Just a short introductory video...

An introduction to aesthetics, complete with example works of art.

Many philosophers have attempted to answer whether religious language is meaningful. While some attempts to argue that it is not, such as verification and falsification, fail, it is still ultimately meaningless, as the traditional concept of God is a self-contradictory concept, and a self-contradictory concept cannot be meaningful.

The first argument over meaning that we shall consider is Ayer's verification principle, and his, ultimately unsuccessful, application of it to religious language. Ayer argues that a cognitively meaningful proposition is either: 1) An analytic truth, or 2) Empirically verifiable. Ayer applies his principle to religious language, and argues that because claims about God are not analytically true, and because they cannot be empirically verified, no sentences about God are cognitively meaningful.

However, there is a major, and ultimately insurmountable, problem facing Ayer and his verification principle, namely that it fails itself. The verification principle is not tautological, and so therefore cannot be verified through the first condition, but also cannot be verified empirically, as experience can never give us the certainty necessary to establish a universal rule. As Ayer's principle fails itself, it is ultimately useless and we need not pay attention to it, or to its application to religious language. As verification is useless, it does not prove that religious language is meaningless, and so, at least in this part of the essay, we can talk meaningfully about God. Ultimately, however, we will see that the failure of the verification principle and the fact that it currently seems that we can talk meaningfully about God is inconsequential once we realise that, even discarding verification and falsification, God is still a meaningless concept.

The next attempt to answer this question is the falsification theory from Antony Flew. Flew argues that for a proposition to be cognitively meaningful, you must be able to understand or provide the conditions which would prove that statement to be false. For example, if I state that today is Wednesday, I can provide the circumstances under which it is falsifiable - a calendar saying it is Tuesday. If, however, I am unwilling to accept any circumstances where my statement could be falsified, then it is not meaningful. Flew argues that religious believers are unable to accept a statement is false when the falsification conditions are met. Flew gives the example of the phrase 'God is good', saying that even if you attempt to falsify this, a theist will qualify it, maybe by adding 'God's goodness is not human goodness'. This attempt to wriggle out of any potentially falsifying evidence destroys the meaning of religious language, and Flew calls this the 'death of a thousand qualifications'. Falsification, Flew believes, renders all religious language meaningless.

Both Hare and Mitchell attempt to respond to this. Mitchell argues that religious language is still meaningful, as it we need to view it in the context of a process of continual doubt and struggle. The fact that the theist doubts their beliefs is precisely what shows that they are meaningful and can be falsified. However, Mitchell is ultimately incorrect, as he misses the nuance of Flew's point, whether or not the theist doubts their beliefs is irrelevant, it is the fact that they refuse to abandon their beliefs that makes them meaningless. Mitchell does not really address this point, and at best merely defends the reasons why the theist is unwilling to abandon their beliefs. Mitchell is, then, incorrect, and falsification, at least temporarily, stands, and with it the cognitive nature of religious language.

Hare agrees that many religious utterances are unfalsifiable, but argues that the fact that a religious believer makes certain utterances without allowing any possible states of affairs to count against them does not mean that they are not saying anything meaningful. Instead, Hare introduces the term 'blik' as an alternative way of characterising religious language. The disagreement between the theist and the atheist, Hare argues, is a difference in their blik. Bliks are not sensitive to empirical evidence and so are neither grounded in it, verified by it, nor falsified by it. However, Hare argues that bliks are nonetheless meaningful in so far as they affect what we believe and do on a fundamental level. Hare argues that “our whole commerce with the world depends upon our bliks about the world”. Hare argues that bliks are so common and so fundamental, he believes that everyone holds a great many bliks, that they cannot be meaningless, as they are so fundamental to our way of looking at the world and to our beliefs. Flew is, says Hare, incorrect, therefore, in arguing that a statement not being falsified makes it meaningless.

