Classic Phillips: Verification and Religious Belief

For an explanation of this post, go here.  

The following takes place soon after professor Davis’ remarks in last weeks post.  I’ve omitted a restatement of Davis’ remarks by Phillips and by the student who asked the initial question.  The issue now is, does the eschaton function as verification of religious belief, thereby making religious belief less like an epistemic practice and more like an empirically grounded theory?

April 17, 2001 (Part 2)

Phillips:  That verificationism, I suppose is the slightly, um . . .well, I don’t know if it is modified in the end, the positivists claim that the meaning of a proposition is found in its verification.  And they took, the positivists – the logical positivists – took that over from Wittgenstein shortly after the Tractatus period, placed great emphasis on verification.  But he dropped it when he saw what the Positivists did with it.  Because, of course, they meant empirical verification.  

And, of course, it’s an interesting question, which by the way, um [Phillips sifts through papers] Sarah’s asking here, different views of eschatology – which I guess is what we’re talking about now.  How does the eschaton over-come, transcend evil?  Do non-traditional eschatologies function in the same way?

Sticking first with this kind of eschatology, they meant empirical verification.  So, one interesting question is, do you understand the eschaton in empirical terms?  As a future empirical event?  And if so, if it’s an empirical event, in what context does this empirical event occur?  Here on earth?  What?  

I mean it’s odd when you ask “when will it occur?” because you’re told “at the end of time”.  And the end of time I take it isn’t a time.  I mean the end of time can’t be a time.  So, how you understand it is one question.  But anyway, before coming to that, why was Wittgenstein attracted to this idea of verification?

His attraction to it was as a logical thesis, namely, that verification takes time.  And it was as a reaction to the view, which he had held himself, that if you are to understand logic, or meaning, you must come in the end to something which gives you its meaning all at once.  Sellars calls this the myth of the given.  Either the given were certain elementary propositions, and you saw at once their meaning, or they were incorrigible sense experiences, like sense data, you saw at once “red”; it just gave you the meaning “red”.

But to get away from that – that meaning could be immediate, given all at once. He said “no”.  The meaning of a word is found in the function it has in whatever context it’s operating in.  He called it a language game, but you don’t have to call it that.  You just say “the context in which it operates”.   So that the meaning isn’t given all at once, the meaning is found in the use of it.  Now, that’s the part of Wittgenstein that’s emphasized, and indeed it occupies most of part 1 of the Philosophical Investigations.  

And it’s present in part 2 as well, but in part 2, section 11 of the Investigations there’s a corrective to that view.  Because even when puts the view, he says you can say, for a large class of words, that their meaning is found in the function they have in whatever context they operate in.  But he then speaks in a way that makes you think at first that he’s got back to the idea of meaning given all at once, he said but there are other words whose meaning is taken entirely up into themselves.

Strange phrase.  There are words whose meaning is taken entirely up into themselves.  And he’s thinking mainly of aesthetics.  Where a word has a function, you can say the same function could be performed – it just so happens we’ll use this word for “red”, but if we called what we now call “red”, “blue”, I mean just as a label you could make all the distinction you make now, except now when you say red, you’d say blue.  You could use a different word, meaning by word just the written label, or the uttered sound.  

But now he says try that for poetry and drama.  Here you can’t say it’s a function.  The words have a function.  And you could put in another way, if you want to.  He says the whole weight is in the words.  That the drama or the poem tells you something that couldn’t be said in any other way.  And then he says think how much of the world is like that.  

He says imagine two people disagreeing about whether the expression on a person’s face is genuine or not – reading the face, reading each other’s faces, how we react to each other’s faces.  So, he compares two pictures.  He uses the picture analogy.  One he calls the representational picture, such as the Crowning of Napoleon.  And he says, what the picture says is outside the picture.  Namely, the picture is a representation of what?  The crowning of Napoleon.  Why is a photograph a photograph?  It’s got to be a likeness.  And son on.  But he says if you think of Cezanne’s Card Players, you don’t know if those card players existed or not.  The picture says itself.  That is, what you get out of a striking picture says itself.

