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Atheist's Guide to Reality (2012 interview) + Religious Language (SEP update)

#1
C C Offline
The Atheist’s Guide to Reality: An Interview with Alex Rosenberg - (Review by Massimo Pigliucci)

http://blog.talkingphilosophy.com/?p=4209

EXCERPT: Reality, notes philosopher Alex Rosenberg, is “completely different from what most people think… stranger than even many atheists recognize.” And having spent some 40 years trying to work out “exactly how advances in biology, neuroscience and evolutionary anthropology, fit together with what physical science has long told us” Professor Rosenberg seems well placed to judge. Thinking seriously and unsentimentally about the nature of reality and life’s ‘persistent questions’ has led the R. Taylor Cole Professor of Philosophy at Duke University to some striking, disconcerting and far-reaching conclusions. In The Atheist’s Guide to Reality: Enjoying Life Without Illusions, Rosenberg aims to stretch out just what the atheist’s attachment to science really commits him to.

The author of some 14 books and an eminent philosopher of science, Professor Rosenberg has been kind enough to answer some questions from Talking Philosophy about his controversial and challenging work. The questions posed, and Professor’s Rosenberg’s replies to them have been posted in full ‘as is’. Readers will, I hope, find something in the following to stimulate both thought and discussion...

MORE: http://blog.talkingphilosophy.com/?p=4209



Religious Language
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/religious-language/

INTRO: The principal aim of research on religious language is to give an account of the meaning of religious sentences and utterances. Religious sentences are generally taken to be have a religious subject matter; a religious utterance is the production in speech or writing of a token religious sentence. In principle, religious subject matters could encompass a variety of agents, states of affairs or properties—such as God, deities, angels, miracles, redemption, grace, holiness, sinfulness. Most attention, however, has been devoted to the meaning of what we say about God.

The scope of religious language and discourse could be construed more widely. For instance, while The Song of Songs has little in the way of distinctively religious content, it could be included in the field because of its place within a religious canon. Alternatively, the field could be characterised pragmatically to include utterances which are used for religious purposes or in religious contexts (Alston 2005: 220; Donovan 1976: 1; Soskice 1999: 349; Charlesworth 1974: 3). In practice, however, philosophical treatments have not extended so broadly, instead focusing on sentences and utterances with putatively religious content. This is partly because it is difficult to find a principled characterisation of a religious context that would delineate a philosophically interesting scope for the topic. When a church congregation is told “Please kneel”, this direction appears to be in a religious context and have a religious purpose but it is difficult to see how the analysis of the meaning of this instruction would informatively contribute to the topic. It is also because the most pressing questions about religious language seem to be those that come into alignment with questions in other areas of philosophy of religion. Is there is anything distinctive about the meanings of what we say about God and other religious matters that are also the focus of metaphysical and epistemological discussion? If, in talking about God, speakers are not expressing propositions or not talking literally—to take a couple of the more radical proposals—that would accordingly require dramatic adjustments in approaching questions about knowledge of God or God’s existence.

Research in the field has a lengthy history, with sustained discussion of the meanings of religious expressions and utterances stretching back at least to the middle of antiquity. Notable treatments of the topic include the work by medieval theologians and philosophers concerned with the meanings of divine predicates, including the debates surrounding analogy and apophaticism (White 2010; Turner 1995; Scott & Citron 2016), and debates about the meaningfulness of religious language that were prompted by Ayer’s 1936 popularisation of logical positivism in Language, Truth and Logic and remained a central issue in the philosophy of religion through the mid-twentieth century. In recent years, religious language has also become a topic of interest in continental philosophy (Derrida 1989 and 1992; Marion 1994 and 1995).