Hare is mostly correct, in that he has, in a somewhat roundabout way, discovered the central flaw of Flew's argument: something being unfalsifiable or continually changed (the death of a thousand qualifications) does not make it meaningless, it just makes it a bad argument. If we cannot falsify something, then it is an assertion, but an assertion is still meaningful. Similarly, if I adapt my argument in such a way that it changes in a way that is completely different from my original premise, that does not makes it meaningless gibberish, but merely a bad response. Genuinely meaningless statements are ones that are logically contradictory, such as 'the four-sided triangle is red' or 'purple is four'. These are not cognitively meaningful because they make no sense, it is literally impossible for them to be either true or false. If, however, I argue that 'my father saw a horse today' and then, after a process of being challenged, concede that actually my father is incredibly short-sighted and so cannot actually tell the difference between farm animals, that is a bad argument, but it is still cognitively meaningful, all of the responses and premises can be true or false. Flew, therefore, misses what makes something meaningful, and so his falsification is incorrect, and does not prove religious language meaningless. However, as we will soon see, falsification is attempting to tackle the problem in the wrong way, and so the fact that it is defeated will not actually have much impact on whether we can talk meaningfully about God.

Religious language is, however, mostly meaningless. This is because, as discussed earlier, the thing that renders language meaningless is if it is contradictory. God, as a contradictory concept, cannot, therefore, be meaningful. In order to see why God, and here I take 'God' to mean the traditional, Abrahamic 'God of the philosophers', is meaningless, we can consider the paradoxical question of whether God could end his own existence. If God could not end his own existence, then God is not omnipotent, as there is an action that he cannot take: ending his existence. A genuinely omnipotent being must be able to take any action, and so God would not be genuinely omnipotent. Even worse, if this is the option chosen then there seems to be something that we can do that God cannot, as we are perfectly capable of ending our existence. Given all of this, then we might decide that saying yes is the correct option. This, however, brings even more problems. If God can end his existence, then he is not eternal or everlasting, as a being with a potential end is neither eternal or everlasting as it effectively makes said beings existence contingent on what is effectively, at least from our perspective, chance. Again, this option throws up some unpalatable questions for the theist, this time: if God could end his existence, what's to say that he hasn't already? We can further draw out the contradictions in the traditional definition of God by adapting our paradox into 'could God end his own existence without the universe ending?' If we answer yes, then God is not omnipresent, as an omnipresent being must, by nature of being fully intermeshed and fundamentally involved with the universe, be unextractable from it. If, however we decide that God could not, then he is not omnipotent, as the action that he cannot take is ending his own existence without the universe ending. We can see, therefore, that God is a meaningless concept, and this realisation only crystalises further when we consider all of the other paradoxes and problems, such as the paradox of the stone, the Euthyphro dilemma and the problems of evil. This is the real cause of what Flew identifies as the 'death of a thousand qualifications', it is theists wrestling to reconcile the different parts of an illogical, and therefore fundamentally irreconcilable, concept. Ultimately, then, we cannot meaningfully talk about God, as the concept of God is not meaningful.

There would, however, still be some religious language that could, under our definition, still be meaningful. For example, 'there was a man called Jesus who was born in Bethlehem' is a religious statement that is not contradictory, and so is meaningful. However, this is not really a threat to the argument, as the key factor in deciding whether we can meaningfully talk about God is whether the concept and the statements we make about it are meaningful, not whether some religious statements, and these religious statements are actually just historical statements, can be meaningful. Similarly, if we used a different definition of God that was not omnipotent or omnipresent or eternal, but just long-living, very powerful and present in lots of things, then the concept would no longer be contradictory, and we could meaningfully talk about it. This is not, however, the concept that most people use, and so is not the concept that we should be evaluating. Overall, then, while there are some minor exceptions where religious language can be meaningful, when asking whether we can talk meaningfully about God, the answer is still that we cannot, as God is a meaningless concept.

In conclusion, while the verification principle fails itself, and so is, therefore, largely useless, and Hare can, in an adapted form, largely defeat falsification, we still cannot meaningfully talk about the traditional concept of God as it is contradictory, and a contradictory concept is not cognitively meaningful.

Property dualists believe that there is fundamentally one substance, namely physical substances, but that there are two properties, mental and physical. Property dualists would argue that the mental often, if not always, coincides with the brain. In order to prove this theory, they make use of two main arguments, namely the knowledge argument and the philosophical zombie argument. The main issue with property dualism is the interaction problem. The main alternate version of property dualism is epiphenomenalist property dualism, which, while it can somewhat avoid the interaction problem, also has major problems of its own. Ultimately, the interaction problem defeats property dualism, and epiphenomenalism is too flawed to work.

