God in the Act of Reference: Debating Religious Realism and Non-Realism (Routledge New Critical Thinking in Religion, Theology and Biblical Studies) [1 ed.] 9780754605447, 0754605442

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GOD IN THE ACT OF REFERENCE To claim to believe in God without accepting that God exists independently of human minds would mean reducing God to merely a human construct, thus not real enough for being the object of religious worship. This book sets out to challenge this common view on existence and religious belief. Arguing from concrete examples of language use in children’s make-believe play and other ordinary situations, Erica Appelros suggests that what makes us consider something to be real involves our capacities to relate to our surroundings - not only on grounds of their physical characteristics but also on grounds of human construction. This book makes a substantial contribution to the contemporary debate within philosophy of religion on religious realism and non-realism, and suggests innovative and constructive solutions to the perennial philosophical and religious issue of what is meant by talking about God and God’s existence.

ASHGATE NEW CRITICAL THINKING IN THEOLOGY & BIBLICAL STUDIES Ashgate New Critical Thinking in Theology & Biblical Studies presents an open-ended series of quality research drawn from an international field of scholarship. The series aims to bring monograph publishing back into focus for authors, the international library market, and student, academic and research readers. Headed by an international editorial advisory board of acclaimed scholars, this series presents cutting-edge research from established as well as exciting new authors in the field. With specialist focus, yet clear contextual presentation, books in the series aim to take theological and biblical research into new directions; opening the field to new critical debate within the traditions, into areas of related study, and into important topics for contemporary society.

Series Editorial Board: Paul Fiddes, Regent’s Park College, University of Oxford, UK Anthony Thiselton, University of Nottingham, UK Jeffrey Astley, NEICE, University of Durham, UK Timothy Jervis Gorringe, University of Exeter, UK Alan Torrance, St Andrews University, UK Adrian Thatcher, College of St Mark & St John, Plymouth, UK Mary Grey, Sarum College, Salisbury, UK Richard Roberts, University of Lancaster, UK Judith M. Lieu, King’s College London, UK Terrence Tilley, University of Dayton, Ohio, USA Rebecca S. Chopp, Emory University, USA Miroslav Volf, Yale Divinity School, USA Edward Farley, Vanderbilt University, USA Stanley J. Grenz, Carey Theological College, Vancouver, Canada Vincent Brummer, University of Utrecht, The Netherlands Gerhard Sauter, University of Bonn, Germany

God in the Act of Reference

Debating religious realism and non-realism

ERICA APPELROS Uppsala University

O

Routledge Taylor &. Francis Group

LONDON AND NEW YORK

First published 2002 by Ashgate Publishing Published 2016 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon 0X14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business Copyright © Erica Appelros 2002 Erica Appelros has asserted her moral right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Appelros, Erica God in the act of reference : debating religious realism and non-realism. - (Ashgate new critical thinking in theology & biblical studies) 1.Realism 2.Philosophy and religion I.Title 261.5*1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Appelros, Erica, 1964God in the act of reference: debating religious realism and non-realism / Erica Appelros. p. cm. —(Ashgate new critical thinking in theology & biblical studies) Includes bibliographical references (p.) and index. ISBN 978-0-7546-0544-7 1. Philosophical theology. 2. Realism. I. Title. II. Series. BT40 .A66 2001 210—dc21 2001046172 ISBN 13: 978-0-7546-0544-7 (hbk)

Contents Acknowledgements 1 Realists and non-realists 2 Reality as conceptualized 3 Reference as context dependent 4 Reference and reality in make-believe contexts 5 An analysis of reference and reality in religion 6 Concluding remarks Bibliography Index

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vii 1 17 57 105 137 177 183 203

Acknowledgements Writing a scholarly book is not a task one takes on single-handedly. It requires the help and assistance of other people. I therefore wish to take the opportunity to thank those who have contributed to this book coming into being. At the same time, it must be stressed that none of them are to blame for any deficiencies which may remain. First of all I want to thank professor Eberhard Herrmann, whose continuous encouragement and insightful remarks have been invaluable for the development of my work. I am also grateful to former and present participants of the research seminar in philosophy of religion at Uppsala University for their open-minded and stimulating discussions on parts of my work. For lack of space I will mention by name only Dr. Stefan Eriksson, Docent Olof Franck, and F.M. Ulf Zackariasson. The joy of research has been enhanced by the multifaceted and friendly academic milieu provided by my colleagues at the Theology Department of Uppsala University. I am grateful to Dr. Janet Martin Soskice for her constructive comments on an earlier version of this book. I want to express my gratitude to the Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation for financing two years of research. I am also grateful to friends and family for their practical help in getting the text ready for publication. Finally, I want to thank my parents for their unfailing love and support. I am also indebted to my son Marcus for efficiently keeping me from becoming totally absorbed in the abstract world of philosophy. Uppsala, 19 February 2001 Erica Appelros

1 Realists and non-realists Introduction People talk. Incessantly. People talk about all sorts of things and in all sorts of circumstances. Having access to a language for communication is partly what distinguishes us as human beings. We talk about our neighbours, the novels we read, our dreams, our ambitions, and our children’s real or imagined achievements. Our children talk about Superman and Santa Claus. Most of us have at least on some occasion talked about God, and some of us may frequently address God in words of prayer. In the same breath we cover anything from frying pans to true love; we ask a congregation for money to repair the church roof and thank God for the resulting contribution in the next sentence. Philosophers, on the other hand, supposedly standing aloof from this mishmash of mundane matters of conversation, only talk about two things: mountains and unicorns, or, rather, about two categories of words: words that refer to that which exists, and words that do not so refer. But is there really, in all our diverse linguistic practices, such a sharp dividing line between referring and non-referring expressions? Do indeed all those disparate matters that we talk about let themselves be nicely streamed into two mutually exclusive categories: having mindindependent existence or being a product of our wild imagination, a mere fantasy? I say no. We need theories of reference and existence that do justice to our actual human enterprises and the complexity of our natural language use. As a result of the common close equation of reference with existence, a great many actual language examples where reference apparently takes place cannot be analysed in terms of reference. Philosophers therefore need to reconsider what they mean by reference and existence. When carried through, this reconsideration will have far reaching implications for a much debated subject within philosophy of religion. 1

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The topic of religious realism and non-realism (or anti-realism as it is also called), diverse and multifaceted as it is, has recently caused much debate in contemporary philosophy of religion. As Joseph Runzo remarks in the introduction to a collection of essays on the subject: “no issue is more trenchant [in contemporary philosophy of religion] than that of religious realism vs. religious non-realism”.1 If you believe in God you also believe that God exists, that God is real. If you call upon God in prayer you believe that you by means of your words refer to that God. This is the traditional religious common sense view of God, reality, and reference. Moreover, it seems quite reasonable. After all, who would put their life in the hands of God if they did not believe that God existed? Who would pray without believing that anyone is there listening? As we all know, however, things are not always that easy for philosophers. Some philosophers of religion, so-called religious non-realists, seem paradoxically enough to have suggested that we can indeed believe in a God that we do not believe exists and pray to a God that is not considered to be real. Others, so-called religious realists, have opposed this, since, given the religious common sense view described above, this would not be a religiously adequate form of religious belief. The debate between religious realism and religious non-realism is a debate between (at least) two philosophical positions, all of which claim that their own interpretation of God, reality, and reference is the correct or the best interpretation. Much energy in recent writings is spent on working out what the various standpoints involve. Is there really a complete dichotomy between religious realism and religious anti- or non-realism, or is the whole controversy misdirected? D. Z. Phillips and other Wittgensteinian philosophers of religion hold that religious realism and non-realism are equally confused; whereas others, both realists such as William P. Alston, Janet Martin Soskice, Roger Trigg, and John Hick, non-realists such as Don Cupitt, and atheists such as Robin Le Poidevin, claim that there is a real issue at stake concerning the reality of God in the religious realism and non­ realism debates.2 Yet others, sometimes called internal realists, such as Eberhard Herrmann, wish to avoid the two extremes and take into account the good intentions from both sides. Agreeing that there is a real issue at stake and that for us to be rational beings we need to be able to distinguish between our inquiries and the object of our 1Runzo 1993, p xiii. 2See Phillips 1993a and 1995b; Alston 1995; Trigg 1998; Hick 1993b; Cupitt 1993a and 1997b; and Le Poidevin 1996.

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inquiries, Herrmann still maintains that the reality we thus talk about and inquire into is not a metaphysical reality, but is always a reality that is conceptualized by us.3 It is generally and tacitly assumed by realists that in order to believe in God and partake wholeheartedly in religious activities, one must be a realist with respect to religious matters. The debate is therefore too often silenced before it has even had a chance to get started, religious non-realism not even being considered an alternative to discuss. Some recent attempts have been made, though, to establish a charitable dialogue between realists and non-realists.4 In order to facilitate dialogue and understanding, both religious realists and non­ realists must be willing to leave their ringsides and move on to explore other approaches than the dualisms and dichotomies often invoked. For this, new analytical tools are needed. I intend to provide them.

Realism, anti-realism, and non-realism During the last century we have witnessed the rise of postmodernism, constructivism, deconstruction, relativism, and the questioning of objectivity, dualism, and absolute truth. These theories are in an important sense reactions against metaphysical realism and a realist conception of truth. The reaction against realism is accentuated within postmodernism in its deconstruction of the Western metaphysical tradition. Metaphysical realism is traditionally understood as an ontological theory that includes the semantic issues of truth and reference and how language is mapped onto an independently existing world. It typically holds that whatever is said to exist, be it the natural world with most of its common-sense and scientific objects, or God, must exist independently of our knowledge, theories, and conceptual structures. There are a number of subject matters where realism is disputed in various ways. The reality of the physical world has been disputed by idealists and phenomenalists; the reality of mathematical objects is disputed by intuitionists, constructivists, and formalists; the reality of future and past events is disputed by neutralists; the reality of mental events is disputed by behaviourists; the reality behind ethical statements is disputed by subjectivists; and the reality of scientific entities referred to by means of theory dependent terms is disputed by instrumentalists. Religion is no exception. The statements disputed in 3Herrmann 1999. See also Putnam 1981 and 1987. 4See Crowder 1997.

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terms of realism and non-realism are here about so-called supernatural entities such as God. Do these entities exist independently of human minds or not? In this postmodern age and with a view of reality as a human construction, the question arises whether religion can still be functional. As Peter Berger remarked: once we realize that the sacred canopy is a cultural product, not a gift of the gods, that canopy can no longer provide protection. Or, in the view of Freud, once mankind realizes that religion is an illusion, an infantile projection of its wishes, a mature person cannot take refuge in it any more.5 There being no general argument for or against realism, one must for each area investigate what is in dispute and in what way it is in dispute.6 The area where realism is most frequently discussed today is philosophy of science, in particular physical theories such as quantum mechanics. Whenever the issue of realism and anti-realism is discussed in general terms, it is therefore likely that what is said concerns the scientific subject matter, even when this is not explicitly stated. Arguments from the discussion about scientific realism and anti-realism are not, however, automatically transferable to other areas where the issue of realism and anti-realism is debated. Caution is therefore needed when applying supposedly general arguments and concepts from the debate on realism and anti-realism within science to the area of philosophy of religion.7 In order to proceed with a discussion on realism and non-realism with regard to religious entities, we thus need to delineate the subject matter of religion, within which the issue of realism and non-realism derives its meaning. Definitions of what religion is are legion. For my purposes, though, neither a realist definition of religion, which incorporates metaphysical dogmas and concentrates on beliefs and religious experiences, nor a non-realist definition of religion, which incorporates other metaphysical dogmas, albeit negative ones, and concentrates on the reductive aspects of religion, is fruitful. Since I am concerned with how reference to God might be explicated in a non-reductive and religiously adequate way, but without presupposing metaphysical realism, it would not be well-advised to have a standpoint on metaphysical realism built into the formulation of the problem itself. To avoid that, let us take the metaphysically most neutral approach and understand religion from the perspective of the religious actions and religious practices in which the religious beliefs are logically 5Berger 1967; Freud 1928. 6See Dummett 1993, p 230 ff. 7See Soskice 1985; and Peacocke 1984.

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implied, rather than the other way round.8 Specifically, for the discussion of reference, I shall characterize a religious practice partly as a linguistic practice where the associated conceptual structures in essential respects rely on conceptualizations that are very weakly dependent on physical characteristics. For practical reasons only, the examples given throughout the book will be taken from a Christian context, since that is the religious context with which I am the most familiar. Religious practices are situated in a human linguistic context, hence I take my starting point in the concrete human situation. In order to carry out a philosophical analysis of actual examples of language use, we need to make clear what factors contribute to them. My analysis, besides using standard philosophical arguments, has therefore involved methods and relevant material from other scholarly traditions, such as empirical theories about human development, communication, sociology, psychology, and play. Besides bearing in mind that the issue of realism is always tied to a specific subject-matter, there is a further complication: we must also distinguish between its metaphysical, epistemological, and semantic dimensions.9 What is at stake in the realist-non-realist debates within a religious context concerns minimally the metaphysical dimension, where the reality of God is denied or affirmed by way of denying or affirming the possibility of God’s mind-independent and unconceptualized existence. Thus also the atheist who denies God’s existence by claiming that there is in fact no entity corresponding to the religious believer’s use of the word “God”, though it is a meaningful possibility to discuss, is in this sense a realist with regard to religious entities. A religious non-realist denies the very possibility of speaking of God as a mind-independent and unconceptualized entity. Religious realism understood in this way may be compared to so-called entityrealism within the philosophy of science, where all that is at stake is whether terms in scientific theories are taken to refer to real existing entities or not.10 Religious metaphysical anti- or non-realism in this sense may then be compared to scientific instrumentalism or anti­ realism. The entities spoken about are here claimed to be fictional entities, useful as tools and posits within a theory without having to be postulated to exist and without the theory being understood as describing an underlying reality.11 8See e.g. Riesebrodt 2000, pp 35-50. 9See Folina 1995; and Kukla 1998, pp 3-11. 10See Hacking 1983; and Devitt 1984 and 1991. 11See Fine 1991; and van Fraassen 1980.

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Adding an epistemological dimension, scientific realism in its more full-blown form additionally involves a claim that current science is more or less correct in what it states about the entities it refers to. Religious realism also involves various degrees of epistemological realism or anti-realism. Thus anything from a naive realism, where it is assumed that we can know and accurately describe what God is like, to a critical realism a la John Hick, where it is acknowledged that we cannot know anything about God and that everything we say about God is a human and cultural construction, is comprised within religious realism. At the bottom of the debates on realism and non-realism, finally, is the semantic dimension, which deals with realism in terms of truth. A semantic realist adheres to the principle of bivalence and claims that a statement must always be either true or false, whether we can know it or not: there are evidence-transcendent truths. Since the truth or falsity of a statement depends on whether the statement refers to existing referents, and whether these are as they are described in the statement, reference is important. A semantic anti-realist, on the other hand, rejects the law of bivalence and accepts that statements need not be either true or false and that there may not always be a determinate answer to the question of truth. The terminology used in the debates over realism in the context of religion as well as in other contexts is, as could be expected, in a tangled state. In the context of religion we find “alethic religious realism”, “irrealism”, “critical realism”, “instrumentalism”, “non-realism”, “internal realism”, and “anti-realism”, each of which combines and emphasizes the above described metaphysical, epistemological, and semantic dimensions differently.12 John Hick, for example, combines metaphysical realism with epistemological anti-realism. In the eyes of those who combine metaphysical realism with epistemological realism of a stronger kind, this makes Hick an anti-realist, whereas in the eyes of those who oppose metaphysical realism, Hick is regarded as a realist. In order to cover all instances of reactions against metaphysical realism, Michael Dummett launched the term “anti-realism” as a general and value-neutral term, not restricted to any one context or theory. In practice, however, no terminology remains value-neutral for long, and when talking about contemporary actual denials of religious 12See Alston 1995; Soskice 1985 and 1987; Crowder 1997; Herrmann 1995, 1996, and 1999; Trigg 1997; and Hick 1993b.

Realists and non-realists 7 metaphysical realism, I shall as a rule instead use the term “non­ realism”. Even though not originally intended that way, the term “anti-realism” has in a religious context taken on almost a derogatory meaning, which means that hardly anyone wants to associate with it. Also, a certain praxis of language use is beginning to develop, in which “religious non-realism” seems slightly more preferred to “religious anti­ realism” as the generic term, even though the terminology, as we have seen, still varies. For the sake of clarity I shall not use the term “non­ realism” when specifically speaking about Wittgensteinian approaches or internal realism. Settling for this terminology does not in any way imply that I shall enter into the various realist and non-realist debates, arguing for or against one or other realist or non-realist position. That is not my purpose. My object is rather to investigate and question the underlying assumptions of one of the central objections against religious non­ realism, namely the referential objection.

A question of reference The general view of reference that underpins most specific theories about reference is that in an act of reference a linguistic expression is connected to an independently and previously existing object, the referent. Once located, it is assumed that the referent can be treated as if unconceptualized and evaluated independently of the context in which the reference was made. If there is no object, there is no referent, and the linguistic expression is said to be non-referential; or the act of reference is said to have been unsuccessful or to have failed. Traditionally, the correspondence between word and referent has been seen to consist in a correctly applied description that uniquely identifies the object. In other, more recent, theories of reference it is acknowledged that for successful reference to take place, there need not be a uniquely identifying correspondence between the meaning of the word and the characteristics of the referent. Linguistic expressions can be used to refer directly to an object, without the detour around senses. The point of contact between word and object that secures the reference can be otherwise established, for instance by a causal relation through an historically and socially transmitted and accepted language use. Behind the expectations that there are independent and unconceptualized referents around, to which we refer, lies a commonly held view on language and reality: the mapping view on language, or, as it is also called, the picture theory of language. The names imply

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that there is something there to be mapped or pictured. The ontological thesis behind this view is that reality is independent from our languages and can be represented by use of language. From this view on language also follows the intertranslatability thesis. Basically, reality is there for all to discover, and it is the same for all of us. Therefore, all languages talk about the same thing, namely reality-as-it-is-in-itself, although in slightly different manners. According to the mapping view on language there is a sharp divide between language and reality, and between our referring expressions and the entities referred to. The opposite to a mapping view on language is a view on language that does not draw this sharp dividing line between language and reality: a construction view on language. It holds that reality is intrinsically connected with and created by language. In its extreme interpretation a construction view on language seems unlikely and counterintuitive. Surely, when I recently slipped on a patch of ice and fractured a rib in the process, more than words and language was involved. What I ate for breakfast today was not words; nor was it created by words. On the other hand, what makes me consider the musli and milk that I had for breakfast to be proper breakfast food rather than something to feed the hamster, does have to do with conceptual construction. And that I can communicate at all about having breakfast this morning is of course also dependent on linguistic construction. A less extreme interpretation of a construction view on language accepts that language matter for how we perceive and conceptualize reality.13 According to the view put forward in this book, which avoids the more extreme accusations of relativism and adheres to a modified version of intertranslatability, language also matters for what reality is for us, in the respect that what we call reality always is reality conceptualized by us. We conceptualize it from our own viewpoint and as we have been taught and socialized into doing. So what we consider reality to be depends on us and the human beings we are. Religious realism claims that religious language, or, to be more specific, the words used when talking about God, do in some way causally originate in, refer directly to, or reasonably accurately describe and correspond to the divine reality existing independently of our human attempts to refer to it. If God did not exist in this way, and was nothing but a human invention or linguistic construction, then, it is assumed, we must conclude that our religious belief was mistaken; the supposedly referring expressions turned out to refer to nothing. 13See Grace 1987.

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Religious non-realism, on the other hand, claims that we do not need to postulate such an independent referent to the word “God” for religious practices to be meaningful and religiously functional. The non-realist apparently accepts the general view of reference along with the realist, but claims that even though God-talk may not be primarily referential it can nonetheless be meaningful. The referential objection put forward by the realist against religious non-realism can be formulated as follows: In religious non-realism “God” is deliberately not taken to refer to a God who exists independently of our human conceptualizations of God. In fact “God” does not refer at all, or refers at the most to an imaginary construct. However, religious practices, such as prayer, conceptually presuppose that God exists and can be referred to; they also presuppose psychologically that the religious believer believes so. Thus, since religious non-realism fails to refer to the real God required for true religion, it is religiously inadequate. So far the realist objection. In some naturalistic and reductionist functional explanations of religion it is claimed that the believers do not in fact refer to what they believe they refer to by the use of “God”.14 The believers are accordingly in the wrong, and if they were to correct their beliefs about what they refer to, their religious activities would cease, which some think would be a good thing, and others not. By a religious realist this stance is often classified among the non-realist approaches to religion treated in this book, since it denies the existence of God. In relation to the referential objection against religious non-realism, this approach is, however, unproblematic, since it assumes the believer to be a metaphysical religious realist. Revisionary religious alternatives are often prompted by concerns for the oppressed (in terms of gender, race, politics, psychology, and so forth), and framed in non-realistic terms, since according to them, belief in a metaphysical God is the essential cause of oppression.15 These revisionists realize that religion has some functional benefits. But since they at the same time hold that religion, as traditionally practised, makes false claims about reality, for example that there is a God, they propose a revised, non-realist religious practice that does not incorporate such falsehoods. This, however, involves new, negative metaphysical statements, which in their turn may have other unwanted concequences. There is, for example, a morally based feminist criticism of religious non-realism, belonging to the larger discourse on gender 14See e.g. Geertz 1999. 15See Hampson 1996; and Cupitt 1997a and 1998b.

