Soft Contextualism in the Context of Religious Language

When trying to do justice to the discourse of a certain religion it is often implicitly assumed that one’s analysis should accord with and respect the opinions held by the people preaching and practicing that religion. One reason for this assumption may be the acceptance of a more general thesis, that adherents of a given religious tradition cannot fail to know the proper content and function of the language and concepts constitutive of it. In this article, the viability of this thesis is explored through an investigation of the extent to which people belonging to a certain religion may be in error about what they mean. I assume that people, if mistaken, are wrong according to a standard which is mind-dependent enough for them to be committed and accountable to it but, at the same time, mind-independent enough for them to be mistaken about it. I try to account for this delicate balance by identifying the standard with a social norm, a mind-independent object of worship or people’s in

The Balance of Meaning : Exploring the possibility of a recognition-transcendent meaning of religious and existentially important terms

Can we be mistaken or ignorant about the meaning of our own words? This dissertation explores this question. More specifically it investigates to what extent and in what sense, if at all, the semantic meaning of religious and existentially important words – like ‘God’, ‘friendship’, ‘justice’ or ‘life’ – can be recognition-transcendent to the competent user of them. The possibility of words having such a meaning is assumed to presuppose a delicate balance: The meaning must be external and objective enough to the user for them to possibly be mistaken or ignorant about it. At the same time, the meaning must be internal and subjective enough to the user for them to be committed to it; to be what they mean by the terms in question. In my dissertation I put forward and examine the viability of several attempts to make sense of this balance and, hence, the possibility of recognition-transcendent meaning. In the course of doing so a number of important questions are addressed and investigated. Can people belonging to a certain religion misunderstand the meaning of the words they use to express their religious conviction? Is the reason for our failure to present an adequate definition of ‘life’ the fact that it refers to an unknown natural kind? And if we try to make explicit what is implicit in our use of religious and existentially important words, can intuition-driven conceptual analysis aid us in this endeavour? And to what extent can religious people refer to their object of worship while being mistaken about its true nature? I conclude that the meaning of religious and existentially important terms can be recognition-transcendent and this in more than one sense