Get 20M+ Full-Text Papers For Less Than $1.50/day. Start a 14-Day Trial for You or Your Team.

Learn More →

Why Truth Matters for the Study of Religion: A Defense of a Truth-Conditional Semantics

Why Truth Matters for the Study of Religion: A Defense of a Truth-Conditional Semantics Truth-conditional semantics holds that the meaning of a linguistic expression is a function of the conditions under which it would be true. This seems to require limiting meaningfulness to linguistic phenomena for which the question of truth or falsity is relevant. Criticisms have been raised that there are vast swatches of meaningful language that are simply not truth-related, with religion representing a particularly rich and prevalent source. I argue that if the concept of truth as used in a truth-conditional semantics is understood in ways other than correspondence to fact, there are suitable reformulations of a truth-conditional semantics that may be appropriate for understanding religion. I further argue that these reformulations offer considerable methodological advantages to the scholar of religion. http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Method & Theory in the Study of Religion Brill

Why Truth Matters for the Study of Religion: A Defense of a Truth-Conditional Semantics

Loading next page...
 
/lp/brill/why-truth-matters-for-the-study-of-religion-a-defense-of-a-truth-rbySZPaGY0

References

References for this paper are not available at this time. We will be adding them shortly, thank you for your patience.

Publisher
Brill
Copyright
Copyright © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands
ISSN
0943-3058
eISSN
1570-0682
DOI
10.1163/15700682-12341426
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

Truth-conditional semantics holds that the meaning of a linguistic expression is a function of the conditions under which it would be true. This seems to require limiting meaningfulness to linguistic phenomena for which the question of truth or falsity is relevant. Criticisms have been raised that there are vast swatches of meaningful language that are simply not truth-related, with religion representing a particularly rich and prevalent source. I argue that if the concept of truth as used in a truth-conditional semantics is understood in ways other than correspondence to fact, there are suitable reformulations of a truth-conditional semantics that may be appropriate for understanding religion. I further argue that these reformulations offer considerable methodological advantages to the scholar of religion.

Journal

Method & Theory in the Study of ReligionBrill

Published: Nov 7, 2017

There are no references for this article.