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and the possibility of making feminist claims without an absolute epistemological ground.16 It is cautioned that the breaking up of dichotomies and patriarchal language must not go so far so as to leave no means to achieve political justice for oppressed and marginalized people. For this purpose some kind of realism is seen to be required. All these realist and non-realist areas of debate rest on a dualistic view on reference and existence. The reactions against realism referred to above have one thing in common. They all want to be able to go on talking about the same subject matter that the realist talks about. And they all want to participate in (roughly) the same activities and practices as the realist does. The scientists will partake in experiments, and will build electronic guns; the believers will take part in prayer and worship, and strive to do good deeds. There are differences in the practices that are occasioned by their stance on realism, but roughly speaking the above assertion is correct. Where they do differ, however, is in their understanding of what is spoken about, what the terms used refer to. According to the realist we can refer to independently existing objects. These are treated as if they were unconceptualized, although it is believed that in principle one single conceptualization has absolute priority in a true description of an object. If the object exists and if what is said about it is correct, then the scientific theory is true or the religious practice adequate. Not everyone accepts, however, that the grounds for why one can adequately engage in a human practice and regard its statements as meaningful must be that they correspond to reality in itself. An alternative account of on what grounds the practice engaged in is seen to be adequate and its statements meaningful is then required. Such accounts are given as the constructive parts of non-realist reactions against realism, for example Braithwaite’s conative account of what makes religious language meaningful, or Cupitt’s therapeutical use of religious language.17 For more than two decades the now retired Anglican priest and philosopher of religion, Don Cupitt, inspired by among others Braithwaite and Feuerbach, has been a nail in the eye of traditional theistic realism by publishing a string of books challenging the very basic assumptions of realist belief in God. What is disturbing about him, many realists seem to think, is that he dismisses realist belief in 16See Anderson 1998, p x; Hekman 1990, pp 152-158 (realist positions); and Webster 1996 (non-realist position). 17Braithwaite 1971; cf. Phillips 1976, p 140; and Mackie 1982, p 229. Cupitt 1991 and 1992.

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God, but still wants to propose a revisionist continuation of religion on a non-realist basis. Following his Sea of Faith series, broadcast on the BBC in 1984, an organization taking the same name as the TV-series was formed with the purpose of promoting faith as a human creation. Several writers have emerged from within it, promoting religious non­ realism, although not always following Cupitt in his later increasingly more radical and postmodernist writings.18 Cupitt’s reason for abandoning religious metaphysical realism is that it is oppressive and damaging for human autonomy and therefore religiously inadequate for our time. More generally, the modern view on history has made us aware that even religion and the use of the word “God” have a human history. The linguistic turn has made us aware that language structures our world and thoughts; there is not one truth or one reality any more. For Cupitt, language is ontologically and logically primary to our world.19 Language is, furthermore, selfreferential in the sense that it cannot refer to anything that is not already ordered and structured, felt and expressed by means of human language.20 Cupitt states that there is nothing outside of language. However, denying that there is a reality apart from language implies knowledge of what there is or is not outside of language. Cupitt cannot consistently do that; yet, he seemingly does it, and is in consequence charged with inconsistency.21 Reading Cupitt charitably, however, one notices that his whole body of writing emphasizes that the world for us is the only world we can coherently speak about.22 Consequently, Cupitt is not concerned with making a distinction between our world, contained within the boundaries of language, and an unconceptualized world, as we cannot talk about an unconceptualized world without thereby making it into our world. In view of this, the charge of inconsistency may well be dropped. Turning now from our natural world as a construction to the religious realm, Cupitt does say that there is no God. He states, for example, that only sentimentality makes John Hick claim the possibility of a supernatural realm beyond language to which we can refer to as God, in spite of his acceptance that all of religious language, meaning, and practice is culturally and linguistically formed.23 The 18See e.g. Crowder 1997; Dawes 1992; Freeman 1993 and 1997; and Hart 1993 and 1995. 19Cupitt 1992, p 71; 1997a, p 76; and 1998a, p 124. 20Cupitt 1997a, p 103f. 21 See White 1994, p 187f. 22Cupitt 1995, p 97; and 1997b, p 19. 23 Cupitt 1998a, pp 39-41.

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reason for taking this stance cannot, again, self-consistently be that Cupitt has made a metaphysical investigation into what there is and found that there are no such things as gods. So, when Cupitt states that there is no God, one might charitably interpret him as meaning that talk about a metaphysical God is semantically meaningless; religious experiences or claims about God cannot be made outside of language. We can of course understand such claims mythologically and benefit psychologically from them, and that is indeed Cupitt’s suggestion for the proper use of religious language. A less charitable interpretation would impute to him the acceptance of the assumptions of metaphysical realism, namely that the statement that there is a God is true or false depending on whether there is a God or not out there. This latter interpretation is also the one that has the most support from Cupitt’s own writings. Referring to himself, Cupitt says: “I still pray and love God, even though I fully acknowledge that no God actually exists.” The context makes it clear that by a God who “actually exists” Cupitt means “the God of realistic philosophical theism, the metaphysical God, the super-Being out there” .24 What, then, is God on Cupitt5s views? In his early writings Cupitt was satisfied with defining God as the sum of our values and spiritual ideals.25 Constantly developing his philosophy, however, Cupitt has recently outlined a theory of religious meaning, according to which God is a metaphorical and mythical representation of language.26 The word “God” does not refer to anything, but it signifies “the non­ objective object of religious feeling ... it is a catalyst for the expression of religious feeling or perhaps the vehicle that carries an expressed feeling, but it is no more than that”.27 In either case, Cupitt is guilty of the charge of reductionism when he claims that God is nothing else than the sum of our values, or a vehicle for our feelings, or the main character in a mythological story. For, on Cupitt’s views, this is all there is to God. The reason to engage in a religious practice is entirely pragmatic and therapeutic. D. Z. Phillips is another philosopher of religion who opposes the traditional religious realist conception of God. He endorses a Wittgensteinian view on language and the role of philosophy as providing conceptual clarifications of purported philosophical problems, with the aim of dissolving them. Within philosophy of religion the pivotal problem has been God’s existence. The religious 24Cupitt 25Cupitt 26Cupitt 27Cupitt

1997a, pp 85 and 62. 1984, p 269. 1997a, pp 16 and 47. 1998a, p 142.

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realist argues that God exists, and the atheist and religious non-realist argue that God does not exist. Phillips claims that the whole issue rests on a conceptual mistake, namely the assumption that God is an object among other objects, that can or cannot exist, and that the whole debate therefore is misguided and confused.28 God’s existence is made into an hypothesis, whereas God in religion is eternal, inescapable, and not possible to imagine as not existing. Philosophy, Phillips claims, often makes the mistake of separating a belief from the actions and attitudes that are internally related to the belief. This internal relation is not, however, a relation of reduction; a belief cannot be reduced to the action in which it is appropriate, nor is it caused by the action. This distinguishes Phillips from a reductionist and instrumentalist kind of religious non-realism. But to the extent that Phillips opposes the realist conception of God as a distinct entity that either exists or does not exist, he takes part in the reaction against realism, and is in fact often categorized together with religious non-realists such as Cupitt.29 Both Cupitt’s therapeutical non-realism and Phillips’s don’twant-to-call-it-anything-for-it’s-not-a-theory-ism are candidates for constituting an alternative to religious metaphysical realism. Neither of them will say that “God” refers to an hypothetically existing and unconceptualized entity out there, though the reasons they give differ. However, if one does not want to depend on metaphysical realism, there is additionally a need for an alternative account of what the terms used within the practice refer to. Since realism is still the norm to which one must relate, the response to the latter requirement has often been an acceptance of the realist view of reference, leading to the conclusion that the disputed terms do not refer to anything at all. Thereby the non-realist has left the door ajar for objections having to do with whether it is meaningful to believe in a God that does not exist, whether fictional entities can really matter to us, and so forth. According to a realist view on reference there are only two positions available: either a linguistic term refers to an independently existing object, or it does not refer at all (refers to nothing). This places the non-realist in an unacceptable dilemma, the first horn of which is shunned for philosophical reasons, and the second horn of which entails severe difficulties concerning the adequacy of the resulting religious practice. One need not accept the dilemma in the first place, however, since the way it is presented presupposes accounts of truth, reference, and reality that are in no way necessary to accept. W hat this book is 28Phillips 1993a, p 85ff. Cf. Scott and Moore 1997. 29See Hick 1989, p 172; and Trigg 1997, p 217.

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all about is to suggest a way in which to account for what the disputed terms refer to that steers clear of this dilemma. There is a tendency in dealing with the “to be or not to be” of referential theories to lean in one of two directions. Those in a postmodernist or Wittgensteinian tradition tend to argue for a deflationary view about the need for theory. It is enough to describe the various situations in which reference takes place and say what reference amounts to in each single case. No general theory of reference is needed at the cost of reintroducing unwanted dualisms. On the other side are the traditionalists of all factions who want a general theory of reference as a theory about how language links us to real, mind-independent objects. I wish to propose a third alternative. Whereas I agree that what reference is must be understood from within the contexts wherein the references are made, I also hold that one can theorize more generally about what reference is. A general theory can be devised that makes allowance for contextuality, specifying criteria for the kinds of factors that are involved in reference, and their relative importance. Such a theory can then be applied to various contexts, making it unnecessary to start all over again in each and every situation in order to say something about what reference amounts to in that situation. I am thus not satisfied either with leaving aside the analytical approach and the demand for a theoretical account for the issue of reference, or with leaving aside the fact that we in our ordinary language use do talk about all sorts of things in various ways, gods and chairs alike, depending on context, and may legitimately consider them to be real. I sympathize with Phillips’s approach of questioning the shared metaphysical and referential assumptions of realists as well as non­ realists. I do not wish, however, to withdraw from the analytical paradigm of the debate to the extent that no coherent reasons can be provided for why the assumptions are not valid. Although I too make use of examples to prove my point, I do not rest there; the examples are a constitutive part of the general theoretical argument I provide. I do not consider it desirable to avoid theorizing about religious expressions or reference, but, on the contrary, find such analyses worthwhile to undertake for the sake of fruitful communication and discussion. Additionally, and also in contrast to Phillips, my aim is not solely to criticize existing assumptions and clarify existing practices, but to suggest constructive solutions to how we should understand reference and existence once we have discarded the traditional dualistic assumptions. I am not satisfied with leaving matters of reference aside. The notion of reference is a theoretically valuable instrument which is useful in linguistic and philosophical analyses. The solution to the

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discrepancy between theory and actual language use is not to discard questions of reference altogether, but to revise and modify our notion of reference in order to make it more applicable to the phenomena it is meant to describe. How, then, must we understand reference and reality in order to be able to speak about reference and reality with regard to God, without having to reconstruct or reinterpret the religious practice in which talk about God has its primary function (as Cupitt does), and without having to eschew the question of reference (as Phillips does)? My aim is to suggest a way of speaking about reality and reference that does justice to existing human practices, including practices encompassing so-called non-existing or fictional entities, non-religious as well as religious. In responding to the referential objection against religious non-realism I shall argue that the general view of reference underlying both realist and non-realist approaches to religious language is problematic. Everything we talk about is to some degree dependent on human construction and is conceptualized with various degrees of dependence on physical characteristics. The strict line that separates entities that exist and those that do not exist is replaced by a gradual scale. The resulting pragmatic view of reference suggests that the inability to produce an independently existing God as referent to the word “God” need not in itself be seen as constituting an inadequacy of a religious practice, as was claimed by the realist. (Unless of course all of our human practices are seen to be equally inadequate, in which case the concept of adequacy has become rather vacuous.) In fact, the religious realist and the religious non-realist positions are equally inadequate when it comes to reference, for they both share the same problematic assumptions concerning reference and existence. Given this revised view of reference, the important philosophical project of analysing the factors that contribute to the constitution of a referent to a linguistic expression in the various contexts of its use, remains. The religious realist, as well as the person who does not want to accept metaphysical realism with regard to religious entities, can in this manner continue to discuss how and why “God” refers or fails to refer in different contexts. The purpose of this work, in short, then, is to argue that the notion of referring to God can be given a coherent and consistent analysis that is not dependent on metaphysical realism, nor collapses into reductionistic functionalism.

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An outline of the book The present chapter has provided a general introduction to the book and its aims by illustrating the discussions concerning realism, anti­ realism, and non-realism and pointing out their referential assumptions. Chapter two deals with the issues of reality, reality construction, and conceptual structures. It is suggested that we conceptualize our surroundings in terms of conceptualizations that are more or less strongly dependent on physical characteristics. This distinction can accommodate discussions about social reality, and is also used when discussing why we consider something to be real or not without appealing to metaphysical realism. Conceptual relativism is discussed and accepted in a modest form. In chapter three the referential question is addressed. Adopting a pragmatic approach, the strict division between semantics and pragmatics is questioned, and Donnellan’s referential-attributive distinction is understood as a gradual distinction. The contextual dependence of reference assignment and the constitution of a referent is discussed, as is reference to so-called non-existing objects. A referent can be conceptualized with a stronger or weaker dependence on physical characteristics, and as being associated more or less strongly with certain conceptual relations and functions. Chapter four proceeds to apply the results of chapters two and three to make-believe contexts, as represented by children’s make-believe play. Examples of language use from such contexts are analysed and suggestions are made for what constitutes a referent to a referring expression, and what makes us consider something as real. In chapter five, finally, I present the results of all the analyses and discussions from the preceding chapters in the form of an analysis of reference and reality in the context of religion; God in the act of reference. It is argued that a pragmatic analysis of what constitutes the referent to “God” in a certain context of utterance can account for why God is considered to be real, without the addition of metaphysical realism. Since what is required in order to be religiously adequate is that God is considered to be real, it is concluded that a religiously adequate position does not necessarily have to encompass religious metaphysical realism.

2 Reality as conceptualized The big questions about reality and existence have often been given big answers. Answers that go beyond our human limits and purport to speak about what reality in itself is. But perhaps a discussion about what reality is for us would bring forth a more adequate answer, since the questions actually do come from—us.

Some theories on reality construction When a baby is born it cannot immediately relate to its surroundings in terms of clothes, a mother, light, milk, and so forth, but has to do so indiscriminately. The human infant is completely dependent on others for its physical survival, as well as for developing capacities to function appropriately in the world as we know it. It will eventually and gradually enter into the socially constructed reality inhabited by the linguistic community to which it belongs. As adults we have concepts about object, space, causality, and time. But what concepts for object, space, causality, and time are implicit in the infant’s actions? Jean Piaget’s classical answer is that they are radically different from the adult concepts.1 The concept of object, for example, does not exist in the infant in the same way as it does in adults, for whom objects are individuated, substantial, and permanent. On the contrary, in the very beginning there is only one thing that is real to the infant, says Piaget, and that is the infant itself and its actions. Through its actions the infant gradually constructs for itself a reality of external objects that are independent of itself and its perception of them. The process 1See e.g. Piaget 1954, pp 3-96. 17

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is completed roughly by the age of 18 months. Two interpretations of Piaget’s views can be distinguished. One weaker interpretation in which the infant is seen to have an indeterminate sense of object, and one stronger interpretation in which it is claimed that the infant holds the view that anything that is, is an extension of its activity. I find more plausible the weaker interpretation that we cannot attribute active views on reality to infants; all we can do is to observe their behaviour. On the basis of such an observation we can say that the only things that infants treat as real are those things that are continuous with their activities, but we cannot say whether this limitation is a cause or a consequence of their limited grasp on reality.2 The British psychoanalyst and paediatrician Donald W. Winnicott has developed a theory about how and why the infant moves from regarding everything as an extension of itself, to the point where it considers itself as separate from its surroundings.3 I shall accept it as a plausible theoretical account of what goes on during the process of forming a reality view that is functional in our world. Winnicott introduces a third category between the inner private reality and the outer communal reality. This third category he calls the transitional area, and it contains transitional objects and transitional phenomena. Transitional objects are characterized by being objects “that are not part of the infant’s body yet are not fully recognized as belonging to external reality”.4 The first transitional object is normally the mother’s breast. A mother who responds adequately to the infant’s behaviour gives the infant the illusion that it itself can create the breast, by presenting the breast at the very moment the infant begins to feel the need for it. There is a paradox in this process that, according to Winnicott, will characterize all future play and cultural experiences, namely that “the baby creates the object, but the object was there waiting to be created” .5 Through these transitional objects and phenomena a transitional secure area is created, where the child is convinced of the presence of the mother (present by way of being symbolized by the transitional object, for example a Teddy bear) and is free to explore the world. The child is gradually learning to conceive of the mother as an independent object and to separate self from what is not self. From the moment we are born we seem preoccupied with deciding on what is real and what is not real. And we have to be in order to survive. A human baby will not survive long without interpersonal 2See Sugarman 1987, pp 201-209. 3Winnicott 1971. 4Winnicott 1971, p 2. 5Winnicott 1971, p 104.

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relations and an ability to use and relate to objects and persons in its surroundings. According to Winnicott, a prerequisite for all this is that a transitional area is developed, by the help of which outer objects and persons may gradually be endowed with an independent and objective reality-status. The social construction of reality is a phrase often used since its introduction by Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann in 1966.6 They presented a theory of sociology of knowledge in which they claim that the social order and conception of reality arise in three steps. Firstly, human beings’ need for each other in order to survive is externalized into a society with a social pattern. Secondly, the society is objectified. It is seen as an objective reality in itself, and not as a human creation for the purpose of maintaining a working society in which we can survive. In order for the second step to be successful, our social and religious institutions and roles must be legitimized and justified. Thirdly, the objectification of society into an objective reality is internalized into the individual through the process of socialization. The objective reality becomes a subjective conception of reality. In order for this subjective conception of reality to be maintained, a social structure is needed where this reality is taken for granted, a plausibility structure. The supreme means of upholding a plausibility structure is language, which makes up a symbolic universe, the end product of the original externalization of human needs. Thus, according to this view, our humanly created symbolic systems expressed in language construct society and our social reality, including ourselves, as social constructs. Instead of symbolic systems I prefer to speak about conceptual structures, which are theoretical constructs reflecting the language in which the symbolic systems are expressed. The American philosopher John Searle has approached the subject of the construction of social reality from a philosophical point of view.7 The philosophical problem he addresses is the puzzling fact that social (institutional) facts that only exist in part by human agreement, are nevertheless taken to exist as an objective reality. How can something, the reality of which is in part constituted by being humanly constructed, still be considered to be objective reality? His way of explanation is not the same as Berger and Luckmann’s theory of social knowledge. Rather, Searle wants to develop a general theory of the ontology of social facts and social institutions by means of which to explain how we construct an objective social reality. 6Berger and Luckmann 1966. 7Searle 1995.

