20th century language

Cognitive language

Statements that express beliefs about reality and can be judged as either true or false.

Non-cognitive language

Utterances that express mental states other than beliefs, such as feelings, values, or emotional reactions, which cannot be true or false.

Logical positivism

A 20th-century philosophical movement asserting that only scientific, empirical, or tautological statements are meaningful.

Verification principle

The rule stating that a sentence is factually significant if and only if there are observation conditions to show whether it is true or false.

Analytic statement

A proposition that is true by definition and requires no empirical testing to confirm its validity.

Synthetic statement

A proposition whose truth value depends on empirical evidence and facts about the world.

Strong verification

A strict criterion requiring that a claim be conclusively proven true or false by direct empirical observation.

Weak verification

A criterion where a claim is considered meaningful if empirical observation can establish it as probable.

Direct verification

The validation of an assertion through immediate, personal sensory observation.

Indirect verification

The validation of a claim using direct observations that support a related statement testable in principle.

Verifiable in principle

The state of knowing what theoretical observations would confirm or disconfirm a claim, even if impossible to perform currently.

Verifiable in practice

The ability to immediately conduct empirical observations to confirm or disconfirm a claim.

A. J. Ayer

The British logical positivist who wrote 'Language, Truth, and Logic' and championed verificationism to eliminate metaphysics.

Eschatological verification

The concept that religious claims about God and an afterlife can be verified after death.

John Hick

The philosopher who proposed the Parable of the Celestial City to defend the meaningfulness of religious claims.

Parable of the Celestial City

An illustration featuring two travellers on a road to show that belief in an afterlife is verifiable in principle.

Karl Popper

The philosopher of science who argued that scientific theories progress through falsification rather than verification.

Falsification principle

The rule stating that a statement is cognitively meaningful only if one can conceive of an empirical state of affairs that would disprove it.

Antony Flew

The philosopher who applied falsificationism to religious language using the Parable of the Gardener.

Parable of the Gardener

An story where a believer continuously adds qualifications to an unseen caretaker until the claim loses all substance.

Death of a thousand qualifications

The gradual erosion of a belief's assertion when it is continually modified to avoid empirical disproof.

God of the gaps

The practice of using divine action to explain phenomena that science has not yet clarified, which shrinks as scientific knowledge expands.

Basil Mitchell

The philosopher who used the Parable of the Resistance Leader to argue that religious beliefs are falsifiable but held despite counter-evidence.

Parable of the Resistance Leader

An illustration of a partisan trusting a stranger despite seeing them act for the enemy, showing that faith acknowledges contrary evidence.

R. M. Hare

The philosopher who introduced the concept of 'bliks' to argue that religious language expresses fundamental non-cognitive attitudes.

Blik

An unprovable, unrefutable foundational frame of reference or mental attitude that governs how a person interprets all experiences.

Parable of the Paranoid Student

An illustration of a person convinced their tutors want to murder them, demonstrating an unalterable non-cognitive worldview.

David Hume's psychological thesis

The view that human reason is subordinate to emotions and desires, serving primarily to justify non-cognitive feelings.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

The philosopher who shifted from the picture theory of meaning to the concept of language games in 'Philosophical Investigations'.

Picture theory of meaning

The early view that language derives significance by directly mirroring the logical structure of physical reality.

Language game

A rule-governed linguistic system embedded within a specific social activity or form of life.

Form of life

The shared cultural practices, values, and social contexts that give meaning to specific linguistic rules.

Wittgensteinian Fideism

The position that religion is a self-contained linguistic practice that cannot be judged or criticized by external criteria like science.

Natural theology

The branch of philosophy that attempts to demonstrate God's existence through reason and empirical observation of the world.

Theological anti-realism

The view that divine concepts do not refer to an objective entity external to human consciousness or culture.

Richard Swinburne

The philosopher who used the example of toys coming alive at night to show that statements can be understood without knowing how to test them.

Moritz Schlick

The founder of the Vienna Circle who asserted that knowing the meaning of a proposition requires knowing the conditions under which it would be true or false.

Willard Van Orman Quine

The philosopher who argued that logical positivism's concept of meaning is merely a modern revival of Aristotelian metaphysics.

Methodological stipulation

Ayer's defense of the verification principle as an operational rule adopted for empirical analysis rather than a factual statement.

John Frame

The philosopher who reversed the Parable of the Gardener to argue that skeptical atheism is equally unfalsifiable.

Analogical language in theology

The view that terms applied to God share a proportional, meaningful similarity to human attributes without being literal or ambiguous.

Cataphatic theology

An approach to religious language that makes positive statements about God's nature and attributes.

Apophatic theology

An approach to religious language that describes God solely by stating what God is not.

Fideism

The theological stance that religious truth is attained strictly through revelation and faith, independent of rational proof.

Tertullian

The early Christian theologian who famously rejected philosophy's role in faith by asking 'What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?'.

Blaise Pascal

The philosopher who distinguished between the abstract 'God of the philosophers' and the living divine experience of faith.

Rudolf Bultmann

The theologian who advocated demythologising religious texts to uncover their existential and ethical significance.

Paul Tillich

The theologian who argued that religious language is symbolic, pointing beyond itself and participating in the reality to which it points.

Vincent Brümmer

The philosopher who criticized the doctrine of analogy for failing to provide actual cognitive knowledge of God's nature.

Positivism

Auguste Comte's philosophical system claiming that authentic knowledge is derived exclusively from sensory experience and empirical science.

Self-defeating critique of verificationism

The argument that logical positivism's core criterion is meaningless because it is neither analytic nor empirically testable.