The first argument that property dualists use is the knowledge argument. The knowledge argument asks us to imagine a genius neuroscientist known as Mary. In this scenario, Mary has spent her entire life studying colour and the way that our eyes and brain interpret it. Mary knows everything there is to know about the subject, but has spent her entire life living in a black and white room, so has never actually seen, for example, red before. The question is: if Mary sees red for the first time, will she learn a new piece of propositional knowledge? If Mary does learn something, then the mind cannot be entirely reducible to a physical thing, as, if it was, Mary would not have learnt everything new, as she knows everything about the physical side. Most property dualists believe that Mary does learn something new, and therefore the mind cannot be entirely physical in nature.

The first physicalist response to the knowledge argument is to focus on acquaintance knowledge, and to say that instead of propositional knowledge, Mary is instead becoming acquainted with what all of the facts about red look like in practice. The intuition that we have that Mary learns something new is, the physicalist argues, because she understands, rather than learns, something new. For example, I can know everything about what a desert is like, but until I see the desert in person, I am not truly familiar with what it is like in practice. By seeing it in person, I develop a better understanding of the desert. The same, the physicalist argues, could be true of Mary and the colour red. This, however, is a very weak argument, as it seems that becoming acquainted with something is just a different way of saying 'Mary learns the proposition "this is what it is like to experience red in reality"'. The response is effectively just arguing semantics, and misses the point of the argument. Substituting the word 'learn' or 'knowledge' with a synonym such as 'understanding' or 'become acquainted with' and believing that you have defeated the argument misses the point.

The next response is known as the old fact, new description response. This response defines facts as things in the world. The same fact can have many different descriptions, which are made up of concepts. This response argues that Mary learns a new concept when she sees red, and so learns a new way of describing the same fact she already knew under a physical description. For example, 'the liquid in my bottle is H2O' and 'the liquid in my bottle is water' both pick out the same physical fact, but are different descriptions using different concepts. Mary gains the new phenomenal property 'redness' and can use it in a new description, namely that seeing red has this phenomenal property in humans. But crucially, this new description is just a new way of describing the same fact that she knew before under a physical description. So, she learns no new fact and, therefore, it seems that physicalism stands. However, it seems that what it is like to see red is not a concept, but an experience. The analogy is misleading because H2O and water are concepts, not experiences of what it is like to drink water. The analogy therefore begs the question in favour of the physicalist response. Overall, then the response is insufficient and ineffective, as it is disanalogous. Furthermore, there once again seems to be no practical difference between propositional knowledge and the new concept that the physicalist attempts to use. Learning a new 'concept' or 'description' seems to just be learning a new piece of propositional knowledge but by a different name.

The final physicalist response is just to deny the argument and argue that complete knowledge would give qualia. If Mary knew all of the physical facts, then she would know what it was like to see red. As no one knows all of the physical facts, we cannot actually know if Mary would learn anything knew. Just because we can conceive of something being one way, does not mean that we can be certain that it is this way. It is entirely possible that if someone did genuinely know everything about a concept, they would know what it would be like to experience it. However, a common counterargument is that this response seems to miss the point of the argument, namely why should we suppose a complete knowledge of objective facts, such as how the eye works when it sees the specific wavelength of light that corresponds to red, gives knowledge of all of the subjective facts, like what it feels like to me to see red. If we could learn everything about a topic, including what it feels like to see or do that thing, then why would we ever do anything. There is no point, the property dualist argues, going skydiving if we can learn what it feels like by doing the far safer activity of merely reading about it. This is however, a somewhat weak counterargument as it seems entirely possible that we actually could genuinely discover everything there is to know about the physical processes and effects of skydiving and from that discover what it subjectively feels like. The reason that people go skydiving is probably merely that no one has enough time for the lifetime of learning and research that discovering everything about the physical processes would take. The problem here arises because the property dualist has attempted to make an argument based on the fact that we can conceive of something, when we can conceive of essentially anything, including many contradictory or nonsensical things. Basing an entire theory of mind of off what some finite, inherently flawed, species can conceive of is obviously deeply unsound.