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One problem with the way he poses the problem is what he means by objective reality. He does not mean reality in itself, as unconceptualized by us. And he does not mean nature, or, as he calls it, brute facts, existing physically, quite untouched by our constructions. The way I understand Searle, he means by objective reality a kind of reality that is stable over time and that is as common and accessible to a community of people as if it were a purely physical reality. His problem could then be reformulated into asking why humanly constructed reality enjoys as robust a reality status as natural physical reality. In this formulation of the problem it is assumed that physical reality is the rule. I also detect an implicit evaluation that physical reality is seen to be a better kind of reality, in the sense that it is the “most real” of all kinds of realities. My reason for this is that Searle’s question seems to originate in a feeling of surprise arising from the fact that socially constructed reality is actually being treated by people as objectively real. Now, the surprise bit, which prompted the question in the first place, cannot be explained unless one adds a dimension of value and expectation. Normally, if we expect of something that it is able to accomplish some task, there will be no reaction of surprise when the task is accomplished. If, however, something we do not expect to be able to accomplish a task still accomplishes it, this will lead to surprise. From this one might conclude that socially constructed reality is from the onset not seen to be quite as good a kind of reality as physical reality, which is considered to be objectively real without need for explanations. As I see it, both the physical and the socially constructed realities have been a necessary part of the human surroundings in order for us to be able to communicate and survive as a species and as individuals. We cannot say that the conceptualization of physical objects, or the structuring of the physical world, is independent of the social dimension of human life. On the contrary, evidence from both the origin of language in history and in the development of the infant, points in the direction that social functions are interwoven with our conceptualizations of the physical world and guide how we differentiate between objects. This does not contradict a belief that physical reality might well be the more basic one in the sense that for example spatial language has formed our language for non-material objects as well. We say that God is great, that we have big problems, or that we need moral support, as if these things had a material three-dimensional extension. I am only saying that Searle needs to specify in what sense, and on what grounds, he takes physical reality to be the norm. As it is, he has presented no case for it being so. The theories of Quine suggest a possible way of arguing for our

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experience of physical reality as basic. It is claimed that one ontology, the ontology of enduring physical objects, is fundamental to all our theorizing in science. The argument for this includes the fact that children learn the ontology of physical objects inseparably from the introduction of physical objects and physical object theory. Thus, physical object ontology may be our most basic ontology in the respect that it is the first one we learn, and is also the ontology that our common sense views very much rely on.8 But this does not mean that other ontologies, belonging to other kinds of theories, can be evaluated according to this basic ontology, even though, as a matter of fact, we tend to understand and evaluate all other ontologies against the background of physical object ontology. Neither does it follow that physical object ontology should be analysed without including the dimension of social construction. Searle’s solution to why social facts can be considered to be objectively real, in a very abbreviated form, amounts to claiming that institutional social facts are created by ascribing a function to something that would not have that function if people did not agree on it having that function. These functions are assigned by a constitutive rule of the form “X counts as Y in the context of C”, where for example bits of paper with certain print count as money (means to perform financial transactions) in the jurisdiction of the Bank of England. There still remains one piece of the solution, and that is to explain how following these rules can constitute objective reality for us. Here Searle falls back on what he calls our background abilities, which include being disposed to treat the institutional facts of our society as epistemically objectively existing and unproblematic. These abilities are not rules that we follow (we do not go about consciously following rules in this way), but have evolved to function appropriately with respect to the constitutive rules of the institutions, without themselves being constituted by them.9 One problem with any solution that like this one is based on social convention and communal agreement as the basis of the objectivity of social reality, is that it does not take into account the fact that social reality exists as an objective fact even for groups that do not take part in the communal agreement.10 Individuals or groups that recognize a certain social institution as being racist or sexist, or 8See Quine 1953c, p 77; see also Nelson 1990, p 101. 9Christian Beyer claims that Searle’s background thesis is about the causal neurophysiological preconditions of human intentionality rather than the logical properties of intentional states in general. Beyer 1997. 10See Babbitt 1997.

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inadequate in any other way, and want to change it, do not accept the institutions unproblematically, even though they presumably share the same background abilities as the rest of society. How are processes of resistance and protest accounted for within a view on social institutions as objectively real? The related question about religious non-realism as a reaction against religious realism, which is a social institution, is relevant in this context. In order to be able to answer questions like these we shall now proceed to critically discuss what is involved in a human construction and conceptualization of reality.

Conceptualized, constructed, and constituted In contemporary discussions about conceptual schemes and structures the examples given and the arguments offered are more often about language than they are about concepts. Concepts are slippery and to avoid them it is often seen to be easier to talk in terms of languages, as languages are closely associated with concepts in categorization and conceptualization. I see no problem in heuristically speaking about concepts by way of the words and sentences used to express the concepts. But I would not go so far as Quine or Davidson to equate a conceptual scheme with a language, which in its turn is reduced to a set of declarative sentences held true. The same conceptual structure may be expressed in different languages. Thus it would be less confusing to speak of the underlying conceptual structures of the two languages as being the same than of two languages being the same language. A conceptual scheme must also surely include more than just declarative sentences held true if it is to be understood as an organizing system that should “fit the tribunal of experience”. We respond to experiences of reality not only by uttering declarative sentences about reality, but by making up fitting metaphors and models, writing poems and fiction, keeping several options open and resting with an indeterminate truthvalue, and by reacting religiously. In this I assume that not only our perceptual and sensory experiences make up our reality, but also our social and existential experiences of life. I can find no reason for why the subset of declarative sentences should be seen to cover the conceptual possibilities of a language or conceptual structure. When I say that we use language as a means to speak about concepts this should not be taken as implying that concepts are real in any substantial, but inaccessible way. On the contrary, when we want to study the conceptual structures and relations associated with some language use, our empirical linguistic behaviour constitutes our only facts. I shall settle for a purely functional characterization of concepts,

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where concepts are tools that facilitate talk about related language uses, and translation. In translation we for example intuitively reckon that there is something that we try to convey by using different languages, and that stays the same, no m atter the varieties in phonology or syntactic structure used in expressing what one wants to express. We do not add anything new by introducing the term “concept” to cover cases like this, but it is a convenient word-saving device. My view is related to the pragmatic strategy with regard to concepts, which is to first state what it is to possess a concept, and then add that a concept is whatever is possessed in that situation. The interesting matter is what we do with concepts and how we come to possess them, not what they are, apart from that.11 Anyway, let us talk about conceptual structures in terms of language, or linguistic usage, bearing in mind that it is the concepts associated with the linguistic usage that are of interest. Let us talk about languages or linguistic usage in terms of conceptual structures, bearing in mind that talking in terms of concepts associated with the linguistic usage may be methodologically convenient in coming to terms with philosophical problems. For example, by delineating the conceptual structure, function, and internal relations between concepts of two seemingly mutually exclusive alternatives, one might accomplish a shift in perspective as to what one meaningfully can discuss and contrast. Whatever the ontological status of concepts and conceptual structures, in practice I shall sometimes speak about a conceptual structure as if it were, so to speak, in the individual’s head. Sometimes it is convenient to speak about the abstract system of a language community (without implying metaphysical Platonic existence), and sometimes it is convenient to speak about the conceptual structure as it is manifest in an individual’s thinking and doing (without implying psychological subjective existence). There are a few concepts that are sometimes used indiscriminately, and need to be clarified, namely reality as conceptualized, constructed, and constituted. To make some crude distinctions we can say that conceptualization is the prerequisite for us to speak of reality at all in any aspect. In relating to our surrounding world, physical and otherwise, we must conceptualize what we encounter if we want to be able to communicate and refer to it. That means that whatever we want to pronounce either real or unreal is thereby also conceptualized 11 Alex Barber suggests even more strongly, in his pleonastic theory of concepts, that talk about concepts gives us no right to assume that concepts will turn out to be anything at all, abstract or concrete. Barber 1998.

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by us; even discussions about things as unconceptualized inevitably involves conceptualizing them. The concept of reality construction is stronger and implies that we actually create the reality in question. It would not exist if we did not construct it by means of convention and agreement. This is the concept most used in the social construction theories, and comes with a weaker interpretation of construction and a stronger interpretation. The reality of a socially constructed reality, such as money, consists in a human agreement to bestow something, in the case of money the bits of paper used as money, with a certain function. Reality as humanly constructed means that we can, and do in fact, consider things to be real and as having a real function not only on the basis of their physical characteristics, but also on grounds of the conceptual relations found in our conceptual structures, in which our social and cultural values and conventions are encoded. Reality as constituted, finally, I understand in the following way. The factors needed for us to consider something to be real rather than unreal in relation to some context, I take to be what in our judgment constitutes the reality of that something. The factors can be of different kinds, physical as well as conceptual and functional. The three aspects of conceptualization, construction and constitution are interrelated. Everything that we speak about is conceptualized by us, and we can therefore not meaningfully appeal to an unconceptualized reality as the reason for why something is to be considered to be real or not. Instead it would be more fruitful to try to find a way to account for our decisions in terms of conceptualization alone, thus concentrating on the contextually constituted referent, conceptualized and constructed in a certain way, rather than on an independently existing and unconceptualized thing-in-itself. Without involving metaphysics we can in this way elaborate on what factors are important in various contexts for us to consider what we refer to as real or not. In order to capture in a theoretical terminology the nuances in actual language use while avoiding making any metaphysical commitments about what we speak about, I suggest that we speak of a gradual scale of conceptualizing things, where our conceptualizations can be more or less strongly dependent on physical characteristics. What for us constitutes the reality of something then depends on the way and the contexts in which we relate to it and whether, or to what degree, it is expected to make a difference to us due to its physical characteristics or due to social construction, both aspects of which are of course part of its conceptualization. The difference between for instance a mountain (which is

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conceptualized with strong dependence on physical characteristics) and money (which is conceptualized with a somewhat less strong dependence on physical characteristics) is that in the case of a mountain the physical characteristics of the mountain forms the key factor in constituting the reality of the mountain, leading us to consider it as something real. We cannot change the physical reality of the mountain by changing our conceptualization of it. Rather it is our views of the physical reality that we restructure by changing our conceptualizations of it. For instance, by calling a mountain a hill, we might be persuaded to believe that it can be climbed more easily, but there would be no difference in the actual ascent we would be required to undertake. Whereas in the case of money, the physical characteristics of money are of secondary importance. We can change the physical vehicle of the monetary function without changing the reality of money. In this age of computers we can even almost completely dispose of any physical vehicle at all, as the function of money can be carried out by electronic signals. Its reality lies chiefly in the social conventions governing the use of “money”. Most of what we speak about and encounter in our surroundings is conceptualized neither with an extremely strong nor an extremely weak dependence on physical characteristics, but lies somewhere between these limits. This means that what constitute the reality of things to us most often have to do with as much their physical characteristics being as they are conceptualized, as that certain functions and relations are rendered possible on grounds of social construction. To elaborate more in detail what this involves, let us now analyse what is required for us to speak about a professor and what is required for us to consider the professor to be real.

Speaking about professors and other things In order to be able to speak about a professor we first need to be able to conceptualize the physical characteristics required for us to be prepared to grant someone the status of professorship. These are for example that the person in question must be a human being, must have certain brain functions intact, and must have reached a certain age. For conceptualizing these purely physical characteristics of a professor we require two things. We need to be equipped with a capacity for conceptualization and we need to be part of a linguistic community. Long term evolutionary processes have evolved capacities for conceptualization that have helped the human race to survive by means of for example enabling the passing on of knowledge about edible

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plants and hunting methods from generation to generation. In each new generation these capacities are activated anew by means of interaction between the infant and young child and its social surroundings. We are thereby equipped with the basic, humanly specific prerequisites for conceptualization, and have the ability to conceptualize our surroundings in terms of objects, space, individuation, person, and so on. 12 We additionally need to be part of a linguistic community with conventionalized conceptualizations for physical objects and characteristics in order to be able to conceptualize the physical characteristics required for someone to be called a professor. Sharing the same language with conventionalized conceptualizations means sharing the same conceptual structures, in which conceptualizations of physical reality are related to each other in various ways. Some relations that are based on the physical characteristics are the relation of part and whole (a nose is a part of a body), cause and effect (running water causes the erosion of mountains), or various functions (the function of clothes is to shield the body from cold winds and from other people’s looks). The reason why we, by way of speaking a language, take part in these elaborate conceptual systems is pragmatic. In our interactions with our physical surroundings, communication is required for the purpose of surviving and thriving physically as a human species. And for communication to take place not only the basic prerequisites for conceptualization is needed but also a fully developed language, in which the conceptual structuring of the surroundings is encoded. Note that some of the requirements for being a candidate for professorship are not outright physical, as in having a human body, but are partly socially constructed. For example, one requirement may be that the person should have published a scientific paper. Publishing a scientific paper certainly involves physical characteristics, such as the material of the paper and the existence of a publishing agency of some kind. But what counts as a scientific paper and publishing and what enables us to speak about publishing a scientific paper, is not only the physical characteristics. As with the professor, there is also something more required. In order to be able to speak about a professor not only do we need to conceptualize the physical but also the non-physical characteristics required for us to be prepared to grant someone the status of 12I shall discuss further what I mean by prerequisites for conceptualization later in this chapter on p 37.

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professorship. In other words, we need to be able to conceptualize reality in other ways than in terms of physical reality solely. On the basis of the social institution of a university, created to uphold the order and transmission of knowledge in society, we bestow a person with the authority to do the things that a professor has the authority to do, and we lay upon the professor certain duties that he or she must fulfil. These mainly functional characteristics of a professor are encoded in our conceptual structures, and without a society with relevant social institutions that uphold them they would collapse into nothing, in a way that the professor’s brain functions certainly would not. Thirdly, and finally, in order to be able to speak about a professor, we need to be able to combine our conceptualizations of the physical aspects of reality with the non-physical, socially constructed aspects of reality into unified concepts. This is accomplished by being part of a linguistic community sharing the same conceptual structures, in which conceptualizations (and whole conceptual structures) are related not only on a physical basis, but also functionally to each other. The reason why our conceptual structures are such complex systems, with indispensable non-physical aspects, is that our social, physical, and existential needs, in our interactions with our surroundings, prompt not only physical, but also social and existential responses from us. Thus there exists a basic human need for conceptualizations that are not solely based on physical characteristics and relations. From this analysis we can conclude that the conceptualization of a professor is a combination of our conceptualizations of the professor in physical terms (body, brain, human), or partly reducible to physical terms (scientific paper, exam), together with our conceptualizations of non-physical and socially constructed aspects of what a professor is (authority to give exams, duty to give lectures, endowed with a title and a social status). Of course, into the conceptualization of a professor also enter things that may not be generally assumed, but that nevertheless play a part in the use of the concept in attributing reference in specific contexts. Such things are for example connotations or prejudices, as when a professor is supposed to be forgetful, old, male, mad, or an Einstein-stereotype, or when associations are made to the actual professors known either in a communication event or in a community as a whole. All these combine into a unified concept of a professor. In this concept of a professor we cannot isolate the parts that are physical from the parts that are dependent on social construction, without at the same time destroying the concept of a professor. Remove one of the aspects and it would no longer be the same concept we speak about. The two aspects are inseparably intertwined, even though we,

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as I have shown, can discriminate between the two aspects at play. The whole is more than its parts. This since the relations between the parts, the weighted importance of the parts, and the function of the whole in relation to other things are also part of the whole, while not among the parts. Conceptual structures and human languages are indeed complex systems that cannot be described or understood solely according to mechanical rule-following.13 Our conceptualizations always involve such a combination of aspects. Sometimes the physical part is dominant (as in mountains and grass). But even when so is the case there always enters some aspect of human construction, as for example why we call one hump of earth a mountain and not another—the reason which may be a culturally or politically significant construct.14 Conceptual structures and linguistic meanings are not independent entities out there for us to discover, but are always in part determined by our human interests. Consider the colonialist attitude of ascribing the discovery of natural phenomena already known by the local people, for instance the source of the Nile, to white, Western men. This conceptualization implies that any previous conceptualization of the source of the Nile was insignificant, and it is thereby an implicit proclamation of white, Western superiority. So, when I say that our interests always enter into our formation of conceptual structures, I have thereby automatically raised the question of whose interests it is that will determine matters, and why the interests of just those people should carry that weight. Even today one may read that scientists discover new medical substances in the rain forests (which the local peoples already know and use). But I cannot recall ever reading that the indigenous people in the rain forest discover our Western medicine; no they are said to be provided with it or taught how to use it. So what is conveyed is that medicine is only medicine when it has been discovered and authorized as such by a scientist. The aspect of human construction in a conceptualization has thus, among other things, to do with our interests, and with power. This is obvious when it comes to conceptualizations where the impact of human construction is significant, as with the case of 13 As has been confirmed by several contemporary scholars in linguistics and philosophy. See e.g. Butt 1996; and Cilliers 1998. 14See e.g. the movie “The Englishman who went up a hill, but came down a mountain”, starring Hugh Grant and Sara Fitzgerald, directed by Christopher Monger and produced by Sarah Curtis, United Kingdom 1995, where the inhabitants of a Welsh village, their beloved mountain having been degraded to the status of “hill” by British bureaucracy, make it a mountain by physically adding the 18 feet that are missing for it to be officially classed as a mountain.

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a professor. Obviously, it is a question of power and of the interests of certain groups of people how the socially constructed aspects of professorship are designed. For example, it may be part of the authority granted to the professor that he only examines male students, and thus women are excluded from higher education. The question of power and privileged group interest, as we have seen, is also relevant when it comes to conceptualizations that are more strongly dependent on physical characteristics. This means that in all our conceptualizations of reality we deal not with reality as unmarked by human interests and power relations but as highly marked by these factors. From the reverse perspective, not even conceptualizations with an extremely weak dependence on physical characteristics (such as gods, fictional characters, and make-believe objects) can be imagined as pure functions, or constructs without a single trace of physicality. These conceptualizations have their place within conceptual structures that contain a combination of physical and non-physical features in their conceptual relations. A fictional character may have no physical existence, but is tied to a book, is imagined to have all kinds of physical characteristics, and has a physical writer and readers. In children’s make-believe play the children use objects that in the play are believed to have different properties from what could reasonable be expected from their ordinary physical characteristics. Similar things happen in religion, where a god may be acknowledged to have no physical existence, but is connected with holy objects, books, rituals, worshippers, real life events, and emotions. A change in the conceptual structure concerning conceptualizations with a strong dependence on physical characteristics is less likely to affect our alternatives in handling whatever is spoken about by means of using a linguistic expression associated with the conceptualization in question. This is because the relations and the functions of the concept in its conceptual structure will be determined mainly on the basis of the physical characteristics ascribed to the concept. Its functions and relations to other concepts will namely be derived from its physical characteristics. For example, if we choose to consider a certain heap of earth a hill instead of a mountain, this will make no difference for the efforts required to climb it. The other way round, the functions within a conceptual structure of a conceptualization with a strong dependence on physical characteristics are more likely to change if the physical characteristics are changed. Take for example the conceptualization of clothes (or the material that clothes are made of) and take away the physical characteristic of being opaque. This will affect the conceptual relations of the concept, so that clothes will no longer be seen to fulfil

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the function of shielding our private parts from the view of other people, whereas they may still fill the function of shielding us from cold winds. Compare this with conceptualizations with a less strong dependence on physical characteristics, for example money, where a change in the physical characteristics will have little effect on the functions of the concept. Money is still the means of carrying out transactions, no matter whether the money consists in bits of paper, shells, or electronic signals. On the other hand, here a change within the conceptual structure concerning the relations between the concepts will indeed affect our alternatives for how we may or may not act with respect to the part of reality conceptualized. A devaluation of a currency will affect how far the money in my wallet will take me shopping, without the physical contents of my wallet having been altered in any way. This is because the relations and the functions of the concept in its conceptual structure will be determined mainly on the basis of human construction and social agreement. Another example is the believer who will let nothing, no worldly horrors or suffering, affect his or her beliefs that God is good. No physical object can ever be used to disprove God’s existence or character. In general terms, a change in the physical characteristics associated with the object will have no effect on the functions of the concept. On the other hand, a believer who for other reasons has changed his or her conceptualization of God, believing now that God has a relation of anger and wrath towards the world, may find this to change his or her whole view of life. The world may become a place of misery, and the enjoyable no longer enjoyable. A change in the conceptual structure alone will affect the believer’s alternatives for action. This would indicate that God is conceptualized with a very weak dependence on physical characteristics.

