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What we think our specific contribution(s) here are, and might be, we will summarize in Section 3 below. Our attitude towards God-talk is not without affinities to other works. Rudolf Otto's suggestion for ‘ideograms’, inThe Idea of the Holy, transl. J.W. Harvey, (Oxford: Oxford U.P., 1950), is akin to our desire to construct a set of predicates that apply solely to God, because natural language predicates are ‘loaded’. William Alston and D.Z. Phillips, among others, have been working out the idea of a ‘religious language’ that is a kind of WittgensteinianSprachspiel within natural languages, and in that respect, our suggestion to construct a linguistic institution for the description of God is similar. Cf. William Alston,Divine Language and Human Language (New York: Cornell U.P., 1989), and previous writings, and D.Z. Phillips, ‘Religious beliefs and language games’, inRatio 12 (1970): 26–46, and hisThe Concept of Prayer (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1965).
A. Kenny,The God of the Philosophers (Oxford: Oxford U.P., 1979), p. 91.
For our explication, see ourforthcoming. The theoretical framework has been provided mainly by John Searle'sSpeech Acts (Cambridge, Ma: Cambridge U.P., 1969) and J. Searle and D. Vanderveken,Foundations of Illocutionary Logic (Cambridge, Ma: Cambridge U.P., 1985).
Cf. E. Martin, ‘Formation of concepts’, and L.E. Bourne, Jr., ‘Learning and utilization of conceptual rules’, in B. Kleinmuntz (ed.),Concepts and the Structure of Memory (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1967), and Fred Dretske'sKnowledge and the Flow of Information (Cambridge, Ma: MIT Press, 1981).
Cf. Asa Kasher, ‘What is a theory of use?’,Journal of Pragmatics 1 (1977): 111.
L. Wittgenstein,Philosophical Investigations (Oxford: Blackwell, 1953 [1989]), §29.
The copula will probably present much difficulty in the future, not only with regard to problems of ontological commitment, but also with regard to logical problems of negation, which we will not deal with here. Cf. P.T. Geach, ‘Assertion’,The Philosophical Review 74 (1965), and D.S. Clarke, Jr., ‘Negating the subject’,Philosophical Studies 43 (1983) on problems regarding the negation of the subject in a subject-predicate phrase.
Such rules can be found in John Searle,Speech Acts (Cambridge, Ma: Cambridge U.P., 1969), mainly sections 4.8 and 5.7.
See D.Z. Phillips,The Concept of Prayer (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1965), pp. 5-ff.
Cf. Russell's ‘Descriptions’ inIntroduction of Mathematical Philosophy (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1919).
For one such instance where this is precisely the case, see Geoffrey Leech'sExplorations in Semantics and Pragmatics (Amsterdam: John Benjamin's, 1980), mainly p. 58.
This is a rough breakdown of Asa Kasher's ‘What is a theory of use?’,op cit., specifically see pp. 109–111. The way we see it, Kasher has offered a viable research program for pragmatics in general, and we see no reason why LDG should not be subsumed under that general program, along with all other linguistic institutions.
A. Kenny,The God of the Philosophers (Oxford: Oxford U.P., 1979), p.92.
K. Barth,Church Dogmatics, G.W. Bromiley and T.F. Torrance (eds.), T.H.L. Parker, W.B. Johnston, H, Knight and J.L.M. Haire (trans.), (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1980). II/I 534.
K. Barth,Church Dogmatics, II/I 537,3.
K. Barth,Church Dogmatics, II/I 538,5.
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Graves, D., Alon, I. A language for the description of God. Int J Philos Relig 36, 169–186 (1994). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01316922
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01316922