Overall, then, the responses to the knowledge argument that try to explain how Mary could be learning non-propositional knowledge fail, as they are unable to make the distinction between the new thing that Mary has supposedly gained and the piece of knowledge about what red feels like. The way that physicalists can deal with the argument is merely to argue that Mary would know what the subjective experience felt like if she learnt enough about the physical properties, and that we can conceive of plenty of things that are wrong. By just denying the main premise of the argument, the physicalist, admittedly unsatisfactorily, can defend themselves against it.

The second major argument deployed by property dualists is the philosophical zombie. A philosophical zombie is an identical physical copy of you that lacks a mind. A philosophical zombie would be behaviourally indistinguishable from the person that they are a copy of. However, they would have no first-person experience or subjective awareness, and no emotion, feelings or desires. In other words, they would not have a mind. The zombie is an issue for physicalists as, the dualist argues, it proves that the mind and brain must be, in some form, separate. This is because of we can conceive of two things as separate, then, the dualist argues, they cannot be the same thing.

The physicalist could deny that philosophical zombies are conceivable, and therefore not a valid argument. Although we think that we can conceive of a philosophical zombie, we cannot, it impossible. As soon as you conceive of the physical copy you have the mind, just as when you conceive of water you have H2O, even if you do not realise this. The concept of water does not tell us whether it is H2O, there is something else about what it is that I could learn. The concept of Clark Kent is not obviously the concept of Superman, but they are in fact the same thing. Conceiving of these things as distinct is not actually enough to know if they are, as if we learnt more about them, we would discover that they are, in fact, identical. The dualist might respond to this by arguing that the physicalist is just begging the question. Whether or not you can conceive of philosophical zombies is a fact about you, not about conceivability. For example, a medieval peasant might not be able to conceive of the earth as spherical, but that does not mean that it is not. This response is broadly successful, but can be responded to by arguing that what is conceivable may not be physically possible.

The response that what is conceivable may not be physically possible is best clarified by use of an example. Water and H2O are not conceptually identical, so we can logically conceive of their distinctness. However, Water and H2O are numerically identical, so it is not actually metaphysically possible for them to be different. Through this example, we can see that conceivability tells us what we can do with our concepts, rather than facts about the real world. Given that it is equally conceivable that philosophical zombies might exist or that they might not, conceivability does not seem to actually help us. As above, conceivability is an inherently flawed thing to base an argument off of, as it can always be argued that the human mind is just too finite to truly comprehend whatever it is we think that we can conceive of.

Overall, therefore, the philosophical zombie argument is not successful, as it relies too heavily on conceivability, which is a fickle and slippery concept, that can easily be doubted or denied.

The main issue with property dualism is known as the interaction problem. The interaction problem asks how a physical and non-physical property could interact. It seems somewhat incoherent that two properties so fundamentally different, the difference between physical and non-physical properties would surely be insurmountable, could ever interact with each other. In order for two things to interact, they must have contact with each other, but as the mental properties are inherently non-physical, this would be inconceivable. The interaction problem is commonly taken to suggest that property dualism is practically impossible.

The property dualist attempts to circumvent this problem by making use of epiphenomenalism. This theory argues that the mind does not have a causal power and does not actually interact with the body. This would, if the theory works, eliminate the issue caused by the interaction problem, as the interaction would no longer need to be explained as it would not exist.

Epiphenomenalism is, however, a deeply flawed theory. The first issue is that it seems to blatantly deny our own phenomenology of mental activity. Our introspection suggests that our free will causes our actions, for example I believe that I use an umbrella because I do not want to get wet, not because of some unconscious process. Epiphenomenalism obviously contradicts that, and it seems considerably more likely that our mental introspection, one of the strongest and most certain tools we have, is correct than epiphenomenalism.

Even more detrimentally, epiphenomenalism actually refutes itself. This is because if my mind cannot cause anything, then how could it cause me to talk about epiphenomenalism. Speaking about mental states requires a causal connection between the mental states I am talking about and the physical processes that actually produce my words.

Overall, then, epiphenomenalism is obviously a very poor response to the interaction problem, and does not help to solve or explain the problem in any way. The interaction problem is, therefore, still a major issue for property dualism. Given that the philosophical zombie and knowledge argument can both be denied or responded to, property dualism is ultimately unsuccessful.