Now, is he going back to the other view then that the sense of the picture is given all at once?  No.  Because he would also say if you’d only seen one great painting, you wouldn’t be able to see a great painting.  You need a culture.  It doesn’t mean you actually compare it with the other paintings when you’re looking at it, though you might.  I mean there may be four landscapes on the wall of a gallery and you say, “look at that landscape, it’s a much deeper treatment.”  I mean they may be all of the same scene.   But if you ask why it’s deeper, you would have to point to features of the picture compared with the others and so on.  So, it’s not given all at once.  But neither can you say what that picture says could be put in some other way.

Now the reason for this somewhat seemingly irrelevant detour is what kind of pictures are religious doctrines?  Are they representational in the sense that their sense depends on something outside them, such as is the eschaton going to occur?  If does occur the picture is true.  If doesn’t occur the picture is false.  Or are you in Christianity offered a picture of your beginning and your end which says itself.  In other words, it offers you something about your Alpha and your Omega.  And the question is, can you eat it?  In other words, is it food for you?  Can you live by it?  Can you devour this message?

But the message isn’t hypothetical.  And this now ties up with what professor Davis was saying about Flew.  It’s falsifiable only in this sense:  That it’s not like a hypothesis where the facts could disprove it, but what you find is that something may happen in your life when you say “I just can’t take it anymore”.  ”I can’t think like that anymore”.  Your baby dies and you say, “this talk of love, I can’t talk of it in a way that would embrace this event for me”.  

So the way the picture does come and go, isn’t “does it correspond to or not”, but can you live by it?  So, that would show that there would be deep differences going all the way down.  Now, Flew’s challenge is, what difference does it make?  The answer to that is that it makes all the difference because you see your whole life in terms of the vision that you’re offered.  And of course there are other offers.  

The Bible says some trust in chariots.  Not meaning, “hey, trust in Christ’s chariot, it goes further than his chariot”, and then you have a common measure.  It’s rather, some are warriors, some trust in chariots.  In other words, what their offer is, live – and you’ve got a picture of eternity to go with it – valhalla.  And what is the picture of eternity?  You spend every eternal day out hunting to return at evening to feast with the Odin and the gods.  A very different picture of eternity.  Which one is true?

Now, I think on one view you say, “well, all those guys after death.  They’re going to find out their not going to be feasting with Odin and the gods, they’re going to be facing the eschaton.” 

Now, there’s another question here that asks me, “do I believe in life after death?” And Kierkegaard’s answer was eternity isn’t after anything.  But I will come more explicitly around to that.  

But that will be one answer, that your eschatological verification after death will show you which picture is true.  Now, I can’t make much sense of that I admit.  But supposing I allowed it for the sake of argument.  You wake up and there’s the eschaton and there’s no banquet hall.  The interesting question is, would the man who trusted in chariots then say, “well, Christianity, then is true”?

Supposing Nietzsche wakes up, and there’s the pale Gallilaen – the grey saviour.  It seems to me, if Nietzsche could see it through as it were, that he would have to say something like this, “well, I always thought it was a horrible morality, but now here he is.  So what I confront now is even more horrible than what I attacked when I was alive.  I attacked a horrible vision, now I see it’s got a horrible author to go with it.”  In other words, I don’t see, within moral or aesthetic terms, how the confrontation will of itself as it were guarantee a response to it.

It’s like G. E. Moore in Principia Ethica who thought if you confronted the property of goodness, somehow the property makes you desire it.  And I don’t think there’s any more reason to think that, than there is to think that Christ’s physical presence on earth made everyone desire him.  And almost no one desired him when he was on the cross.  Even his closest people fled.  

In the next installment, Phillips and Davis finally have at it. 

Classic Phillips: epistemic practices

During the Spring of 2001, in the small town of Claremont, two of the world’s most renowned philosophers of religion debated and discussed the problem of evil for an entire semester.  The two philosophers were D. Z. Phillips, my academic advisor, and Stephen Davis, a member of my dissertation committee.  I maintain that Phillips, was the most important and profound philosopher of religion (though he was more than that) of the twentieth century.