A distinction that guides the selection of material for this article is between revisionary and non-revisionary accounts of religious language. Non-revisionary theories aim to explain what religious sentences and utterances mean. Revisionary theories, in contrast, propose accounts of what religious language should mean or how it should be used. While non-revisionary theories are descriptive of religious language and should do justice to linguistic data, revisionary theories are usually driven by metaphysical or epistemological considerations. This article will mainly be concerned with theories of the former type i.e., what religious utterances mean rather than what they should mean.

MORE: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/religious-language/

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#2
Magical Realist Offline
Quote:“Ultimately, science and scientism are going to make us give up as illusory the very thing conscious experience screams out at us loudest and longest: the notion that when we think, our thoughts are about anything at all, inside or outside of our minds.”

Well I'm certainly not ready for his slick new rebranding of eliminativist materialism. I stand by the idea that thoughts are about real things, and that consciousness is real, and if that makes me a "mystery monger" so be it. Also his unabashed embrace of scientism is something that alarms me. He seems to crown science as the new saving worldview that we must all bow before. I seriously doubt that. And I don't like the sort of intolerant totalitarianism that that sort of absolutism can lead to. People will not likely embrace a meaningless universe just because scientists say to. And there's nothing wrong with that.

"Eliminative materialism is the relatively new (1960s–1970s) idea that certain classes of mental entities that common sense takes for granted, such as beliefs, desires, and the subjective sensation of pain, do not exist.[5][6] The most common versions are eliminativism about propositional attitudes, as expressed by Paul and Patricia Churchland,[7]and eliminativism about qualia (subjective interpretations about particular instances of subjective experience), as expressed by Daniel Dennett and Georges Rey.[3] These philosophers often appeal to an introspection illusion."---https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eliminative_materialism
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#3
C C Offline
(Aug 8, 2017 06:33 PM)Magical Realist Wrote:
Quote:“Ultimately, science and scientism are going to make us give up as illusory the very thing conscious experience screams out at us loudest and longest: the notion that when we think, our thoughts are about anything at all, inside or outside of our minds.”

Well I'm certainly not ready for his slick new rebranding of eliminativist materialism. I stand by the idea that thoughts are about real things, and that consciousness is real, and if that makes me a "mystery monger" so be it. Also his unabashed embrace of scientism is something that alarms me. He seems to crown science as the new saving worldview that we must all bow before. I seriously doubt that. And I don't like the sort of intolerant totalitarianism that that sort of absolutism can lead to. People will not likely embrace a meaningless universe just because scientists say to. And there's nothing wrong with that.

"Eliminative materialism is the relatively new (1960s–1970s) idea that certain classes of mental entities that common sense takes for granted, such as beliefs, desires, and the subjective sensation of pain, do not exist.[5][6] The most common versions are eliminativism about propositional attitudes, as expressed by Paul and Patricia Churchland,[7]and eliminativism about qualia (subjective interpretations about particular instances of subjective experience), as expressed by Daniel Dennett and Georges Rey.[3] These philosophers often appeal to an introspection illusion."---https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eliminative_materialism

In denying propositional attitudes or language / conceptual products in general, such scientism would be in conflict with its own validity; as well as atheism being a function-less stance because there are no theism beliefs for it to reject to begin with. But the contradiction and incoherence of it (and unconcern about any other consequences falling out of _X_ proclamations) makes no impact because the demand of reason that statements and ideas "hang together well" can be rejected along with the rest of the historical, philosophical background (just more affairs of "folk psychology").

If not for that, one could say that this is definitely a case of atheism being a doctrine or ideology, in contrast to etymological "atheism" just meaning "minus belief in gods" without an appended system, agenda, or worldview.

The elimination of thought and its orientations is sort of akin to nihilism about computer code or programming languages, due to all that stuff reducing down to the on-off states of the microscopic electronic devices at the bottom of a technological substrate. But it's that upper-level system of programming, introduced from the outside, that the binary states (whether storage or processing) are conforming to with regard to their patterns. Similarly, humans are led around in extraordinarily complex ways by the rules, units, and relational organization of their language, like a leash attached to the ring in a bull's nose.

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