Considering real professors and other realities Very often the word “real” is used as meaning physically real, without making explicit that one means physically real and not something else. In the case of a professor, physical existence is indeed part of the criteria for being considered a real professor. But not because having physical existence is a general criterion for anything to be considered real. Bearing in mind that the distinction between conceptualizations with a strong and those with a weak dependence on physical characteristics is gradual and not a strict dichotomy, I shall nevertheless suggest criteria for what characterizes conceptualizations with a strong respectively weak dependence on physical characteristics and how this affects our

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willingness to consider them to be real. What is needed for us not only to be able to speak about professors and other things, but also to consider them to be real? With conceptualizations that are strongly dependent on physical characteristics it seems to be the case in ordinary language use that for us to consider something to be real, the phenomenon in question must conform to the physical characteristics that are constitutive of the concept. Thus real grass is not imagined, as in a mirage, and it is not artificial plastic grass. These criteria for considering something real or not, seem to be quite straightforward and easily verified intuitively. With conceptualizations that are more weakly dependent on physical characteristics matters become slightly more complex. Here we have to take into account the conceptual context of the conceptualization in question, which in these cases is not a straightforward physical context with relations and functions based on the physical characteristics constitutive of the concept. We have to distinguish between on the one hand evaluating the conceptualization and its conceptual relations and functions as internal to its conceptual structure, and on the other hand evaluating the conceptualization as representative of the conceptual structure to which it belongs, taking into account how this conceptual structure relates to other conceptual structures and fills a function in human life. For something conceptualized with weak dependence on physical characteristics to be considered real internal to its conceptual structure is generally a matter of conforming to the characteristics that are internally constitutive of the concept. Consider the literary character Anna Karenina. Internal to the conceptual structure of literary fiction she is conceptualized with strong dependence on physical characteristics, in short she is a fictional human being. Thus, for Anna Karenina to be considered real within the fiction of which she is part, she must conform to the physical characteristics and the conceptual relations that are constitutive of the concept of Anna Karenina in the work of fiction where she belongs. She cannot, for example, be a ghost, or someone in another fictional character’s dream, but must be a wife, mother, and lover; neither can she be an impostor that in the fiction tries to impersonate Anna Karenina. However, sometimes we want to move outside of the particular conceptual structure to which a particular conceptualization with weak dependence on physical characteristics belongs. We want to evaluate such conceptualizations as real or not real in relation to ordinary life and other conceptual structures. Then the conceptual structure becomes important in another way than in providing internal

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criteria for its components, as in the previous case. What kind of conceptual relations does the conceptual structure in question and its conceptualizations have to other conceptual structures, and what functions does it have that are relevant to our relating to our surroundings? First of all, the subject matter, or human practice, as it is conceptualized in a conceptual structure to which the conceptualization in question belongs, must have an adequate function in human life. It must in some way promote our well-being or enhance our survival skills, in enabling us to better relate to our surroundings. This is a necessary condition, but not a sufficient one. A second condition needs to be fulfilled as well. The conceptualization in question must, as a representative of its conceptual structure, be directly related to conceptualizations that are strongly dependent on physical characteristics in other conceptual structures. An example might clarify what I mean. Speaking about Anna Karenina externally to the work of fiction in which she belongs, I would say that she is not real. I cannot communicate with her, she cannot bake me a cake. And more importantly, she is not expected to be able to do so. According to the conceptual relations between the conceptual structure of fiction and that of every day life (as a vague notion), Anna Karenina does not have any direct point of contact with me. Only indirectly does she affect me, by means of what emotions may arise in me when reading about her. That is part of what it means to conceptualize Anna Karenina, to conceptualize her as being not real. This is not to say, however, that reading fiction may not affect us or have real consequences in our lives. The subject matter of fiction may indeed have an adequate function in our lives, in for example providing an outlet for strong emotions, but this is not sufficient for us to consider a fictional character real. A fictional character is in its construction conceptually unrelated to the ordinary life of ordinary physical human beings. In contrast to fictional characters, however, the religious character God is usually considered by believers to be real in relation to ordinary life and not only internally to a limited sphere of human practice, as in reading literature. The religious conceptual structure to which the conceptualization of God belongs, makes God directly related to the world. It is part of the conceptualization of God that God is related functionally to human beings, in for example prayer, in providing salvation and guidance, and in demanding obedience. Thus, provided that religion can be seen as having an adequate function in human life, it follows that from a conceptual point of view it makes sense to

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speak about God as real, in a way that it does not when it comes to fictional characters; even though both are conceptualized with only a weak dependence on physical characteristics. Now, a great many of our conceptualizations are on a scale between the two extremes of being conceptualized with very weak and very strong dependence on physical characteristics. Therefore, our reasons for considering something to be real are often a mixture of considerations. The weight that should be placed on each specific factor must be allowed to vary according to the context of utterance. For example a real professor, spoken about in a non-fictional context, must both be a physically existing person, and must also have the functions a professor has. Thus a non-real professor might be a person impersonating a professor, providing falsified papers of authority, or such a person might be professor Moriarity, from the Sherlock Holmes stories. What makes us consider these to be non-real professors differs in the two cases. My claim is thus that what we consider to be real is intrinsically connected to our conceptual structures. Accepting in this way that reality for us is always in part humanly constructed, seems to leave open the possibility that reality might be radically differently construed for someone else. If my view of reality as humanly conceptualized inevitably leads to unwanted extreme relativism, we may want to abandon it. But does it really have such consequences?

Exciting and trivial cases of conceptual differences A common way of expressing the idea that reality is humanly constructed is by means of speaking of conceptual schemes and conceptual relativism. Anthropologists have long been aware of the vast differences between human cultures. Early anthropologists tended to judge other cultures as more or less defective according to how well they measured up to Western scientific ways of thinking. But, starting with Benjamin Whorf, anthropologists began speaking about conceptual relativism instead, and explained cultural differences in world view by arguing that language structures experience.15 Thus different languages may lead to the formation of different reality structures even when faced with the same physical evidence. Philosophers retaining the Kantian dichotomy between content and scheme happily viewed the anthropological theoretical development as validating this dichotomy between sense data and the form under which the mind interprets the 15Whorf 1956.

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data. Different schemes of interpretation would result in different views on reality, or even different realities, in a strong conceptual relativism. Donald Davidson denied this latter strong relativism and his critical arguments first expressed in 1974 continuously generate new arguments and counter-arguments.16 According to him, in order to make sense of the concept of a conceptual scheme we need to speak about it in terms of language. A criterion for us to consider something to be a language is that we can translate it or, in a more generous reading of Davidson, interpret it. Languages that are intertranslatable share the same conceptual scheme, and languages that are not intertranslatable are then candidates for representing different conceptual schemes. From this follows that even if something was not intertranslatable and thus a potential candidate for being a radically alternative conceptual scheme, we would never be in a position to evaluate it as such, since we could not know that it was a language. If we could recognize the alien conceptual system as a language, we must have been able to translate or interpret it. Per definition it then shares the same conceptual scheme as our own language. The idea of conceptual relativism is thus incoherent. Much of the debate about conceptual schemes does not appear to be about the possibility or impossibility of the existence of different conceptual structures at all, but about whether the conceptual differences that do exist are philosophically exciting or not. Davidson allows for localized and shallow conceptual differences—they cannot be more than local, since a conceptual difference cannot be understood as such without the two schemes agreeing on the surroundings. But these cases are unexciting, he says. To be philosophically exciting the notion of a conceptual scheme must be the radically different conceptual scheme. In the first alternative the conceptual differences are not so deep as to be interesting, and in the second alternative the very idea of a different conceptual structure is incoherent. The defence for the idea of the existence of different conceptual structures comes in two forms. The first approach defends the untranslatable radically alternative conceptual scheme as being a coherent idea, either by accusing Davidson for conflating epistemic and ontological questions, or by proposing other means than translatability to establish that we have to do with a language. The other approach challenges Davidson’s dismissal of actual conceptual differences being shallow and unexciting. It claims that there are non-trivial and 16Davidson 1974. For an historical and contemporary exposition of the arguments see e.g. Bar-On 1994; Crumley 1989; Edwards 1993; Glock 1993; Hacker 1996; Henderson 1994; and Lynch 1997.

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philosophically interesting conceptual differences, even though they can be translated, interpreted, or paraphrased in some way. The one thing that both defenders and opponents seem to agree about is that the conceptual differences have to be exciting and not trivial in order for it to be worthwhile devoting time to them in philosophy. Where the debate goes astray is when they presume that they mean the same thing with triviality; this they do not. For adherents of the idea of the existence of philosophically interesting different conceptual structures, there are degrees of actual conceptual differences, which vary from almost non-existent and very trivial to wide-ranging, deep, and anything but trivial.17 Presenting examples (and arguments) from the anything but trivial-kind of conceptual differences, they try to convince the opponent that there are non­ trivial alternative conceptual structures around. As far as I can see, this project is not likely to succeed, for the very simple reason that the opponent has no gradual scale of conceptual differences. Rather the opponent has stipulated that anything that is less of a conceptual difference than untranslatability is trivial. And since anything that would involve untranslatability would be logically impossible to conceive of as a conceptual difference at all, the outcome is certain: no examples presented can ever constitute grounds for assuming the existence of philosophically interesting different conceptual structures. It is foolproof. But does it lead us anywhere? If the debate has come to a stalemate, where the participants do not agree since they do not share the same views concerning what it is for something to be philosophically exciting, would it not be more fruitful to examine the differences in views? Only relative to some philosophical goal or interest can something meaningfully be said to be trivial or exciting. This should be made clear. Then those who want can carry on to examine the so-called trivial cases of conceptual differences, while those who have no such interest, will not. I am among those who will consider it worthwhile to carry on. The supposedly exciting radical cases of differences in conceptual structures, as far as I can see, would all turn out to involve aliens from outer space with such vastly different sensory apparatus and concepts from ours that we would not even understand that they were communicating. From a pragmatic point of view that hardly sounds exciting. A radically different conceptual structure, one that we could not translate or even interpret, might be a logical possibility, but nothing more. The fact that we epistemologically would not be able to evaluate this 17See Bar-On 1994; Hacker 1996; Henderson 1994; and Lynch 1997.

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alien conceptual structure completely, or even as being a conceptual structure at all, is of course no evidence for the impossibility of there being one. The problem is what we might conceivably mean by stating the possibility of a radically different conceptual structure. Being the organisms we are as humans, we cannot ourselves meaningfully use such a radically alternative conceptual structure, since it would presume our being radically different organisms, evolved in ways we cannot even imagine. All human conceptualizations presuppose certain ways of thinking that make possible inter-language-translatability, taken up by Davidson as a criterion for being a language. Any attempt to exemplify, devise, or argue for a radically different conceptual structure would then per definition be doomed. The supposedly trivial cases on the other hand would all concern human linguistic practices. And if you see philosophy as a human enterprise, the prospect of probing our human conceptual differences should seem exciting enough. I consider it a philosophical task of immense importance to elucidate our conceptual differences and thus to be able to dissolve problems and disagreements that originate partly from conceptual differences and not from differences in opinion alone. An issue of disagreement may be resolved just by making clear within what conceptual structures the different views are made and then reconstructing the respective views, by means of translation, interpretation, and paraphrase. If there still remain opposite views, at least they will have been clarified. With an awareness that all issues are couched in larger conceptual structures and are not isolated from the rest of a world-view, one may achieve an atmosphere of discussion and argument marked by mutual respect and suspension of immediate judgement.

Prerequisites for conceptualization Several philosophers have emphasized the need for a common conceptual structure for communication and language to be made possible, while still allowing for some conceptual variation across cultures. Michael Lynch is no exception, although he additionally seems to try to argue for the possibility of a radically different conceptual scheme.18 He makes use of Strawson’s distinction between basic concepts and other concepts, and construes a neo-Kantian model of conceptual schemes. Lynch proposes that two conceptual schemes are identical if they share the same basic concepts, where basic concepts 18Lynch 1997.

Reality as conceptualized 37 include having some kind of concept concerning substance, time, space, person, morality, power, gender, identity, composition, fact, and event. These basic concepts are then presupposed when we form and use other concepts. Lynch’s basic concepts are contextual in the wide sense of the word. The set of basic concepts may change over time to include new basic concepts and getting rid of old basic concepts as being obsolete. And thus, he claims, we will have the possibility of radically different conceptual schemes. With respect to Lynch’s project, I find it highly improbable that we over time, no matter in what quantities, would be able to manage without any of the very basic concepts of substance, person, or identity. Our very linguistic practices are based on the fact that we intend our utterances to be understood by a listener—we want him or her to do something, to know something. And if we did not presuppose that there were things such as persons around, that is to say, that the conceptual structure in question is based on the basic concepts of person and identity at least, speech acts would not be possible. Even though we may acknowledge that what constitutes personal and social identity is linguistically constructed, and thus that there exist different concepts of person, these concepts would all presuppose that there are such things as separate, individual persons. We cannot make sense of a conceptual structure that is not dependent on such very basic concepts that Lynch thinks can be replaced over time. Lynch has thus failed to show the possibility of a radically different conceptual scheme. The differentiation between basic concepts and ordinary concepts will, however, prove to be a potentially useful tool for dealing with the issues of conceptual differences. I suggest a distinction between, on the one hand our prerequisites for conceptualization, which are common to us all as humans and which can be theoretically described as basic concepts, and on the other hand our different conceptualizations of reality, our conceptual structures. For our survival the human race historically, and the human individual in its development from infant to adult, need to relate to their surroundings in specific ways that presuppose that reality is such that it can be related to in these ways. Without being able to differentiate between substances, our distant ancestors would never have gathered edible things or escaped the predators, and the baby would never make contact with its surroundings and would die. Without being able to relate to persons as persons, as different from stones and bones, there would have been no communication, no

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development of language.19 On the level of analysis we may find it convenient to use the basic concepts of substance, time, space, person, identity, and so forth, to speak of what is presupposed in all other human conceptualization, the very prerequisites for conceptualization, even though it is not the concepts themselves that are presupposed but the ability and environmental capacity to form such concepts. What people actually do does not, of course, necessarily involve any active awareness of concepts or conceptual structures on their part. Although, on the level of analysis we find it convenient to talk about the conceptual structures of a language or a group of people when trying to describe a linguistic usage and a way of relating to reality. Speculating about doing without these very basic concepts as prerequisites for conceptualization might be stimulating as a philosophical thought-experiment, and even helpful in trying to make clear what exactly we do (need to) presuppose in the rest of our concept-forming. But that certain ways of thinking are in fact unavoidable, that we do conceptualize the world by way of substance, time, space, person, identity, and so forth, is not likely to change. Cultural and geographical differences around the world make for slighter differences in conceptual structure; if you are surrounded by snow you have to relate to snow in order to survive, and if you live in the equatorial area there is no need for any concept of snow. Differences in long-time evolved organisms may of course allow for greater differences in conceptual structures; we might, who knows, develop wings and acquire a new set of concepts having to do with flying and flapping wings. But even so, a human race cannot evolve uncorporality and over time drop having any concept of substance. Thus, an Eskimo people may move to Africa and over time drop the concept of snow; but the whole human race can never grow into one single organism, and thus dispense with all concepts having to do with person. To recapitulate my position with respect to the issue of conceptual differences, we are as human beings biological organisms with a certain sensory apparatus, relating to certain physical, biological, social, and existential surroundings. In conceptualizing and in making use of language we presuppose this very setting that we are a part of. Doing that is a prerequisite for conceptualizing in the first place; you cannot have one without the other. The prerequisites for our conceptual structures are what they are since we are what we are. They are not absolute in that they constitute what conceptualization of reality is per 19 See also Sebeok 1986, for a discussion on the role of concepts in the evolution of human beings.

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se, but they do constitute what conceptualization of reality is for us, what we can say and think. To us there is only one alternative. My claim that there is for us only one alternative must not be confused with the position adopted in what Eli Hirsch calls the division problem.20 The division problem deals with arguments for and against our normative intuition that the way ordinary natural languages divide reality is correct, and that other divisions, even though they may have the same descriptive content as natural languages, are irrational and bad. A relativist in the division problem is one who believes any division of reality in language is in theory as good as another. In English we have for example a word for green things, and a word for circular things. But, says Hirsch, imagine a language that has the word “gricular”, which denotes the class of things that are either green or circular, but does not have any word that applies to only green things. Add the words “grincular” (either green or not circular) and “ngricular” (either not green or circular), and this would enable the Gricular language to have the same descriptive content as English, even though it divides reality different. Since the natural and the unnatural languages all are capable of providing the same descriptive content, and thus all make use of the prerequisites for conceptualization, the discussion regarding prerequisites for conceptualization cannot be used to provide an argument in the division problem. Hirsch himself admits that he cannot present a philosophically valid argument to validate our initial intuition “that there are definite limits on what can constitute a reasonable alternative to our ordinary division practices”.21 He believes, though, that the solution does not lie in a purely pragmatic argument, which he claims is vacuous, but must be along the lines of claiming that it is metaphysically impossible for people to have as their only language a strong version of one of the strange languages.22 Hirsch’s devaluation of a purely pragmatic argument for the natural languages is not a valid criticism of my own pragmatic argument for the necessity of certain prerequisites for conceptualization, since I do not wish to speak of a metaphysical necessity, but of a necessity stemming from the physiological and biological beings we are. There is in the debate on conceptual relativism, as we have seen, often a lack of distinction between the criteria for the individuation and identification of radically different conceptual schemes on the one hand, and not radically different conceptual schemes on the 20Hirsch 1993. 21 Hirsch 1993, p 6. 22Hirsch 1993, chapters 5-7.

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other. This, I suspect, involves a lack of distinction between what I have called prerequisites for conceptualization on the one hand and conceptualizations or conceptual structures on the other hand, and it paves the way for a multitude of confusions. One such confusion is when the existence of actual culturally or grammatically different conceptual structures is used as an argument for the possibility of radically different conceptual schemes. The conceptual structures that are not radically different from each other all share the same prerequisites for thinking, sharing, confronting, and conceptualizing the same reality as human biological beings. They are therefore possible for us to use, given interpretation and contextual information, a second socialization into another culture, or whatever it takes. Whereas the criterion for being a radically different conceptual scheme is precisely that it does not share the same basic ways of conceptualizing as other conceptual structures, and so we cannot coherently propose any examples of such a conceptual scheme.

Reconstructive understanding Leaving aside the idea of radically different conceptual structures, let us now concentrate on what it means to say that we can have different or partially different conceptual structures, even though we share the very basic grounds for conceptualizing. I shall use, in a slightly modified form, a distinction between strict and reconstructive translation, introduced by David Henderson.23 Since I shall apply it not only across natural languages, but also within the same natural language, I prefer to speak of reconstructive understanding, though. In short, Henderson’s theory is as follows. When translating from another language into our own we use stand-ins for the words in the source language. In the case of strict translation this poses no problems. For example the Swedish sentence “sno ar vit” readily translates into “snow is white”, where “snow” is a stand-in for “sno”, “is” for “ar”, and “white” for “vit”. The underlying conceptual and theoretical structures are shared between the two languages and we perceive of the translation as unproblematic. In what Henderson names reconstructive translation, however, we attempt to translate terms that do not have any equivalents in our own language. The short stand-ins we nevertheless attempt to give in translation are then best seen as abbreviations for longer explanations of the terms. The point is that the foreign concepts cannot be understood apart from 23Henderson 1994.

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the whole conceptual structure they are embedded in, so no direct translation is possible, as we do not share that conceptual structure in our own language. In order to translate alien concepts from an alien language, we first need to engage in reconstructing into our own language a conceptual structure similar to the concept-embedding conceptual structure of the terms we want to translate. In doing so we use existing linguistic means from our own language. The stand-ins we choose as translations are to be seen as markers of a foreign concept, which can only be understood from within the holistic reconstruction of the whole theory. The example Henderson works with is taken from the classic study of Evans-Pritchard on the Azande people.24 In the view of life of the Azande, witchcraft is of immense importance. Henderson focuses on linguistic expressions dealing with a special substance in the stomach considered to be magic. Many things in life depend on this substance. If we from another culture are to translate, without misunderstandings, utterances from this language, according to Henderson, we need to realize that there are concepts that do not even exist in our own language, for example a word for the magic substance. We then have two alternatives; either we may use a circumlocution, for example “magic substance”; or we may invent a new word, perhaps a transcription of the native word (mangu and ngua), and let that be a stand-in for the concept in question. Whichever we do, we need to bear in mind that the word used is associated with a concept that gets its meaning, in a structuralist fashion, from its conceptual relations within a whole conceptual structure. So in understanding the stand-in in our own language we need to understand it reconstructively. Whenever we speak about these strange phenomena using reconstructive understanding we incorporate the alien conceptual structure into our own. The stand-ins are not associated with a concept in our own conceptual structure, and thus they cannot unproblematically be related to our own conceptual structures. This relating needs to take the by-way over the alien language and the relations and functions the concept has to other concepts and conceptual structures there. Let me now illustrate how my own distinctions of conceptualizations that are more or less strongly dependent on physical characteristics together with the notion of reconstructive understanding can be of help in analysing the Zande concepts.25 Suppose someone were to state 24Evans-Pritchard 1937. 251 make no claim to give an accurate analysis of the actual Zande concepts or

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that “Ngua is superstition, it does not exist, the term does not refer to anything”, with the intended meaning that there is no magic substance located in the stomachs of the Zande people, and therefore the belief in it must be mistaken and superstitious.26 However, perhaps “ngua” in the Zande conceptual structure is conceptualized with a weaker dependence on physical characteristics than is assumed in the remark where it was claimed to be superstitious. Perhaps the grounds on which it is considered real are primarily that the way it is socially constructed makes a difference for the alternatives for action for the Azande in that it regulates social relations and religious affairs. The primary reason it makes a difference for the alternatives for action would then not be that it is real in the sense of being physically locatable in the stomach of people. The reason would rather be that its conceptual relations to other conceptualizations that are strongly dependent on physical characteristics in the Zande culture make it a real factor for a functional Zande life. Thus all three claims (that ngua is superstition, that it does not exist, and that the term does not refer) are mistaken. The mistake rests on the failure to recognize that in this case what one says something about in one’s own conceptual structure is itself conceptualized outside of one’s own conceptual structure. Mistakenly, one understands “ngua” as a strict translation of something that in one’s own conceptual structure would be simply a non-existing substance in the stomach. What has happened is that what one speaks about is no longer the “ngua”-concept of the Zande culture, but something else. Even if one, in an attempt to recognize the reconstructive status of the stand-in term, would purport to say within this culture that “Ngua [as conceptualized in the Zande conceptual structure] does not exist”, one has thereby already moved outside of the conceptualization as it is conceptualized within the conceptual structures of the culture in question. If one does not recognize the reconstructive status of the stand-in term “ngua” the statement will be trivially true about something which is construed as being non­ existent (“Ngua [as conceptualized as a non-existing magic substance in the stomach] does not exist”). Or, alternatively, not recognizing beliefs; my purpose is simply that of providing illustration, and the example chosen may, if preferred, be seen as hypothetical or conventionalized. 26See also Winch 1999. In his well-known paper on Evans-Pritchard’s study on the Azande, Winch argues for why we should not understand primitive mystical thought from the view-point of a Western scientific context. Cf. Horton 1999 for counter-arguments, and for further references to the debate stemming from Winch’s paper.

