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Meaning, Truth and Realism in Bultmann and Lindbeck

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2008

David Fergusson
David Fergusson
Affiliation:
Department of Theology and Religious Studies, New College, Edinburgh University
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Extract

The philosopher Michael Dummett has argued that a commitment to realism in a given domain must display the following marks: a conception of reality as determinate and mind-independent, the correspondence theory of truth, and a truth conditions theory of meaning. In his own and others' philosophy we see a series of arguments at work in the theory of meaning, in epistemology and in the philosophy of science which converge upon a common rejection of such realism. It is not surprising that in such an intellectual climate we see a rise in non-realist theories of religion. Religious realities are here recognised as projected; theological truth is fixed by pragmatic criteria; and meaning is handled in terms of assertibility conditions. This rise of regulative religion has met with a variety of reactions ranging from a horror of being imprisoned by an alien philosophy to a delight that the true nature of religion has at last been brought into sharper focus.

Type
Research Article
Information
Religious Studies , Volume 26 , Issue 2 , June 1990 , pp. 183 - 198
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1990

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References

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2 An array of such arguments are elegantly expressed in Rorty's, RichardPhilosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton, 1980).Google Scholar

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46 Ibid. p. 65.

47 Ibid.

48 This is powerfully argued by McGinn, Colin in ‘An A Priori Argument For Realism’. The journal of Philosophy, LXXVI, (1979), 113–33.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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50 For a critique of the emotivist theory of ethics see MacIntyre, Alasdair, After Virtue (London: Duckworth, 1981), pp. 12 ff.Google Scholar