Abstract
The discussion of religious language in the previous chapters indicated a difference of opinion regarding its function: is the function of religious language to make factual assertions or does it perform a non-cognitive function? The chief views held in relation to religious language as essentially non-cognitive in nature were also surveyed. It needs to be recognised now that:
In implicit opposition to all noncognitive accounts of religious language, traditional Christian and Jewish faith has always presumed the factual character of its basic assertions. It is, of course, evident even to the most preliminary reflection that theological statements, having a unique subject matter, are not wholly like any other kind of statement. They constitute a special use of language, which it is the task of the philosophy of religion to examine. However, the way in which this language operates within historic Judaism and Christianity is much closer to ordinary factual asserting than to either the expressing of aesthetic intuitions or the declaring of ethical policies.1
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Notes and References
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This seems to be implied in Eliot Deutsch and J. A. B. van Buitenen, A Source Book of Advaita Vedānta (Honolulu: The University Press of Hawaii, 1971) p
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See Bijayananda Kar, Theories of Error in Indian Philosophy: An Analytical Study (New Delhi: Ajanya Publications, 1978)
K. Satchidananda Murty, Revelation and Reason in Advaita Vedānta (New York: Columbia University Press, 1959) p. 219.
Stanley M. Daugert (ed.), I. C. Sharma. Ethical Philosophies of India. (New York: Harper & Row, 1965) p. 53.
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© 1990 Arvind Sharma
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Sharma, A. (1990). The Problem of Falsification and Verification. In: A Hindu Perspective on the Philosophy of Religion. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-20797-8_6
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