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the reconstructive status of “ngua”, one would not know what the statement is about. “Ngua [as conceptualized in ??] does not exist” would be an indeterminate statement and without meaning. The alternative “Ngua [as unconceptualized] does not exist” is not a meaningful alternative for obvious reasons. What one can do is to try to make clear what it means for “ngua” to exist and to refer in the Zande conceptual structure. It is also possible to claim that the “ngua”-concept is irrelevant in one’s own culture and that it has no function in one’s own conceptual structure, or to claim that it is relevant and in that case how. In assuming that all other instances of translation between the Zande language and our own would be unproblematic instances of strict translation, where understanding is facilitated by us sharing similar conceptual structures, one overlooks the possibility that even words that may readily lend themselves to strict translation, such as stomach, may additionally to its ordinary use in our language in the alien language be otherwise conceptually related. Thus, even concepts that at the first onset seem innocent and straightforward enough might be in need of reconstructive understanding in order to be fairly understood and used. The distinction between strict and reconstructive understanding is quite easy to understand in the context of translation between two different natural languages with different cultural systems, as it has been outlined by Henderson. However, since I claim that there is no sharp dividing line between what is in his terminology called strict and reconstructive translation, even things that are not completely alien and culturally distant may be considered to be in need of reconstructive conceptual work to some extent. The pragmatic reason is to avoid misunderstandings and misinterpretations. In these cases it is not motivated to speak about translation between two languages or conceptual structures. I instead speak more generally about reconstructive work being carried out in order to reach a reconstructed understanding of what is said. The degree to which reconstructive work is needed to be done in order to understand and express the concepts expressed in another conceptual structure, together with the extension of the conceptual area where such work needs to be undertaken thus signifies the degree of conceptual difference. But, you may say, there are legitimate instances of ambiguities in natural languages within the same conceptual structure, that are not in need of any reconstructive work in order to be understood. Yes, when only the semantic descriptive meaning of an utterance is considered, we may have ambiguities, as in “He went to the bank”,

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which is ambiguous as for whether he went to the bank, the money institution, or to the river-bank. Taking in the contextual elements as well as the speaker’s intention, however, most probably the ambiguity will be resolved. What is said is not ambiguous provided that the speaker as well as the listener are both part of the same linguistic community and are both reasonably well socialized into it to make and understand linguistic and contextual cues in order to get at the utterance meaning of an utterance. Where the ambiguity remains, it can still be resolved without leaving the same contextual structure. Perhaps more information is needed, perhaps the speaker overestimated the knowledge of the listener, or perhaps the speaker was intentionally ambiguous for some reason. In most cases of ordinary communication the goal is mutual understanding. In order to achieve mutual understanding it is vital that the referring expressions are taken to refer to the same referent by both speaker and listener. And what constitutes the referent of a referring expression is to a large degree dependent on the associated conceptualizations and how they are related in conceptual structures. Consequently, if there are discrepancies in the conceptual structures that the speaker associates with his or her utterance and the conceptual structures that the listener associates with the utterance, there is a potential for misunderstandings and a need for reconstructive work and understanding. Consider for example the concept of “flour” as it is conceptualized in children’s make-believe play of baking a cake in the sandbox, compared to the concept of “flour” as it is conceptualized in the ordinary life of a household. Since the two words look the same, sound the same, and belong to the same natural language and seemingly mean the same there is the temptation to treat them the same. But they are not the same since the associated concepts belong to different conceptual structures. One advantage that Henderson sees with the notion of reconstructive translation is that it puts a limit to relativist tendencies, since it presupposes a significant degree of conceptual agreement. Otherwise we could not succeed in reconstructing an alien theory using already existing concepts from our own language. My version of reconstructive understanding is somewhat less limiting towards relativism, since the only agreement that is needed in order to do reconstructive conceptual work is that we share the same prerequisites for conceptualization. As far as we can assume that speakers of another conceptual system are speaking in terms of person, substance, individual, time, and so forth, we can, by the additional help of observing their behaviour and asking

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for clarifications, find out the functions of the concepts they are using and reconstruct their conceptual structure in our own language.27

Our conceptual structures in practice I suggest that examples of purportedly different conceptual structures may be divided into two main groups: examples concerning, firstly, whole cultural-linguistic systems, including specific domains of discourse compared across cultural-linguistic systems, (for example colour-concepts, or numerals); and, secondly, those specific domains of discourse for which several separate conceptual structures can or do coexist within the same overall cultural-linguistic system, (for example science and, I want to maintain, from the perspective of the problem discussed in this book, religion). The first large group of examples concerns culturally distinct conceptual structures that in their linguistic structures structure the physical and social surroundings differently. Examples would be the classical ones with differing concepts for snow and other natural phenomena, different pronoun-systems depending on social and family structures, or colour-terms. These kinds exist side by side, but often geographically separated from each other. There are barriers between the different cultural structures, language barriers, geographical barriers, or social barriers within the same society. Different cultural conceptual structures may also exist side by side successively, with time as a barrier, when we speak of ancient and future cultures. An individual normally belongs to only one separate culturally distinct conceptual structure. Exceptions are completely bilingual or bicultural persons, belonging equally to two or more cultural groups or languages. Such persons are known to be able to switch between different conceptual structures without problems. But they are known also not to integrate the two conceptual systems into one coherent system, but to keep them separate.28 Differing cultural conceptual structures may cause translation difficulties, misunderstandings, and other cross27The additional help of observing the behaviour and the context of utterance is vital for understanding. Compare the charge of circularity against Whorf (that he is begging the question by basing the alleged cognitive differences encoded in language on a reiteration of the linguistic differences) by, among others, Lennenberg 1953, pp 463-471. However, as Miihlhausler &; Harre point out, Whorf also looked at differential non-linguistic behaviour, and so the alleged cognitive differences encoded in language were not based only on a reiteration of the linguistic differences. Miihlhausler & Harre 1990, p 5. 28See Blom and Gumperz 1972; and Heller 1988.

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cultural problems, especially if the speakers are not aware of belonging to different conceptual systems. But otherwise, cultural-linguistic conceptual structures seem to exist happily side by side, even within one and the same person. The second main group of examples referred to concerns those specific domains of discourse for which incompatible conceptual structures coexist within the same overall cultural-linguistic system. A frequently occurring area from which examples are taken in the debate is the scientific area. Science normally claims to be objective and to transcend cultures and languages. At the same time several competing scientific theories in one and the same cultural-linguistic conceptual structure may cover the same subject matter, but with different conceptualizations. Following Kuhn, it is proposed that as scientific theories change drastically through a paradigm-shift they also change from one conceptual scheme into another.29 Even though the same terms may be used they represent different concepts. The concepts of space and time in relativity physics are not the same as Newton’s concepts of time and space, and so the two theories, although they seemingly propose to speak of the same thing, do not do so, since what they speak about is conceptualized within different conceptual structures. One of science’s goals is to be objective. A criterion of a good scientific theory would then be that it should be easily translated into all cultures and languages, given the necessary explanations and expanded vocabulary. However, science, as it is practised, is a part of a larger cultural-linguistic conceptual structure, in the same way as the domain of colour-concepts is. Lynn Hankinson Nelson makes a strong case of showing how scientific theories are contaminated, not only by the meanings of the scientific terms of the theory, but from culture as a whole, and specifically the male bias of language.30 She argues with Quine that common sense views are part of the evidence for scientific theories. She then makes use of recent feminist insights to expand this holism into incorporating among those common sense views that are relevant for science, not only views about physical objects, but also views about politics, values, and gender. The traditional ideal of objectivity is supposed to make science autonomous with respect to gendered social and political context. However, the traditional ideal of objectivity is based on a Cartesian view of knowledge as individual, a view which Nelson claims is false. She claims instead 29See Kuhn 1970; and Hacker 1996, p 292. 30See Nelson 1990.

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that knowledge always originates in a community and is communal. Her two main reasons for this communal approach is, firstly, that the human young are dependent on others for many years; without relating and communicating the young would not survive. The second reason is that there is no pre-theoretic experience, but experience is always conceptualized in a communal shared language. Thus a science that builds on a community that has excluded women is biased. Her two arguments for the view that knowledge is communal are similar to my own arguments for the view that reality for us is always conceptualized reality, and that our conceptualizations build on certain communal prerequisites for conceptualization. So not even scientific theories can be isolated (unless of course temporarily for purely methodological reasons) from the larger cultural-linguistic conceptual structure they are part of.31 I conceive of two versions of the area of conceptually different theories concerning the same subject matter within the same culturallinguistic system. One version is where the two theories have the same function and are mutually exclusive, for example two medical theories about the cause of a particular disease, one claiming viral infection and the other bacterial. The other version is where the two theories have different functions and are not mutually exclusive even though they at first glance may contradict each other, for example physical theory according to Newton respectively Einstein. As for the question of the place of religion, first a reminder that by religion I mean a religious practice including its rituals, its language, its beliefs, its truth-claims, and its intentional attitudes. All this is included in the subject matter of religion. Speaking about the concept of God, for example, I do not believe it is possible to isolate it from the rest of the religious practice, for God is conceptualized within that religious practice. And it is the conceptualized God we attempt to speak about, as it always is as soon as we make an attempt to speak or think about something. On the other hand I do believe that it is possible to speak about the concept of God outside of religious practice without distorting how religious believers use and understand the concept. Its relations within a conceptual structure and its functions may be outlined for all to understand by the help of reconstructive understanding. A discussion about the specific discourse domain of religion in 31 See, for a similar purpose, also Anderson 1998, although with a much more postmodernistic oriented approach to the traditional rational subject, and applying her critique to the philosophy of religion rather than science; and Stenmark 1997a and 1997b, for a discussion of the aims and limits of science.

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the present context may take two main directions. Either it could emphasize the cross-cultural aspects, and show how differences in the overall cultural-linguistic conceptual structure of reality results in different religious conceptualizations around the world, which would place it in the first category. The other direction such a discussion might take is to consider the specific discourse domain of religion as being conceptualized differently within the same overall culturallinguistic conceptual structure, which would mean a place in the second category. One instance of this would be a realist versus a non-realist conceptualization of religion. My principal interest lies with the second alternative, which does not, however, imply that the other route is not in its own way commendable.

Relativism Is adherence to the idea of different conceptual structures always connected with conceptual relativism? We have seen that the views about what different conceptual structures may amount to vary among philosophers. Therefore, the notion of relativism needs to be qualified before we can attempt to answer the question. For this purpose I have found it fruitful to exemplify the discussion of the notion of relativism by a trichotomy presented by the Swedish philosopher Lars Bergstrom.32 Bergstrom tells us that there are three kinds of cognitive relativism: sociology of knowledge-relativism (our beliefs are influenced by our cultural context), epistemic relativism (the rationality of our beliefs is relative to our cultural context), and ontological relativism (the truth of our beliefs is relative to our cultural context), all of which can encompass a wide range of interpretations. It is the third kind that will interest us here, since ontological relativism for the realist is a completely impossible position. If a referential theory for its success depends on ontological relativism, this alone is reason enough for the religious realist to reject it. I want to avoid this becoming the fate of my own suggestions, and suggest that the three categories distinguished by Bergstrom cannot be kept strictly apart; they are interdependent. In order to be philosophically interesting, Bergstrom claims, along with other realists, ontological relativism must entail that the same sentence or belief can be true in one culture and false, or neither true nor false, in another. Bergstrom concludes that for several reasons ontological relativism is untenable; truth cannot be relative. I believe this claim is unproblematic when we are dealing with two conceptual 32Bergstrom 1998.

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structures capable of extensive mutual direct understanding. Any utterance must then have the same truth value as its direct translation for the conceptual structures to be commensurable. If they have opposing truth values the structures are mutually exclusive. Truth here is not relative. Then, however, we have those cases where the two conceptual structures in question both have their own theory for the same domain of discourse, but with a difference in function or purpose. The question of the truth of an utterance will then have a quite straightforward answer within the individual conceptual structure. What counts as true in one may, however, be different from what counts as being true in the other, depending on what functions we expect our concept-embedding theories to perform for us. This in its turn may have to do with our beliefs and what we consider rational. After having reconstructed the theory of the other conceptual structure to the best of our abilities we might end up with two holistically understood utterances which are incommensurable, but not mutually exclusive, simply for the reason that they fulfil different functions. This is perhaps not seen to constitute “real” relativism, relativism in a strong sense, since we are here really dealing with two distinct utterances, with different meanings. But even though I agree with the realist that truth is not in a strong sense relative, and agree that ontological relativism in this sense is not a viable philosophical alternative, I still have the following point to make. If nothing we say, if no conceptual structures can be said to exemplify strong relativism, then, by the whole philosophical enterprise of rebuffing relativism, one still has not touched our actual human linguistic practices. All our human linguistic practices and utterances with their conceptual differences still remain to be analysed. I do not consider it fruitful to characterize these actual conceptual differences as philosophically uninteresting, as, for example, both Bergstrom and Davidson intimate, since these differences are the only ones we have. Not all utterances are of the form “Sno ar vit” and “Snow is white”, where a strict translation of the constituent terms is all that is needed for us to agree that both can be true at the same time and that this is trivially the case. A great deal of our utterances depend on reconstructive understanding to various extents, where an additional explanation, apart from a strict translation, is required for us to understand why both can be said to be true, when on the face of it they may even seem to contradict each other. Take for example the two utterances: “A human being is worth less than a pound.” In other words, a human being is more or less worthless; and “A human

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being has an infinite value.” Here we have two seemingly contradictory utterances about a human being. But no contradiction is at hand if we acknowledge that the first utterance belongs to a biological context dealing with facts about the raw material of the human body and bodyparts and the estimated worth of that material in today’s market price; whereas the context of the other utterance is a religious or political context where for some purpose certain values are promoted. The two utterances are made within different conceptual structures with different functions. Should, however, both utterances belong to the same contextual structure, a genuine disagreement would follow. One might for example debate whether or not it would be worthwhile and lucrative to “recycle” human bodies. Here both speak about physical and economical facts, and they should be able to resolve their conflict by appealing to market research and price-lists. The additional explanations required can be given by reconstructing the respective conceptual structures so to arrive at a reconstructive understanding of the two utterances in order to understand them from the viewpoint of each other. One might of course choose other words to capture this difference than relativism, if one is weary of getting classified as a strong relativist, but I see no problem in calling even this a case of conceptual relativism, in a weak sense. Truth is here relative to a conceptual structure in the sense that what counts as being true is relative to the function of the concept-embedding theory. To get back to the initial question whether relativism follows from granting the existence of different conceptual structures, I shall answer it by saying that it is surely possible to promote some variants of conceptual differences and yet not be a conceptual relativist. Relativism seems to be a threat and a label that opponents and defenders of conceptual schemes alike want to avoid. I do, however, believe that a weak form of relativism will follow, as described above. But a strong ontological relativism, the third kind of relativism recognized by Bergstrom, does not follow. Thus, since the alternative position in the debate on religious realism and non-realism that I propose, does not imply ontological relativism in a strong sense, the religious realist does not for that reason need to disqualify it.

Reality as conceptualized by us The way I use the term reality and its corresponding adjective real (unless otherwise stated) is to speak about reality for us. What reality “really is” in itself, apart from our ponderings, conceptualizations and constructions, I do not discuss, for reasons that are made clear in this

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chapter. In order for us to talk or think about something, we have to be able to conceptualize it; we have to be able to build on the basic prerequisites for conceptualization. A discussion about something that we could not at all conceptualize lies beyond any rational project. Some writers tend to hang on to the distinction between reality for us and reality in itself as a meaningful distinction by making a clearcut distinction between social facts (which may be seen to be humanly constructed) and natural facts (which are not). I make a distinction between social and natural facts too, albeit in a more gradual fashion. But I certainly do not want to equate it with and use it to defend the distinction between reality as conceptualized by us and reality in itself. The two operate on different logical levels. Raw nature, say a mountain, is sometimes taken as evidence that there is a reality in itself, quite independent of our conceptualizations of it. The mountain will stand no matter whether or not anyone sees it and speaks about it. Yes, but in stating this someone is speaking about the mountain. We classify it as a mountain; we see the assembly of rocks, earth, and sand to be a mountain. I do not deny that the mountain stands there. We cannot walk through it at will. The physical world certainly would not vanish in a puff of air at the moment there ceased to be humans around to conceptualize it. All I am saying is that in order for something to be considered to be a social or natural fact at all, it has to be conceptualized by us; that is the only way we, as humans, with our limitations and conditions of life, have access to what we speak about in terms of social or natural facts or reality. Not even when confronted with something we have never encountered before, and thus have no concept for, can we claim to refer to anything else than reality as it is conceptualized by us. For, as a matter of fact, in order to perceive and make some sense of this strange phenomenon, we are obliged to conceive of it in terms of space, identity, substance, and so forth. That is how we differentiate the world around us, and have learnt to do since infancy, when we first separated ourselves from our mothers as separate individuals. So without these basic means of conceptualizing, we would not even perceive of there being anything there at all. And if we wanted to talk about and describe to someone else what we had encountered, we would be obliged to use concepts common to both of us in order for communication to take place. We would talk about the new phenomenon in terms of concepts known to us, but perhaps putting them to new uses, pointing out similarities and differences, perhaps creating new metaphors. Finally, the new phenomenon would have been woven into our own conceptual structure. By our very attempts

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to grasp a presumed unconceptualized phenomenon, it automatically becomes conceptualized by us. Even metaphysical theories that are launched about the nature of reality as unconceptualized by us are themselves examples of this. Granted that at all times we speak about that which is confronted by us and conceptualized by us, what we consider to be real, or to belong to reality, is a relational and contrastive matter. Being real is not an absolute concept that can be applied to objects out of context, or without consideration for the conceptual structure within which talk about the object is understood. We talk about real money in contrast to counterfeit money; we talk about a real daddy in contrast to a step-father; we talk about a real princess in contrast to a fictional princess; we talk about a real oasis in contrast to a mirage. The unmarked case in our linguistic habits seems to be the use of real as meaning physical, or observable, in contrast to illusive and non­ physical, as in the two last examples. However, this does not permit us to assume that this is always the case, as can be seen in the two first examples above. In those examples we do not talk about a real daddy in contrast to a non-physical disembodied daddy; we do not talk about real money in contrast to non-existent money. Regrettably, this is not always appreciated in the discussions concerning realism and non-realism. It needs to be stressed that to say that something is real, or belongs to reality, implies that we consider it real, and not unreal, in relation to some purpose or function. For example, only real money can function as authorized vehicles of financial transactions, in contrast to unauthorized. Or, the purpose of talking about a real oasis might be in order to avoid spending energy on travelling to a mirage. In the second case, to be a physically embodied object, in contrast to being fictional, illusive, or non-physical, is crucial, but not in the first. The distinction between social facts and natural facts is one crude taxonomy that attempts to disrupt this often presupposed equation between physical existence and reality, by claiming that also social facts are real. I go one step further and analyse in what sense, if any, fictional facts, make-believe facts, and religious facts may also be considered to be real. These areas, all characterized by a very weak dependence on physical characteristics, cannot be fully understood on a par with social facts, at least not on the interpretation of social facts given by Searle. The reality of social facts depends on there being legitimizing social structures and institutions that can uphold and guarantee the reality of the social facts. This is not necessarily the case with fairy princesses, unicorns, make-believe playmates, and God. To start with, I think we can agree that what constitutes the reality

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of these things for us cannot depend on them being physical observable objects. They all per definition cannot claim a status of physical existence. So what then does constitute their reality? The reality of a fairy princess depends on her place within a piece of fiction, within which it may matter a great deal whether she is a real or a false princess. The reality of a child’s make-believe playmate depends on there being a genuine need for a make-believe playmate in the child’s emotional life and stage of development. The make-believe playmate then actually accomplishes things for the child which would not be accomplished if it were not there, and this makes it real. And, finally, the reality of God also depends on the function God has for the believer, combined with the place of the concept of God within the religious conceptual structure in question. I shall deal in more depth with these areas that are conceptualized with only a weak dependence on physical characteristics in chapters four and five, and my purpose here is only to show that the principles that make it possible for us to evaluate what is real and what is not, are basically the same for all areas of human conceptualization. The principles are, firstly, that when we talk about reality we talk about reality for us, and not unconceptualized reality; secondly, that the concept of reality is a relational concept, not an absolute concept; and thirdly, that what we consider real is what makes a difference for our alternatives for action in a context. Starting out from these principles we must ask for each concept in different conceptual structures, what being real amounts to, and in relation to what purpose and function something is considered real. For each utterance containing a reference to an object we must ask what conceptual structure the terms of the utterance are dependent on, and how that conceptual structure relates to other structures. Without considerations like these we cannot say whether it is true or false to say of something that it is real. Neither are we licensed to compare and evaluate utterances containing seemingly the same concept as if they were in need of no reconstructive understanding at all, without first making sure that this is not the case and that the utterances do not belong to different conceptual structures with different functions.

