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Informative Discourse and Theology

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2008

William L. Power
Affiliation:
Professor of Philosophy and Religion, The University of Georgia

Extract

It is a fact that human beings attempt to discourse about God. The question is: can they? In this paper I want to discuss the problem of man's endeavour to speak and write meaningfully about God. In the first part of the paper, I will discuss the informative function of language and the conditions under which one can use language intelligibly to communicate information about a particular concrete individual or object. In the second part of the paper, I will attempt to apply my remarks to the problem of discourse about God and to show how God can be understood as a concrete individual by employing the metaphysical categories of C. S. Peirce.

Type
Research Articles
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1976

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References

page 21 note 1 Morris, Charles W., Foundations of the Theory of Signs in International Encyclopedia of Unified Science, 1, 2 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1938), 36.Google Scholar

page 22 note 1 Ibid. pp. 13–35. In the pages, Morris is developing the syntactic-semantic-pragmatic distinction which he derived from Peirce. My own understanding of this threefold distinction has been influenced by my colleague Clarke, Bowman L.. See his Language and Natural Theology (The Hague: Mouton, 1966), especially chapters 1, iii, and vi.Google Scholar

page 22 note 2 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, translated by Pears, D. F. & McGuinness, B. F. (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1961), p. 151.Google Scholar

page 22 note 3 Harris, James F. Jr, ‘The epistemic status of analogical language’, International Journal for Philosophy of Religion, 1, 4 (1970), 211–19.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

page 23 note 1 Clarke, pp. 69–73.

page 23 note 2 Clarke, Bowman L., ‘Theology and philosophy’, Journal of the American Academy of Religion, xxxviii, 3 (1970), 276–88.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

page 25 note 1 Bunge, Mario, ‘Is scientific metaphysics possible?The Journal of Philosophy, LXVIII, 17 (1971), 508.Google Scholar

page 25 note 2 Hartshorne, Charles, Creative Synthesis and Philosophic Method (La Salle, Ill.: Open Court, 1967). See chapter 11.Google Scholar

page 26 note 1 Clarke, p. 13.

page 26 note 2 Clarke, Bowman L., ‘How do we talk about God?’, The Modern Schoolman XLV, 2 (1968), 91.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

page 26 note 3 Flew, Anthony, God and Philosophy (New York: Dell, 1966), p. 30.Google Scholar

page 28 note 1 It should be pointed out that some have argued that names do have something like an intension. See Searle, John R., Speech Acts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), pp. 162–74.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Others want to restrict the use of terms such as ‘extension’, ‘intension’, and ‘definition’ to discourse about general terms. See Mill, John Stuart, ‘Of Names‘, in Theory of Meaning, ed. Adrienne, and Lehrer, Keith (Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice-Hall, 1970), pp. 4464.Google Scholar Also Ryle, Gilbert, ‘The Theory of Meaning’, in Philosophy and Ordinary Language, ed. Caton, Charles E. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1970), pp. 4464.Google Scholar

page 28 note 2 Peirce, Charles S., ‘A Neglected Argument for the Reality of God,’ in Charles S. Peirce: Selected Writings, ed. Wiener, Philip P. (New York: Dover, 1966), p. 358.Google Scholar

page 28 note 3 The theory of definite descriptions comes from Bertrand Russell's article ‘On Denoting’ in 1905. Since that time the expression ‘definite description’ has been employed to designate any phrase which begins with the definite article. A definite description signifies the unique characteristics of a particular individual, and, therefore, should not be confused with a definition.

page 30 note 1 See his Summa Theologiae I, question 13 on theological language.

page 30 note 2 Hartshorne, Charles, A Natural Theology for Our Time (La Salle, Ill.: Open Court, 1967), p. 34.Google Scholar

page 31 note 1 See Philosophical Writings of Peirce, ed. Buchler, Justus (New York: Dover, 1955), pp. 7497.Google Scholar These selections are taken from Peirce, C. S., Collected Papers, ed. Hartshorne, Charles and Weiss, Paul (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1931–5), 1.Google Scholar

page 33 note 1 Anderson, Bernhard W., Understanding the Old Testament, 2nd ed. (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1966), p. 39.Google Scholar

page 34 note 1 Buchler, p. 376.

page 35 note 1 Peirce, ‘A Neglected Argument for the Reality of God,’ p. 358.

page 35 note 2 Ibid. p. 359.

page 35 note 3 Ibid. p. 365.

page 35 note 4 Ibid. p. 370.

page 35 note 5 Ibid. pp. 368–70.

page 35 note 6 Ibid. p. 378.