Abstract

This dissertation will examine the relationship between epistemological questions and the testimonial or proclamatory nature of religious belief based in Paul Ricoeur's linking of metaphor to "the hermeneutics of imagination." My argument is built around the issue of sense and reference in religious language; we can say along hermeneutic lines that religious symbols and narratives have an internal structure which "reconfigures" the real, but we must also ask "what exactly is disclosed in this process?" In forming a potential answer to this question, I analyze the historical and thematic issues which have shaped our understanding of metaphor. This involves an examination of philosophical and epistemological arguments surrounding the relation of ontology to language, schema, and cognition in Aristotle, Kant, Heidegger, and Hegel as they correlate to Paul Ricoeur's thesis. I focus on how the representational and referential function of religious concepts can be developed in a way which avoids strict coherentism. In my view, we can say that there is a qualified need to allow for a form of linguistic reference which takes into account some epistemological considerations. ;Drawing from Hilary Putnam and Susan Haack, I describe this moderate view of reference as based on "internal realism." We are not entirely bound by natural description or ontological forms of disclosure, but we can locate ourselves somewhere between these kinds of experience. I develop this linking of two modes in terms of cognitive-psychological processes which occur through the acquisition of analogical and metaphoric schemes. ;This study concludes with a critique of Ricoeur's use of metaphor as the basis for religious reconfiguration. His analysis of the metaphoric function, in this context, eradicates the epistemic functions of language and leads to a position which is purely linguistic and contextual. I believe an analysis of lower-level analogies allows us to make a criticism of his view. We may then open a way to look at a different version of the representational aspects of religious discourse