Same subject matter— different functions Several competing theories in one and the same cultural-linguistic conceptual structure may cover the same subject matter, but with different conceptualizations. There are two alternatives. The first alternative is that the theories may be mutually exclusive. They are

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then hypotheses which await testing, and the theory that best fits the facts will prevail. An historical example might be the two theories on the causes of death in childbirth: bacterial infection or lowered spirits due to the presence of a priest.33 During the testing of the theories the whole conceptual structure will suffer from indeterminacy. Since there are always competing hypotheses about how to best describe our surroundings, there will never be a fixed and determined whole conceptual structure of reality, but it is constantly changing and evolving. The other alternative is for the theories to be suited for different purposes, useful in different ways. In this way they need not be mutually exclusive and they can both be accommodated within the larger conceptual structure, but related differently. They are not seen to be hypotheses for the same purpose waiting to be confirmed or falsified, but are useful for different purposes and will both function in their separate domains. This alternative constitutes no problem as long as we do not try to evaluate the different conceptualizations metaphysically and assign a specific, context-independent reference to each concept (or rather to the referring expression associated with the concept). If we do, the references may cause contradiction when separated from the functional and relational aspect. Imagine a person, sharing exactly the same everyday conceptual structure as an ordinary person of your own language community, apart from one thing. This person holds a different conception of breasts, compared to the usual one. Let us say that the person denies the physical existence of breasts. Since we supposed that the rest of the conceptual structure is unchanged, the non-physical concept of breast retains all the same relations to other concepts, and all the same functions in the person’s doings and handling of life, as does the ordinary concept of breast. Thus, if this person was a woman, she would wear a bra and care for her breasts; and if a man, he would, if so inclined, take due notice of women’s breasts. We would not hesitate to say that such a person must be confused, or have false beliefs in holding that there are no physical breasts, since in everything else he or she is completely normal, and behaves as if there were physical breasts around. But compare this with an infant. For an infant breasts will be 33Example taken from the classical story of how the Hungarian doctor Ignaz Philipp Semmelweis at the maternity ward in Vienna 1847 launched the bacteriological explanation of the high rate of deaths in child births in the ward taken care of by doctors (coming directly from dissections) compared to the ward run by midwives.

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highly significant. The breast will be seen to be brought into existence by the infant’s wishes and needs and to be a part of the infant.34 The breast will in its turn, independently of the infant, cause pleasure and satisfaction to the baby as he or she feeds and gets comforted by the mother. Coming to terms with the breast in these various aspects is the beginning of the infant’s attempts to objectify reality as separate from itself. Here, too, the associated concept of breast, which we on the level of analysis attribute to the infant, is not the same as in our everyday conceptual structure, or web of belief, where breasts are physical objects, bodily parts of women, sometimes used to feed babies. But, in contrast to the previously mentioned adult, we cannot dismiss outright the infant as being confused or having false ideas. The infant’s way of relating to the breast, which we may analyse as being associated with a different concept of breast and a differently structured conceptualized reality than our usual one, is functional for the infant. It serves him or her well, both for survival purposes, in developing an objectification of his or her surroundings, and in relating to reality. The conceptual structures associated with the linguistic and non-linguistic behaviour of an ordinary adult compared with those of an infant are too different to be compared and evaluated from just one singular aspect. One has to see to the totality of relations and functions of the concepts. The two alternative conceptualizations of reality are not mutually exclusive, (statements made in both can be said to be true without contradiction), they are just different and made to serve different purposes in different contexts. In the first example, on the other hand, the deranged person in all other respects shared the same conceptual structures as everyone else, using them for the same purposes as everyone else, and thus had no reason to so radically change the concept of breast. Only in the second example is there a reason for ascribing to the concept a content that differs from our everyday concept of breast. We do not scold the infant for relating to the breast as it does, for we realize that its behaviour is useful and functional. In the same way we do not scold a small child for believing in fairy tales, even with consequences such as being afraid at night, or not daring to sleep in its own bed. But we do expect him or her to grow out of it and learn to distinguish reality from fiction. We realize that fantasy has a role to play in the child’s development. An adult that cannot make the distinction, however, we scold, or give psychiatric treatment, and 34The description of the infant’s experiences is taken from a fairly widely accepted psychoanalytic theory of child-development. See Winnicott 1971.

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we hold him or her responsible for any consequences in ordinary life his or her entrapment in fiction may have caused. Failing to make the distinction is usually considered to serve no purpose for an adult member of our society. But what then about the possibility of believing in God and referring to God without presuming metaphysical realism? Can that be said to serve a purpose and to be functional, or should it be dismissed together with belief in fairy-tales and transitional objects? In order to supply an answer to that question we first need to turn to the subject of reference. If reality for us is understood as contextual and a gradual matter of human construction and conceptualization, this should be reflected in a likewise contextual view on reference.

3 Reference as context dependent Let us recall the realist assumptions that underlie the present debates on religious realism and non-realism. The realist objection to a religious non-realist, posed in terms of reference, is that the use of “God” must refer to a real God, existing independently of human conceptualizations, in order to be religiously adequate. By denying metaphysical realism, religious non-realism has also accepted that “God” does not refer. Reference is here understood in terms of some kind of correspondence between our referring expressions and an independent reality. Once located it is assumed that the referent can be examined removed from the context in which the reference was made. This claim for an independent referent is, however, unjustified, since the referent to a referring expression is intrinsically connected to the act of reference of which it is part. Therefore, I claim, it is not logically possible to isolate a supposedly unconceptualized object as being the referent of some referring expression, independently of the context of utterance, and make that a criterion for the success or meaningfulness of the act of reference itself.

Traditional theories of reference Before launching the pragmatic view on reference that I advocate and the reasons for it, let us have a short look at some traditional theories of reference in order to better understand why they cannot adequately cover the examples of language use I present throughout this book. Usually thought of as the father of modern day semantics, Frege suggested that the significance of a complete sentence is that it is either true or false. Now, whether a sentence is true or false depends 57

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on the semantic power of its constituents, which in its turn depends on its association with an extra-linguistic object—its referent. This association between the expression and the object it refers to Frege called the “Bedeutung” of an expression, sometimes translated with “meaning” and sometimes with “reference”. The problem with this is that there are proper names that do not have objects as their referents. The sentences within which they occur will then, according to Frege, not obtain any truth-value at all. It is usually thought that Frege’s later introduction of “sense” solved that problem for him and allowed him to ascribe sense even to so-called empty singular terms or nonreferential expressions, that is terms without objects as referents. Frege spoke about the sense of an expression as a mode of presentation of its Bedeutung (meaning, reference). The expression stands for a certain object, but how we speak about this object may differ depending on our thoughts about the object. His famous example of the Morning star and the Evening star illustrates this. The referent to these expressions is the same, but they differ in sense. A person can entertain the thought that the star he or she sees is the Morning star, but deny that it is the Evening star, if unaware that they refer to the same object. The sense of an expression makes one not only think of an object, the referent, but think of the object in a certain way. This property of expressions in ordinary language enables us to use language for communication. Bertrand Russell is also a significant philosopher in this context. He defended a descriptive theory of proper names, according to which the use of a term to refer is dependent on a description.1 What we normally see as proper names are in fact most of the times abbreviated descriptions: instead of “Homer” one could use “the writer of the Iliad”. The open or disguised descriptions uniquely pick out the referent and limit the reference to objects that fit the description. It is also possible to argue in a Fregean manner that the descriptive force of a name is to assert that a sufficient but unspecified number of statements are true of the object. This is sometimes called the cluster view of reference.2 The traditional descriptive theory of reference ran into so many problems that it is now largely abandoned in its strict application. In his seminal article, “Reference and definite descriptions”, Keith Donnellan showed that the same definite description could be used both attributively (which would be accounted for within a descriptive view of reference) and referentially.3 In a referential use of a definite 1Russell 1990. 2Searle 1990a. 3Donnellan 1990.

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description the descriptive content of the referring expression might be false when applied to the intended referent and yet the person using the expression might successfully refer to the correct referent (a case which the descriptive theory could not account for). In a similar way Saul Kripke claimed that a descriptive theory of reference leads to absurdities.4 A speaker may use a description that is not applicable to the intended referent, but happens to uniquely identify some other object. The consequence is that the speaker actually refers to the latter individual and not to the individual the speaker had in mind. Kripke, as a reaction to the descriptive theories of proper names, suggested that proper names refer directly, as rigid designators that designate the same object in every world, and suggested a causal explanation of how the connection between name and object is set up. He made it clear that in fact no description at all needs to be true of the referent for a name to refer successfully. Reference is secured by a causal link consisting of communicating people who each intends to use the name with the same reference as the person from whom they learnt it. The link is initiated in a baptism, or a dubbing ceremony, where the bearer of the name gets named ostensively or descriptively. In this way Kripke holds that we can, and do most of the time, refer successfully without having any uniquely identifying description or cluster of descriptions which we hold true of the object referred to. The attempts to account for the connection between the object referred to and the referring expression in causal terms have had their fair share of counter-argument s.5 Only to mention one example, there are two versions of the descriptive theory, not distinguished by Kripke: what the speaker refers to in a certain context (the cluster of information the speaker has determines the name’s reference on a particular occasion by fit), and what the name refers to (associated with each name is a set of descriptions which an item has to satisfy to be the bearer of the name). Kripke attacks only the first view, and a consequence is that a name’s capacity to refer becomes almost magic.6 Jerrold J. Katz illustrates this with a well known thought experiment.7 Suppose that what we refer to by means of the name “Moses” turns out to be a stone, playing an important part at the Exodus of the Israelites, and not at all the person it eventually became in the mythology that grew around the Exodus event. Intuitively, we 4Kripke 1980. 5See McGinn 1981; and Searle 1983 and 1990b. 6See Katz 1979, p 110; and Evans 1982, pp 73-79. 7Katz 1979, p 121.

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would then want to claim that Moses never existed. But if reference has nothing to do with any descriptive characteristics of the referent, not even such basic ones as Moses being a man, but depends only on a causal chain stemming from the original naming event, then we would have to claim that by using “Moses” one refers to that initial stone. This, of course, leads to absurdities, and philosophers such as Evans and Katz strove to preserve the benefits from both the descriptive and the causal theories of reference, without taking aboard the counter­ intuitive parts of the respective theories.8 From the descriptive theory one wants to retain the view that the descriptive content somehow associated with a linguistic expression normally plays a role in the assignment of reference, be it as a restriction as for what is accepted as referent, or as providing access to a potential referent. From the causal theory one wants to retain the view that the speaker’s intentions to refer to a specific object may override the descriptive content of the linguistic expression used for the purpose of referring to the object. The descriptive content of the referring expression may not correctly identify the object, and yet the object is successfully referred to. The emphasis in the contemporary philosophical debate on reference has shifted more and more towards accounts of direct reference. Singular terms, such as proper names, pronouns and demonstratives, are normally seen to refer directly, without any detour via senses. They are prime specimens of the direct-reference program proposed by Kripke, Putnam, and Kaplan, and recently developed by Frangois Recanati.9 Not only proper names, as originally suggested by Kripke, but also the reference of general terms, natural kind terms, and physical magnitude terms, such as “water” and “energy”, can be given an external explanation. The division of linguistic labour within a linguistic community means that not everybody needs to know the exact necessary and sufficient conditions for something to qualify as referent to a linguistic expression, as long as there are some people who do. General terms as well as proper names are seen to be capable of referring directly to objects, without mediation of the senses of the terms. In the field of religion some versions of a direct theory of reference have been found to be useful for critical realists such as J. M. Soskice, W. P. Alston and J. Hick when they concede that the descriptions held to be true about the referent to “God” may be a product of human culture and psychology, but still claim that the word “God” must have a referent that is independent of human minds. As long as 8Evans 1982; Katz 1979. 9Kaplan 1978 and 1989; Kripke 1980; Putnam 1975 and 1981; Recanati 1993.

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some causal link can be found that links this ultimate God-referent to the current use of the word “God” it can be claimed that the word refers successfully; which is seen to be a requirement for religious practice to be defensible.10 Much of the debate on reference concerns how the connection between a linguistic expression and a mind and language independent object is to be understood in order to account for correct and successful acts of reference. What is not questioned, however, is that there is such a connection and that “whatever is referred to must exist”.11 It is assumed that there has to be a correspondence between a referring expression and an independently existing referent for reference to have taken place. The intrinsic connection between reference and the correspondence theory of truth in a realist view can be explained as follows. In a correspondence theory of truth one thinks of truth in two ways, which many often fail to distinguish. Firstly, a sentence is about its corresponding states of affairs, and when they correspond the sentence is true simpliciter. Secondly, in a true sentence its predicate term is true of the object referred to by the subject term. Thus the correspondence theory of truth requires the existence of the constituents of the states of affairs that the sentence corresponds to. As Avrum Stroll points out, this explains why the problem with reference to fictional characters arises.12 Even if it would seem appropriate to say that it is true simpliciter to say that Sherlock Holmes lived in London, this implies that there is a person Holmes, of whom it is true that he lived in London. But there is not. One possible way to get around this, and a way chosen by several theorists, is to ignore everything having to do with fiction, to view it as peripheral and thus not necessary to solve for a referential theory. However, this will have further unwanted consequences. One would have to ignore talk about a whole lot of other areas as well, such as play, cultural activities, and religion, areas having to do with the human capacity for make-believe and imagination, and where the objects spoken about are not embodied. Or, one would have to try to make these areas conform to a scheme not devised for them. A referential theory built on a correspondence theory of truth in this way will not be able to cover all language uses, and therefore, I suggest, it is better to develop an alternative view on reference. 10See Alston 1989; Hick 1993a; and Soskice 1985. See also Helm 2000, where, in a collection of essays, it is discussed how holding direct or descriptive views on reference will influence the stance taken on religious pluralism. 11Searle 1969, p 77. See also Strawson 1990, p 226; and Recanati 1993, p 130. 12Stroll 1998b, pp 163-166.

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Reference as a human linguistic practice A general theory of reference should, as a basic condition, be able to handle examples that are specimens of real language use. There are semantic theories that have carved away all the complex layers of speaker’s intentions, and vagueness of language, in order to arrive at a neat and orderly theory of semantics and reference. I see nothing objectionable with this, provided it is recognized that these theories will only have their application to those formal and constructed logical languages that they are modelled on, and will not be applicable to natural languages. For my purposes though, I am concerned with theories of reference that have natural languages as their scope, since in religious activities, as well as in our dealings with each other and the world, we make use of a natural language, and not a simplified made-up formal language. Therefore, in the case of a clash between a theoretical claim and an actual occurrence of a counter-example to that claim, it is almost without exception the actual language use that takes precedence over the theory. It is up to the theory to adjust so as to manage to incorporate the apparent counter-example in a way consistent with the rest of the theory. The inability of the traditionally held views on reference to incorporate examples such as those put forward in this book is partly what impels me to adopt the kind of view of reference that I do. Reference is a speaker-dependent concept, rather than a purely semantic concept. I shall assume this to be generally accepted among contemporary linguists and philosophers.13 Words or sentences in themselves do not refer to anything, but are always uttered by someone in some particular situation—the context of utterance. The purpose of reference is to make someone—the listener or the reader—focus on, understand, and pick out what one is talking about. The same words with the same semantic descriptive meaning may be used on various occasions by various speakers and with various purposes and consequently with various utterance meanings and referents.14 These different uses of one and the same sentence-type are commonly called sentence-tokens, although I prefer to speak about utterances. With an emphasis on speaker’s reference it also follows that reference is not a 13See Strawson 1990, p 223; and Stalnaker 1990, p 184. 14See also Reimer 1997.

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one-to-one mapping of words to objects in the world, which is then at a later stage to be applied to actual speech situations. Reference is rather the act in which a speaker makes clear to the listener what he or she is speaking about by means of the words and expressions used by him or her. In some contexts the term “referring expression” is used for describing a logical relation between certain kinds of expressions (typically indexicals, proper names, and demonstratives, but other combinations are also possible) and the objects they refer to. A referring expression is according to this view an expression that by virtue of being a certain kind of linguistic expression (potentially) refers to some object. This, however, is not my view, and I shall restrict the use of the term “referring expression” to when an expression is actually used in an act of reference. Another useful criterion for assessing the fruitfulness of a theoretical approach to reference, besides being able to encompass real language examples, is provided by our intuitions as speakers about what we refer to.15 I am aware that “:eference” in a linguistic and philosophical context is a subject-specific technical term and is not to be equated with the common sense meaning of the word “reference” and “refer”. On the other hand, linguistics in particular, but also philosophy of language as I see it, have the field of human language and linguistic behaviour as their object of study, or at least as their stimulus for reflection. So, it would seem apt for the technical term to capture to some degree, or at least not contradict, the intuitions we have about the language examples that are used as grounds for building theoretical accounts of reference. This is particularly the case if these theoretical accounts are then said to be able to explain and describe linguistic behaviour at large. A theory of reference that depends on the speaker’s intentions to refer to this or that is vulnerable to the accusation of making reference inaccessible. If the referent is determined directly on the basis of what intentions the speaker has in his or her head, how can we ever find out what the referent is?16 And how can we make intentionality a manageable part of a theoretical treatment of reference? These are indeed serious questions, but whereas I am dependent on the concept of intentionality, I am not dependent on a concept of the intentional 15See Recanati 1993, p 248. 16Cf. Chrisholm 1990, in which the opposite difficulty is emphasized of how we can possibly give a purely linguistic answer to what causal relations would be sufficient to ensure reference to a named object. The primacy of the intentional is argued for. Cf. also Rosenkrantz 1990.

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object as inaccessible and subjective. Without necessarily carrying through an ontological reduction of the speaker’s intentions into the manifest actions of the person speaking, this is, nevertheless, what I methodologically do for the purpose of deciding on a referent to a referring expression. The speaker’s intentions, as I see it, contribute to the context of utterance in a similar way to other things evident to the listener, such as physical objects, or the listener’s own knowledge of the speaker. Thus the speaker’s intentions indirectly determine the reference. All there is on the listener’s part for deciding on a referent is the speaker’s manifest actions combined with other contextual cues and the listener’s overall knowledge. Howard Wettstein, in a discussion of the reference of indexical terms, makes the even stronger point that the speaker’s intentions are not even required in order to determine the indeterminacy of pointing gestures accompanying a demonstrative.17 Thereby he seemingly eliminates the speaker’s intentions altogether from the discussion of what determines reference. However, if we make the distinction I introduced above between the speaker’s intentions as a direct cause in determining reference and the speaker’s intentions as an indirect cause in determining reference, by their contribution to the contextual cues available to the listener, then Wettstein’s point need not be so radically understood. Wettstein rightly dismisses the speaker’s intentions in the sense of having a direct impact on the listener’s decision on what is the referent. But I believe he would agree that the speaker’s intentions as displayed in manifest action and as can be inferred from the listener’s overall knowledge are indeed part of what determines reference. Wettstein does explicitly claim that when a speaker intends to refer to something, but by his or her overt manifestation of this intention makes the listener decide on something else than what the speaker had in mind, then the referent is what was manifestly pointed out in the context, and not what was in the speaker’s head. The argument for making the pointing gesture rather than the mental intentions of the speaker decisive is that: [o]ne who utters a demonstrative is responsible, from the point of view of the natural language institution, for making his intended reference available to his addressee, and so he is responsible for the cues that a competent and attentive addressee would take him to be exploiting. The cues for which he is responsible, those that he, to all appearances, exploits, are the cues that determine the reference.18 17Wettstein 1998. 18Wettstein 1998, p 51.