In the transcript below, I’ve tried to capture the back and forth between Phillips and Davis, as well as the substantive debate.  I’ve failed to capture, completely, the funnier and more light-hearted aspects of the debate, for Phillips and Davis were friends.  Over time I hope to rectify this.  I would like in the future to include the audio with this post.  However, everything that is written here is accurate and in context.

But for the philosophically inclined, I hope the debate will be enlightening.  The major concerns of philosophy are debated – and by two towering intellects.  Of course, the debate assumes some familiarity with philosophy, and so, may not be as interesting or illuminating to the uninitiated.  

April 17, 2001 (Part 1)

Phillips: [mulling over student questions on the debate between himself and professor Davis] Okay, there’s a number of questions to do with eschatology (the beatific vision).  There’s a number of questions to do with instrumentalism, and what kind of objection is being raised to it.  There’s questions about belief and ontology.  One on epistemic practices and ontology.  

Okay, um, there’s a program on the radio in Britain called (something like) “Gardening Questions” [here Phillips begins to speak in a British accent - he, in fact, spoke with a thick Welsh accent, by the way - SP] Edith Stern from Somerset wants to know what’s going wrong with her carrots, Her question reads, so it’s a bit like that [chuckling from Phillips and Davis].  

Let me see, have you thought of any order?

Davis: No, not really

Phillips: Okay, then, in that case let’s see . . .

Davis: We could just take the questions one at a time, and where they start getting redundant skip over it.

Phillips: Okay, . . .let’s start with the ones that are asked once and only once.  So let’s start with Mr. Amesbury’s question for professor Davis which goes like this, a couple of weeks ago you said you agreed with professor Phillips that our epistemic practices are neither true nor false, but provide the context within which the distinction between truth and falsity can meaningfully be applied.  

I believe that one of the conclusions that professor Phillips draws from this, and I may or may not, is that it is misguided to attempt to provide philosophical arguments in support of the truth of the religion, which is itself a kind of epistemic practice. Do you agree?  

If not, in what sense do you think it makes sense to speak of the truth or falsity of a religion, in total, as opposed to the truth or falsity of a  particular experience or doctrine within that religion.  

I’m wondering whether the idea that our epistemic practices are themselves measurable by something external to them.  Which, it suggests, you’ve already agreed they are not, gets smuggled back into your view  by means of the Eschaton – conceived as an event that reveals in some absolute sense who was right and who was wrong.

Davis: To me the only kinds of things that it makes sense to talk of as being either true or false are claims, sentences, statements.  And obviously, there are all sorts of linguistic utterances like “shut the door”, or “what time is it”, or”doggonit”, that are not claims, and so are not either true or false.

An epistemic practice – the trouble is that term can be understood and defined in lots of different ways.  Maybe an epistemic practice is a bunch of people who believe that Mozart was a great composer and so one of the things they do is go to as many Mozart concerts as they can, and buy tapes and CD’s of Mozart, and play his stuff all the time, and talk about him all the time.  I don’t know if that’s an epistemic practice, but if it is, I don’t think it makes sense to talk about it as being true or false.

Now there are certain claims that such people make within a practice that make sense to talk about being true or false.  But the epistemic practice – no, I can’t see what that would even mean.

Now obviously, I’m going to want to make a distinction between the epistemic practice of admiring Mozart and the epistemic practice of admiring Hitler.  But probably what that would come down to would be, in part at least, evaluating the propositions or claims that are part of that practice, and those are the kinds of things that can be true or false.  

Now, as far as religions are concerned.  I think the notion of a religion being true or false – since a religion includes all kinds of practices, both epistemic and non-epistemic, like going to Church or whatever you do in the context of a given religion, I think it’s only in a very extended or stretched sense that you talk about it being true or false.  

But I certainly think there are claims that are made, statements that are made, in the context of every religion – even Zen Buddhism – that can be either true or false.  Sometimes we don’t know whether they are or not.  In fact, that’s probably the case a lot of times.  But maybe the concept “true religion” is a religion that has, where most of the claims made by people who are adherence of that religion are true.  And false religion maybe would be one where most of the claims made by adherence of that religion are false.  But that’s a stretched sense of the word.  And so, well I’ll just stop there.