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Reconstructing the ineffable: the grammatical roles of ‘God’
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 October 2008
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In ‘Ineffability’ Alston suggests that philosophical mystics take care to delimit the class of predicates which cannot be ascribed to God. It is suggested that some qualification of ‘ineffability’ is necessary lest the mystic be trapped into such simple contradictions as that of ascribing predicates like ‘ineffability’ to God, while denying that any predicates can be ascribed to God. By the end of Alston's dialogue Mysticus, the would-be defender of mysticism, is browbeaten into meekly asking, ‘Yes, I see that [qualifying statements of God's ineffability] would be better. But how does it happen that so many philosphers make ineffability statements without qualification?’
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References
page 485 note 1 Alston, W. P., ‘Ineffability’, Philosophical Review, lxv (1956), 506–22.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
page 491 note 1 Thus, for instance, Watts, Alan in The Deep-In View (Dustbook, 1965), (p. 11)Google Scholar: ‘…the real self of every man is the entire cosmos focused at this point and that point, this point and that point being the place where we Locate our bodies’. For a discussion which pays specific attention to the indexicality of some standard explications of ‘God’ see Smart, Ninian, Reasons and Faiths (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1958), p. 37.Google Scholar
page 494 note 1 An attempt might be made to suggest that to an out-of-context question, ‘What is predicable of this table?’ one might answer by presenting the predicates which attach to all tables; and thus, mutatis mutandis, that predicates which attach to all manifestations of the universe (such as the logical or empirical laws all manifestations of the universe exhibit) are predicable of God in a general, context-free way. But this is misguided; for it makes the question with the index reduce to an entirely distinct question. I know what someone means by the question ‘What is predicable of any table?’ If that is the question one is interested in, that is the way the question needs to be put. Nothing is served by equating meaningless questions such as the out-of-context question ‘What is predicable of yesterday?’ to other distinct questions such as ‘What is predicable of any day?’ however meaningful the latter question is.