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It may seem that I have made an inconsistent shift of emphasis from the speaker’s to the listener’s point of view. However, when I have earlier emphasized that reference is a speaker dependent concept, it is in contrast to a view of reference restricted to words and objects, sentences and states of affairs, in which the actual speaker of the sentence and other participants of the communication event are seen to be superfluous. The speaker is thus not in contrast to the listener, but they both co-operate to make the act of reference complete. The speaker attempts to direct the listener’s attention to what the speaker wants to speak about. The listener for their part attempts to determine what the speaker speaks about. The means for both of them are the referring expressions of the utterance and the provision or interpretation of such contextual cues that are semantically significant. If the listener cannot make out what the speaker refers to we tend to say that the communication has failed and the act of reference has been unsuccessful. The speaker may not have been clear enough, the listener may have misunderstood, or the context of utterance may have been ambiguous. We can of course go on to examine what the speaker’s intended referent was, or what the listener’s perceived referent (if any) was, and find out the reasons for the break-down in communication. But I consider it futile to demand an answer to the question of what the real referent was, over and above these considerations. In practice a new attempt to refer has to be made, involving perhaps requests for clarifications and other attempts to restore the communication. Seeing reference primarily as originating in and being part of the context of communication and the need to talk about a common shared world, I take the functions of both the listener and the speaker to be important for a successful act of reference.

The demand for an independent referent There is a realist assumption that once an object referred to has been identified by means of a referring expression, the act of reference has no more part to play for the referent. The act of reference is seen only as providing a means to identify the referent, which is then treated as if unconceptualized, or as an independently existing object conceptualized in a certain way which is thought to have absolute priority. It is believed that the general and specific context of utterance, including the conceptualization of the referent, can be discarded once the referring expression has done its job to connect us with a language and mind-independent object. I intend to show, however, that it

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is problematic to claim of an object that it is independent from, or something else than, the contextually constituted referent to the referring expression that was used when talking about the object in question. Even in order to make the above claim the object needs to be referred to again, and is thus not unconceptualized. In every act of reference the object is again conceptualized with a certain dependence on physical characteristics, and involving certain conceptual relations and functions. Of course there are cars, toy cars, fathers and mothers, and all sorts of things that we talk about and refer to. We handle them and rely on them as physically existing, independently of ourselves and our minds. I am not denying that. However, the fact that we can identify an object by means of referring to it does not warrant the further step of claiming that we unproblematically can go from this referent to the object as unconceptualized. Whenever we refer to an object, we refer to it in a particular linguistic, physical, social, and personal context, and the referent is constituted by that very context. And whenever we want to talk about an object we have already referred to, we unavoidably thereby refer to it again, and again, constantly singling it out in the context where it is spoken about. We can of course go through the motions of talking about an object as independent of language and context of utterance, but in the very act of doing this we refer to the object as conceptualized within a certain context. If we are to relate to each other, ourselves, and our surroundings in communication and thought, we cannot evade the context-dependent referent, which per definition is conceptualized by us. We cannot have only the object itself in pure unconceptualized existence. Communication presupposes a shared linguistically structured reality, and it is here that reference takes place. A little baby, making random noises and making random movements with its limbs is not considered engaged in linguistic behaviour. A slightly older baby though, using perhaps identical sounds and identical movements, but co-ordinated and intentionally, to draw attention to a bright red toy car will be seen to be engaged in linguistic behaviour and in referring to the toy car. Perhaps when the baby babbles and eagerly tries to reach for the car we infer that the baby’s noises are about the car, perhaps the baby wants the car, or expresses delight with its colour. We interpret the baby’s efforts favourably and perhaps we say: “So you want the car, do you?”, and we give it to the baby. Or we say: “Oh, yes, that is a bright and shiny car, isn’t it!”, but do not give it to the baby. In either case, if it is an adequate response to the baby’s expression, the baby is gradually incorporated into the linguistically structured

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world of ours. This is how referential behaviour is transmitted to young humans. And this is indeed what reference amounts to. As we learn a language we enter a mutually constructed world in which we can understand each other when we express ourselves, our feelings, our wishes, and our needs. The linguistic expressions used for referring thus provide us with the means to talk about and express whatever we want to talk about and express. On the other hand, the same linguistic expressions (and underlying conceptual structures) are the means by which reality is structured for us, and thus constitute and define what we are able to talk about and express. Our acceptance of this linguistically structured reality is implicit in our childhood incorporation in the linguistic communicative society. Imagine the following situation: It is Christmas Eve in a Swedish home; the Christmas tree is decorated and the snow glitters white in the dark evening outside. Crunching footsteps are heard and the children rush to the door, hands on the handle, ready to fling it open. Santa Claus enters with a long red coat, a white beard and a huge sack full of presents. “Ho, ho” says Santa and hands out the Christmas gifts. Having done what he has come for, Santa Claus leaves the happy household and walks out into the dark woods again. The next minute Dad enters, very sorry to have missed Santa Claus while going out to buy the paper. His young child runs up to him, eagerly pushing a brand new red toy car into his face, with her old Teddy as passenger, and says with sparkling eyes and awe in her voice: (1) “Santa Claus gave this to me.” Later the little girl turns to her least liked cousin who did not get such a shiny red toy car and says spitefully and bragging: (2) “Santa Claus gave this to me.” The girl then walks up to her mother who sits in the sofa admiring her new diamond bracelet, which she just untangled from the wrapping. She asks her mother what she got from Santa. The mother, exchanging significant looks with her husband, answers: (3) “Santa Claus gave this to me” and holds up the bracelet. The next day the little girl goes to play with her friend next door, whose family comes from England. Both girls, using the same wordings, show each other their Christmas gifts: (4) “Santa Claus gave this to me.” In their conversation the Swedish girl is surprised to hear that the English girl never met Santa, but got her present from a stocking where Santa supposedly put it during the night. And the little English girl is equally surprised to hear that the little Swedish girl actually touched Santa when she received her gift. And finally, imagine the same household six months later, when on a sunny day the father comes dashing into the house and summons the family to the driveway where a shiny new red car stands. The family give out appropriate sounds

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of oohs and aahs, and the exhilarated man says (5) “Santa Claus gave this to me”. It turns out that while shopping for groceries the father was approached by a stranger who gave him the car. Perhaps it was an eccentric millionaire, who knows, but the car really came as a godsend gift to the family whose own car had just broken down and was beyond repair. In this example there are three recurring words used with the purpose to refer: “Santa Claus”, “this”, and “me”. What are the referents to these terms? The referents to the terms are different in the different situations. The sentence alone, taken out of context, cannot provide us with referents to the referring terms. It should be fairly uncontroversial that the words “this” and “me” in themselves, apart from the context of utterance, are not enough to provide the referents for the words. The demonstrative draws attention to something in the context, and the pronoun refers to whoever speaks, and that varies according to context. Therefore, such words have been seen to be the concern of pragmatics, whereas the corresponding “the red toy car” and “the little girl” belong to semantics and can be treated without concern for the context. Obvious though this may seem, it will in the following discussion be argued that the division of labour between semantics and pragmatics may not be all that straightforward.

Semantics versus pragmatics Traditionally the study of language has been divided into three separate and complementary disciplines: syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. Syntax deals with the structural relations of the linguistic signs in a text; grammar in short. Semantics traditionally studies the connections between linguistic expression-types (or words/sentences) and the states of affairs or objects they represent or refer to; conventional meaning in short. Pragmatics traditionally deals with specific linguistic expressiontokens (or utterances) in specific contexts of utterance. More specifically it deals with context-dependent aspects of meaning, such as indexicality, speech acts, conversational implicature, and the implicit rules for our linguistic behaviour. This traditional division of labour implies that a word has a specific semantic meaning that is invariant and that determines the reference of the word. Whatever is added to or modified in that semantic meaning by means of metaphorical uses of words, irony, speaker’s intentions, and contextual cues, does not go into the semantic meaning of the word, and is thus seen to be of no importance when it comes to the study of conventional meaning. Leaving syntax as it is and concentrating only on the distinction

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between semantics and pragmatics, Jens Allwood, however, concludes that it perhaps would: be better to abandon the distinction in favour of a semantico-pragmatic approach where linguistic meaning has as its primary function contextual adaptability, which would make such things as vagueness, metaphor and contextual determination of meaning central concerns rather than phenomena which are seen as exceptional and therefore safely left for another day.19 Allwood’s reasons for not wanting to hold on to the distinction between semantics and pragmatics is that, according to him, there cannot be a context-independent pure semantics where each linguistic expression receives a fixed meaning, intension and extension, and where truth conditions may be given to sentences by way of the situation independent meanings of the constituents of the sentence. In situations where we use natural languages we are always dependent on the context in order to fix the referents of the terms, as well as to establish the truth conditions. For example, to determine the referents and truth conditions of “Santa Claus gave this to me” we need to know certain things about the context of utterance. We need to know who uttered it, what in the context is salient enough to be connected to the demonstrative. We need to know the cultural baggage of the speakers concerning the status of Santa Clauses, and we need to know when and under what circumstances the utterance was made. So for reference and truth we do rely on contextual factors. However, All wood continues, might there not be an intensional meaning that is not dependent on reference and truth, but is a conventional, literal meaning of an expression, and could not this be the semantic meaning of the expression? The problem with this, though, he argues, is how to establish that conventional literal meaning in a satisfying way without resorting to the notions of reference and truth. Were one to choose the greatest common denominator as the true semantic meaning of an expression, the meaning would run the risk of becoming so minimal as to call for contextual specification. A choice of the prototype or basic meaning as the true meaning runs into the problem of how to determine it; and also not all basic meanings are conventional meanings. Finally, if one were to choose the union of all the meanings of the expression the resulting conventional literal 19Allwood 1998, p 125.

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meaning would end up so vague and polysemous that context would be needed in order for the expression to be determinate.20 The upshot of Allwood’s argument is that you cannot construe semantic meaning, truth, and reference without appealing to context in some way, and that is where pragmatics comes in. He therefore suggests a blend of the two into one single “semantico-pragmatic approach”. This, however, I do not think is necessary, even though I agree with his reasons for this suggestion. There is also the possibility of keeping semantics and pragmatics apart for pragmatic reasons. Semantics will then only be interested in contextual issues as far as they are vital for connecting a word with its referent, whereas pragmatics will be interested in the contextual issues nevertheless. Pragmatics, on the other hand, will only be interested in intensional, descriptive issues as far as they are an input to the illocutionary force or conversational implicatures of an utterance, whereas semantics will be interested in descriptive meaning nevertheless. So there is a shift of emphasis that warrants keeping them apart, even though they share a common ground. According to this view a semantic analysis of “Santa Claus gave this to me” would collect enough contextual information to be able to specify the speaker and the referents. It would then go on to relate the different parts of the utterance to what they refer to and give truth conditions that depend on the meanings of the parts. The sentence will be true if and only if the person who uttered this sentence did at some past time receive from Santa Claus (who might be given various semantic interpretations) that object to which the demonstrative refers. A pragmatic analysis of the same utterance would, for example, analyse the illocutionary force of the utterance, which would be different in (1) and in (2). In the first case the girl intends to inform her father and she expresses her exhilaration over having met Santa. In the second case the girl intends to brag and impress her cousin. The perlocutionary effects are also different in the two cases. Her father, himself being Santa, was not informed of something he did not know, although probably felt satisfied at his daughter’s delight. The cousin perhaps got impressed and envious. These kinds of things would be of interest in a pragmatic analysis, and features of descriptive semantic meaning would only come in focus when they have an impact on these matters. The descriptive meaning of “Santa Claus” would, for example, differ between the Swedish and the English girls, and that would have an effect on their communication. This is one way of looking at the relation between semantics 20Allwood 1998, pp 120-123.

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and pragmatics that keeps their interests fairly well separated, but allows them to draw from each other. The element they would have in common, which Frangois Recanati suggests we call “integrated pragmatics”, deals with the part of sentence meaning related to sentence use. It “looks at linguistic forms whose meanings are pragmatic rather than descriptive and analyse their meanings by specifying their conditions of use”.21 The semantic meaning of a word or sentence may include both descriptive meaning and pragmatic meaning. So what we have is a fairly stable conventional semantic, or descriptive, meaning of a word. This meaning is, I agree with Allwood, dependent on the notions of reference and truth. But not to such a degree that it merits a complete merging of semantic descriptive meaning and more contextualized aspects of meaning. The conventional meanings in language are context dependent, but in a fossilized way over history. They are, therefore, although changeable, fairly stable and are part of the linguistic conventions of language that make it possible for us to communicate at all. We then also have conventional pragmatic meanings, which are somewhat restricted by the semantic meaning of the words used. And finally we have the unconventional pragmatic meanings, which are totally dependent on the context of utterance. And all of this without crossing the line into conversational implicature and other issues of pragmatics proper. The context dependence thus varies from a dependence on the whole linguistic and cultural community as a prerequisite for having the semantic descriptive meanings of the different parts of an utterance, to an additional dependence on features of the actual speech situation to get the full meaning of an utterance. If we are to keep the terminological difference between semantics and pragmatics, what I do is on the semantic side. My focus is on how utterances connect us with the world we inhabit, what referents to referring expressions amount to, and what is needed for determining what is the referent of a referring expression. I shall for the sake of convenience use the term “semantic descriptive meaning”, or “conventional meaning”, to mean the descriptive meaning of a word or sentence, not dependent of the immediate context, though of course dependent on the over-all cultural and linguistic context and structuring of language and surroundings. I shall use the term “utterance meaning”, or “what is said”, to cover both the semantic meaning and the pragmatic meaning of an utterance in a context; 21 Recanati 1998, p 141.

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although not including the pure pragmatic issues as explained above. I shall reserve the term “referent” for when a referring expression is used in an utterance in a context to draw attention to something. We can say that in a situation a type-sentence is uttered for some purpose. The utterance then has a semantic descriptive meaning, derived from the type-sentence, and it also has an utterance meaning, to which the contextual cues have contributed. The utterance finally has a pragmatic implicature, which takes us beyond the scope of semantics. Communicative intentions and conversational implicature are pragmatic concerns rather than semantic because they are not seen to be adequate for the task of explaining reference. On the contrary, making implicatures presupposes reference already to be established. Descriptive semantics alone, however, is not up to the task of explaining reference either. So that is why we need to insert a pragmatic level as part of the utterance itself. The utterance is not understood as an utterance before it is pragmatically enriched, as the following example shows.22 In (1) “Santa Claus gave this to me”, the descriptive semantic meaning of the demonstrative would be something like “the salient object in the context”. Pragmatic enrichment then enters to decide the reference of the referring expression “this”. In the Christmas situation I have described, the most salient object in the context is the red toy car that the child so obviously holds up while making the utterance. This fact, together with the topic of conversation and the girl’s belief that the father understands that she is talking about the toy car, result in the understanding of the utterance as picking out an individual object, the toy car given as Christmas gift. Not until now do we have a statement, a statement about the referent that is referred to by means of the demonstrative “this”. This statement can then be used for making conversational implicatures. To get the implicatures of what is said requires of course further pragmatic considerations, but the point here is that pragmatics comes into the picture much earlier, to establish what is said, to fix the reference. For example knowledge about it being customary to give new things rather than second hand as Christmas gifts will help us to choose the brand new toy car, rather than the shaggy old Teddy bear in it, as referred to by use of the demonstrative. Contextual elements are thus necessary if we are to pick out referents to an utterance in a real language use situation. At the very least it should be uncontroversial that this is the case when we have obvious 22See Sperber and Wilson 1986 for a basic exposition of the notion of pragmatic enrichment.

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pragmatic elements such as indexicals, demonstratives, and pronouns. At least in these cases we cannot meaningfully speak of a contextindependent semantics or a context-independent referent.23 Most work within pragmatics is done on these so-called singular referring terms.24 However, not only these obvious pragmatic elements are in need of a context for the assignment of reference, but also ordinary definite descriptions and proper names. That is, even if we were to get rid of the indexicals in our sample sentence and replace them with for example: “Santa Claus gave the red toy car to the little girl”, we would still be dependent on the context of utterance for establishing the referents to the different terms.

The referential—attributive distinction To reach the aim of including not only indexicals and demonstratives among the referring expressions that are in need of contextual information to determine a referent, but also definite descriptions and names, we shall challenge yet another distinction. With respect to the use of definite descriptions, Keith Donnellan introduced the distinction between a referential and an attributive use, which has been widely discussed ever since.25 The previously prevailing descriptive view of reference assumed that in order for reference to take place, the referent had to be uniquely singled out by the definite description used in the act of reference; or, in the more modified cluster view of definite descriptions, that the speaker must have at least some true beliefs about the referent in order to successfully refer to it. All of this was questioned by Donnellan when he presented his now well known counter-examples, where it is not the case that the referent needs to correspond to the descriptions used to pick out the referent. One of his examples concerns a man at a party actually drinking a glass of water but being successfully referred to as the man drinking a martini.26 Donnellan called this the referential use of definite descriptions. In a referential use of a definite description the speaker has a certain individual or object in mind which he or she intends to refer to. It then does not matter if the speaker’s beliefs or descriptions are inaccurate or even false, as long as they do the job of picking out 23See Bar-Hillel 1954. 24See Bach 1992; Bezuidenhout 1996 and 1997; and Reimer 1991. 25Donnellan 1990. See also Bach 1981; Kripke 1990; Rouchota 1992; Searle 1979b; and Soames 1994. 26Donnellan 1990, p 238.

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the correct individual. Donnellan distinguished this use from what he proceeded to call the attributive use of definite descriptions. Here no particular individual is premeditated but the speaker intends to refer to whoever or whatever corresponds to the definite description used. The corresponding example he gives is where the chairman of the local Teetotallers Union is informed that there is someone drinking alcoholic martini at their annual party and wonders who the man drinking martini is. In this example the successfulness of the reference hinges on there being a man corresponding to the descriptive content of the referring expression. If there is no such man, there is no referent. The moral of all this is that there are cases when the speaker’s intentions to refer, quite apart from the semantic descriptive meaning of the words used to refer, determine who or what is the referent. The speaker’s reference and the reference indicated by the semantic meaning of the referring expression may point in different directions. The definite descriptions used may be false and incorrect as applied to the intended referent. In that case we have a pure referential use, and it is the speaker’s intentions that determine what is to count as referent. A pure attributive use of definite descriptions would be where the speaker’s reference is said to play only a minor, if any, role, in determining the reference. The speaker’s intention is then solely to refer to whoever or whatever fits the description. In that respect attributive reference is both speaker-dependent and context-dependent, although in a different way than the referential use of definite descriptions. It is normally assumed both that the speaker has an intention to refer to something specific, and that he or she uses somewhat adequate and correct descriptions to refer to whatever he or she intends to refer to.27 I take this to indicate that both a referential and an attributive use of referring expressions take place at the same time, although one or the other may be the more prominent. A purely referential or a purely attributive use would then be extreme cases which would be fairly rare in ordinary language use. It has been discussed whether Donnellan’s referential-attributive distinction is a semantic or a pragmatic distinction, and if we are dealing with a semantic or a pragmatic ambiguity in the linguistic expressions used referentially or attributively. Donnellan himself suggests that it is a pragmatic ambiguity; whereas Saul Kripke interprets Donnellan’s paper as arguing for a semantic ambiguity.28 If it is a semantic distinction all definite descriptions would be 27Donnellan 1990, p 245. 28Donnellan 1990, p 243; Kripke 1990, p 254f.

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semantically ambiguous, which means that we would at one stroke have significantly enlarged the vocabulary of a language for no other reason than accommodating this distinction, and that is not desirable. It is also questioned whether such a language would at all be possible.29 However, if the distinction is said to be a purely pragmatic one, then by definition it should not interfere with the referential mapping between language and objects in the world. All cases where speaker’s reference and intentions determine the reference of a referring expression as contrary to its descriptive content must then, according to the theory, be seen as exemptions of some kind. But this seems to be counter­ intuitive and ad hoc. A linguistic theory designed to explain the phenomenon of reference that does not manage to do so without dismissing a large amount of instances of reference as deviant, cannot be seen to be preferred over one that can encompass all (or at least more) instances of reference within its theoretical framework. This discussion about the proper place of the referential-attributive distinction in semantics or pragmatics can be loosened up with the help of the discussion above about the dissolving of the strict division between semantics and pragmatics. I propose that we see the referring expression in an act of reference as having a semantic descriptive component, and a complex pragmatic component of meaning. Both these components together, in different combinations, contribute to the picking out of the referent. We have all, I think, experiences of people who cavil and quibble, and who make themselves difficult where ordinary people would have understood perfectly well. For example, if the father had responded to his little girl’s happy exclamation (1) “Santa Claus gave this to me” with saying: “there is no Santa Claus, so you are wrong, you did not get that from Santa Claus”, he could be accused of having purposefully misunderstood what she was intending to say. Or, suppose she had dropped the toy car on her way to her father, not noticing, thus holding up an empty hand, or an empty wrapping. Again, the father might have responded by accusing her of being wrong, whereas every sensible person would conclude that she meant the red toy car a couple of yards away that originally was in the box, and would make no such comment. What is going on here is that the difficult quibbling person fastens upon the semantic descriptive meaning of what you say. The person thereby implies that you use the referring expression attributively, whereas you may additionally be using it referentially to some extent, 29See Patton 1987.

