focusing entirely on the
facts and eliminating any questions of emotion.
Weakness
Overly restrictive: It implies that assertions that are obviously
meaningful are meaningless because it demands concrete evidence
from observation or experience. Because historical claims concerning
past events cannot be verified using the Verification principle, history is
thus seen as being meaningless. D.Z. Phillips feels that scholars such
as Hume and Dawkins are naive in assuming that if something is not
scientific or quantifiable, it is not meaningful. We should not claim that
science can potentially comprehend the entirety of reality. For example,
assertions like "dinosaurs existed on Earth" cannot be proven by
observation or experience, hence we cannot accept them as meaningful.
Weak Verification
Ayer responded by coming up with weak Verification. If it is theoretically
conceivable to obtain the evidence, or if we are aware of a method by
which such claims may be verified, then a statement that purports to tell
anything about the world is meaningful. For instance, Historical
documents. It's not always feasible to provide definitive proof. Therefore,
claims that make an attempt to describe the world are factually
meaningful if they can be verified as likely by experience and
observation.
Strengths
Weak verification means we can make statements about history,
scientific theories and human emotion but not religion and ethics. If we
know in principle how to verify a statement, then it is meaningful. If the
probability weighs in favour of the statement, then it is meaningful.
Weakness
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