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letting some pragmatic considerations override the semantic descriptive content of the expression. Since the semantic descriptive meaning is much more conventionalized and structured than the complex bundle of pragmatic considerations which goes into the utterance meaning, it is fairly easy for the quibbling person to get at you. The ensuing quarrel may continue with “but I meant ... ”, and “but you said ... ”, where the difficult person equates what you said with the semantic descriptive meaning of the type-sentence you used in order to say what you said. This unwarranted equation is of course at the root of the problem. What you said is actually determined by a lot more things than the semantic descriptive meanings of the words utilized in order to say what you said. The conflict in fact either shows that the person very well knows what you are talking about and can very well make out what the referent is, but only wants to create trouble. Or, if the person really does not know what you are talking about, the conflict shows that there is a disagreement or confusion over the whole communication situation and what factors are decisive in determining the referent. This later conflict may have various causes, such as cultural, social, psychological, or language differences between the people trying to communicate. Vast differences in shared beliefs or ignorance of how to participate in the communicative event in question may result in such misunderstandings. Whatever the causes may be, the conflict is not solved by pointing to the basic semantic descriptive meaning as an objective means to establish what is referred to, as we have seen. Rather, the conflicts themselves constitute evidence that reference cannot be determined apart from the context and the pragmatic components of meaning. The point is that we cannot give exact rules regarding the relative importance of the semantic descriptive component contra the pragmatic considerations in determining the referent. It will all depend on the situation and the purpose of the analysis of the utterance. If the father of the little girl wants to question the validity of her act of reference, or whether she really referred to the empty box or the toy car, we would find him a bit strange. But in another situation, say in a court room, where a piece of evidence is held up, a thorough discussion of what exactly is referred to might be highly relevant and important for the outcome of the case. So, to conclude, I would say that the referential-attributive distinction in the use of definite descriptions is a semantic distinction. More precisely, and this is crucial, it is a distinction to be made not in semantic descriptive meaning, but in utterance meaning.

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Pragmatic processes of enrichment To shed some more light on how I perceive the referential-attributive distinction and how it can be put to work in accounting for reference assignment I shall make use of the theory of relevance and pragmatic processes of enrichment developed by Dan Sperber and Deidre Wilson and applied by for instance Anne Bezuidenhout and Frangois Recanati.30 I am sympathetic towards the broad lines of their description of the communication process and the pragmatic processes of enrichment, although I do not accept any implications of its dichotomized assumptions about reality and reference. First of all, this theory of relevance seeks to explain how we pick out a referent to a referring expression in a context, or rather how we choose a context that will make the utterance the most relevant. The principle of relevance says that of all the stimuli we encounter, verbal utterances directed at us are invested with an inherent guarantee that the utterance is optimally relevant in the context in which it is made.31 The speaker, wanting to communicate, seeks to optimize the utterance to yield a maximum of cognitive benefit and to demand a minimum of cognitive cost from the listener. The listener, knowing that the speaker adheres to the principle of relevance, rests assured that the speaker devises the utterance in such a manner that the referent which is picked out with the least cognitive effort is indeed most likely the intended referent.32 Provided, of course, that the meaning of the utterance with that referent will give desirable contextual effects, such as leading to new implications when combined with other assumptions in the context, or strengthening or weakening existing assumptions.33 In relevance theory we have initially a first level process where the input consists of acoustic sounds and the output is the logical form of the utterance. The logical form is not as yet a complete proposition. What still remains is to solve ambiguities of semantic meaning and assign references by means of primary pragmatic processes of enrichment. The primary pragmatic processes are, according to Recanati, firstly, saturation, which concerns the traditionally recognized processes of disambiguation and reference assignment of propositions expressed by indexical utterances. Secondly, we have free enrichment, which comes in two forms: strengthening (or logical enrichment), where the output proposition entails the input 30Sperber and Wilson 1986; Bezuidenhout 1997; Recanati 1993. 31 Sperber and Wilson 1986, p 158. 32For some illustrating examples, see Gundel 1996. 33 See Bezuidenhout 1997, p 397.

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proposition, as when “I have had breakfast” is enriched into “I have had breakfast this morning”; and expansion (or syntactic enrichment), where the output does not entail the input, as when “I have nothing to wear” is expanded into “I have nothing suitable to wear”. Finally, we have the process of transfer (analogical and metonymical), where no propositional constituent is contextually provided as in the other cases, but an already available constituent is mapped upon and replaced by another, as when “the ham sandwich is getting restless” is transferred into “the orderer of the ham sandwich is getting restless”.34 Recanati suggests that what is said consists of the semantic descriptive meaning of the words uttered plus some pragmatic enrichment from the context. The combination of these into what is said, thus making the content of the utterance complete, takes place on a sub-doxastic level, and the speaker does not consciously distinguish between them. What is communicated, however, consists additionally of a secondary pragmatic enrichment, usually known as conversational implicature, and that distinction is consciously accessible. By means of our pre-theoretical intuitions we can decide when a pragmatic aspect of meaning is part of what is said, part of the utterance meaning, and when it is part of a conversational implicature. For example “John has three children” is classically seen as consisting of a literal proposition saying that John has at least three children. But what the speaker communicates is that John has exactly three children. What is communicated is then classically accounted for by conversational implicature; the listener infers that the speaker means something over and above the literal proposition. But turning to our pre-theoretical intuitions, the speaker would not recognize the proposition “John has at least three children” as what he or she said. This proposition lies on a sub-conscious level, and what is said lies on a conscious level. Different from this case is when someone says “I’ve had no breakfast today”. We intuitively feel a difference between the proposition that I’ve had no breakfast today and, for instance, the implicature that I am hungry and wish to be fed. Here the implicature is clearly made external to what is said, but the so called implicature that John has exactly three children can hardly be separated from what is said without forcing our intuitions.35 In its capacity as functional part of a pragmatic theory of reference, the logical form corresponds to what I have called the semantic descriptive meaning of the utterance. The semantic descriptive 34Recanati 1993, pp 260-266. 35Recanati 1993, pp 246-250.

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meaning is then the input to the primary pragmatic processes of enrichment, which, in the terminology used so far, would be the same as taking into account all contextual and extra-contextual cues from the social and cultural environment that have “semantic significance”.36 The outcome of taking into account both the utterance’s semantic descriptive meaning and the relevant cues from the context (including the speaker’s intentions, shared knowledge—context specific as well as in a wider sense—and salient features of the physical context) is the utterance meaning of the utterance, or, in other words, what is said. Only when the utterance meaning is clear to the listener can any secondary pragmatic processes take place. To illustrate: The input “Santa Claus gave this to me” (you will have to imagine this to be written phonetically with the complementary addition of acoustic diagrams) results in a descriptive semantic meaning which might be something like: [someone that fits the use, meaning and function of the lexical item “Santa Claus” at some previous time from the utterance has given some object, salient in the context and referred to by “this”, to the speaker of the utterance]. This in its turn is the input to the primary pragmatic processes of enrichment to find the correct context that will give the utterance the maximum relevance. For example, (1), (3), (4), and (5) will yield different utterance meanings, even though the descriptive semantic meanings of the utterances are the same. The facts that (1) is uttered by a child, is uttered in the context of celebrating Christmas, is directed to the girl’s father even though the father earlier was dressed up as Santa Clause, that the girl is in a certain emotional mood, that she is holding up a toy car; together with relevant cultural knowledge of Christmas, social knowledge of the participants of the communication, remembrance of what prefixed the utterance, and so on, will lead the listener to conclude that what is said is something like “Santa Claus [construed for the most part attributively in accordance with its semantic descriptive meaning and only minimally referentially] gave this toy car to me”. Once this utterance meaning is worked out, the listener can go on to make conversational implicatures. Note, though, that this is a theoretical account, not an empirical account of the actual sequence of things. Experientially the decoding of acoustic sounds to semantic descriptive meaning and the pragmatic processes in order to arrive at the utterance meaning of what is said are most probably simultaneous, habitual, and unconscious. Only the secondary pragmatic processes are more conscious. 36See Wettstein 1998, p 45.

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The speaker’s directive intentions For Anne Bezuidenhout the speaker’s intention that the semantic descriptive meaning should be used in a certain way is part of the cues that the context provides.37 Therefore, she claims, the question of whether a referring expression in an utterance is to be interpreted as referential or attributive is settled at the level of pragmatically enriched utterance meaning and not at the level of semantic descriptive meaning. Thus she can avoid the problems connected with postulating a semantic ambiguity regarding all definite descriptions, but still preserve her conviction that the distinction belongs to what is said, to the meaning of the utterance, and not to the area of pragmatics proper. According to Bezuidenhout, the speaker may intend the listener to use the semantic descriptive meaning of the utterance in an identifying way, where the referent is thought of under an object-dependent mode of presentation (that is, a referential use). Alternatively, the speaker may intend the listener to use the semantic descriptive meaning of the utterance in a criterial way, where the descriptive meaning is not meant to be used to track down some object as referent. The object is then thought of under a descriptive mode of presentation (that is, an attributive use). I see the referential-attributive distinction not so much a matter of mutually exclusive alternatives as a matter of different emphases on what determines the referent. So, contrary to Bezuidenhout, I do not think that the decision the listener makes regarding whether the speaker intended the utterance to be object-dependent and identifying (that is, a referential use) or criterial (that is, an attributive use) has to be a matter of a binary choice.38 I would prefer to say that it is up to the listener to grasp to what degree the speaker’s intention is identificational and to what degree it is criterial. And here I definitely depart from Bezuidenhout’s use of the terms “criterial” and “identifying”. But I take the liberty of using the terms nevertheless, with the slight modification of “identifying” into “identificational”, since I find that they capture well the point I want to hold on to, namely that reference assignment takes place first after that primary processes of pragmatic enrichment have taken place, of which the speaker’s directive intentions, as they are manifested in the context, are a part. Let us return to (1) and I shall illustrate what I mean. What is the girl’s directive intention in using the referring expression “Santa 37Bezuidenhout 1997, p 389. 38See Bezuidenhout 1997, p 392.

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Claus”? It cannot be 100% criterial (attributive use), because the figure she saw, touched, and talked to was a specific person she experienced, and whom she now refers to. Were some other Santa Claus, of different height, weight, or colour, to walk in through the door, she would deny that she had referred to him. She did not refer to whoever fulfils the semantic descriptive content of the word “Santa Claus”. However, neither is her intention 100% identificational. If the figure who gave her the Christmas gift had stripped there and then, revealing daddy, something would happen. This would indicate that her directive intention was not exclusively identificational, since if it was, the referring expression would have been just one means to refer to some specific object and some other means would have done equally well. Let us say that her directive intention is roughly 90% criterial and 10% identificational. Compare this with (5), which for obvious reasons would have something like the reverse proportions. The father referred to the man giving him a car as “Santa Claus”. The major part of his intention, let us say 90%, would be identificational, thus pointing out the very man he met. His reference would not change if he got to know the man’s name, or got to know him well. However, his use is not 100% identificational, it is also to a small degree criterial. The referent must to some degree correspond to the semantic descriptive meaning of the referring expression, that is, he must be benevolent, kind, and giving. Suppose it turned out that the car was stolen and that the man was a malevolent person who wanted to frame the father by placing him in possession of a stolen car with no rational explanation to give to the police. If this was the case I assume that the man would find his referring expression “Santa Claus” not applicable to the man who gave him the car. How the referent is constituted is thus determined by a mixture of intentions. In most ordinary situations this mixture obtains, even though there may be extreme cases with only a criterial intention (and attributive use), or with only an identificational intention (and referring use). This attributive-referential intentional blend that I perceive in actual speech situations is one of the reasons why I claim it is unreasonable to speak of a referent independent of the context of utterance. It may be thought now that pragmatic enrichment (in order to retrieve the utterance meaning of the utterance) is only needed in cases of predominantly referential uses of definite descriptions, where the semantic descriptive meaning alone is not sufficient to pick out the referent, and that in other cases the picking out of the referent is

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unproblematic. This, however, is not the case. Bezuidenhout shows by way of examples that there are also indexicals with attributive as well as referential uses that are in need of pragmatic enrichment for the listener to be able to adequately understand what the speaker said. For example, if George W. Bush were to say “The founding Fathers invested me with the power to appoint Supreme court justices” the reference of “me” is attributive and it needs to be pragmatically enriched by the process of metonymical transfer. This enables the listener to make the transfer from “the speaker of the utterance” as referent, to focus on the property associated in the context with the speaker, the property of being a president.39 It is often tacitly assumed that the cases where the picking out of a referent supposedly is unproblematic and without need of pragmatic enrichment, are the paradigmatic cases that a theory of reference ought to cover. It is also tacitly assumed that it is not a big drawback for a theory not to be able to account for the reference of referential uses of definite descriptions without appealing to the context. But now, if Bezuidenhout, Recanati, and the other pragmatists are right about the widespread need for pragmatic enrichment for the purpose of assigning reference, which I believe they are, then a theory of reference that does not offer an explanation of this cannot get away with calling it peripheral. The troublesome cases which demand contextual cues for their reference assignment cannot simply be put into the pragmatic wastebasket together with indexicals and other cases of deixis. Instead such a theory needs to be revised or abandoned.

Reference to so-called non-existing objects According to a direct reference account of reference, given by for instance Recanati, one can only refer to that which exists.40 Our conceptual files are about specific objects, of which we must have had a direct causal contact in order to be able to refer directly to them. The referring expression used may contain some description stored in the conceptual file about the object, but the description does not necessarily enter into the proposition communicated if the speaker’s intention is identificational. If there is no object, there is no peg to hang the information on, and reference is not possible. If this is the case, it may well be thought that my use of these theories will get me nowhere in proposing a view of reference that will 39Bezuidenhout 1997. 40Recanati 1993, p 130.

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do justice to an understanding of God in the act of reference, without adopting a religious metaphysical realism. However, I do not accept the underlying premise about existence as a dualistic and absolute concept, as will have been understood from chapter two. Granted that reality for us is relational and conceptualized with various degrees of dependence on physical characteristics, stating that we only can refer to existing objects must be understood in another way than the traditional dualistic. I propose that the findings of a pragmatic theory of reference are not invalidated if one substitutes “existing object” with, roughly, “object conceptualized with a certain dependence on physical characteristics and as having certain conceptual relations and functions” and takes into account the criteria for why we consider something real. On the contrary, the theory will then be able to accommodate more samples of real speech, which can only be an advantage for a pragmatically oriented theory of reference. Bertrand Russell has had a pervasive influence on the approach to those awkward cases where we apparently refer to some object that does not exist.41 In his view it is only our ways of expressing ourselves that lead us to believe that there must be something that, for instance, “the present king of France” must refer to in the sentence “The present king of France is bald.” By transforming the sentence into the logical form: “There is an object x such that x is king of France and x is bald”, Russell could claim that the sentence is false, since there is no such object x, and so “the present king of France” does not refer to anything. If the object does not exist, the term does not refer and the sentence containing the term is false. It would seem, though, that this theory is counter-intuitive when it comes to the more frequent cases of so-called non-existing objects that we actually speak about, namely fictional, religious, make-believe, and mythical entities of various kinds. These utterances are always made in a context, more often than not other than philosophical, that usually makes it fairly clear whether they are to be considered true or false, quite independently of the material reality status of the objects referred to. I will illustrate this with some examples featuring a unicorn—an animal cherished by philosophers as a prime example of a so-called non­ existing object. Nevertheless, we use the term “unicorn” meaningfully in conversation, and we can think of a number of occasions when it indeed does refer. Take for example these following four sentences and imagine them being uttered in different contexts: (A) The unicorn is a mythological fierce animal with a single horn. 41See Crittenden 1991, pp 1-30.

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(B) The unicorn is grazing in the field north of the castle. (C) Will the unicorn please hurry up and get dressed. (D) Mummy, I am scared, the unicorn under my bed will hurt me. All of these are incomplete without us knowing their context of utterance. We cannot conclude that the utterances are false or meaningless simply because the term “unicorn” is used—and since there are no unicorns the term does not refer to anything. In (A) the conventional rules for the use of the term “unicorn” are spelled out; it may be taken from a dictionary. The reference of “the unicorn” is semantically constituted, a purely attributive use of the term. One might perhaps call it a generic constitutive reference: this is what we mean by “unicorn” in an attributive use of the term. The context of (B) may be a cartoon or a story book, in which case the utterance may be made within or outside of the cartoon or story book. In both cases “the unicorn” refers to the fictional object in the fiction. The context of (B) may also be a theatre play or a costume film, in which case “the unicorn” may refer to either the fictional character of the play, or, if the utterance is made outside of the play, it may also refer to the actor playing the unicorn, or some indeterminate mixture. As for (C), we understand that this most probably also belongs to the context of a theatre play, or children’s play. The referent to “the unicorn” in this case is then definitely not a fictional object, but an actor, or a child who is to hurry up. What it is that makes us decide whether it is mainly a fictional object or a real person that is referred to by means of uttering (B) and (C) is both the physical and social context of the utterance, and the semantic descriptive meaning of the term “the unicorn” and the rest of the sentence. In (C) the semantic descriptive meaning of the constituents of the utterance gives away that it is the actor that is referred to, since it is no part of the semantic meaning of “unicorn” that it should put on a dress; whereas in (B) we do not know from the utterance alone, but need additional cues from the actual context of utterance in order to find out the reference of “the unicorn”. For (D), we find that the semantic descriptive meaning alone of the utterance is normally enough for us to determine that the referent of “the unicorn” is predominantly attributively constituted as a fictional, mythological animal. The setting of unicorns is not normally (remember, they are semantically constituted as being fierce animals) under little children’s beds. The use of “mummy” tells us that (D) is uttered by a child, and we know that having a vivid imagination is

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part of being a child. The mother might well answer that there is no need to be scared, because there are no unicorns. Her answer implies that “the unicorn” does not refer to a physical object that is able to take a position under a bed and to hurt a person physically, and thus that the referent is conceptualized with weak dependence on physical characteristics. Imagine, however, a truncated version (D 2 ): “Mummy, I am scared, the unicorn will hurt me.” Then we would not know whether the child mistakenly confuses the world of fiction and the world of physical objects as in (D); correctly reads aloud from a story book; acts the part of someone scared by a unicorn in a play; or perhaps has been molested by someone dressed up as a unicorn and now is afraid it is going to happen again. Going back to (B), as uttered by someone looking out on a meadow with grazing cows, this may also be the case of someone confusing the world of mythology and the world of farming. In this case our first strategy in getting hold of the referent is to attempt to dissolve the confusion. We try to make some sense of the utterance before we turn to the conclusion (if it is an adult) that the person is mentally insane in some way. What I want to say is that in the normal case we expect an utterance to make sense, we expect the person to say something, to talk about something or other by making the utterance. Therefore, in the normal case of an utterance containing a so-called non-referring term, the so-called non-referring term does indeed refer. It is used to talk about something, to make clear to the listener what is said and about what it is said. When an adult seriously proposes that there are unicorns out on the grass, or when a child is scared of unicorns, then we try to correct them. We teach them how to use the term “unicorn” correctly. We conclude either that they have not learnt it yet, which is natural and expected with a child, or that they are mentally deranged in some way. In these deviant cases the term “the unicorn” does not refer, the speaker does not succeed in referring to anything. But that is not because the term in itself does not have a corresponding referent in the physical, non-linguistic world. No, the speaker does not succeed in referring to anything because he or she has not grasped the rules for the use of the term; the speaker does not make sense. It is not the referring term that does not have a referent, it is the speaker that does not manage to use it meaningfully. Not realizing this, one might arrive at absurdities. For example, a causal theory of reference might want to trace the reference in (B) to the visual object causing the act of reference, a cow; hence the cow is said to be the referent to “the

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unicorn”.42 Leaving aside deliberate lies and practical jokes, talking about there being unicorns out on the grass is either an instance of fantasy, a game of make-believe of some kind, and then the reference is most certainly not to the cow, even though the cow may be used as a prop in the game; or, if a make-believe setting of the utterance is ruled out, it is a case of confused language use. A child may not quite yet have learnt the correct context for real and fictional objects, or, if an adult, some mental defect may have precluded the person from making this distinction. In neither case is the referent the cow. One could be generous and say that the person is trying to create a space in the linguistic structure for the unicorn in the ordinary world, but at most the referent to “the unicorn” would then be an empty such space, a malfunctioning linguistic structuring of reality. Since the referent is not recognized by others, the reference is unsuccessful and subject to correction. A specific category of so-called non-existing objects is the category of fictional characters, such as Sherlock Holmes and Anna Karenina. These are much more discussed by philosophers as potentially presenting philosophical problems, than are “real” Santa Clauses and unicorns; or mud-pies and fantasy-roles. Which perhaps says more about philosophy’s attraction to abstractness, than about what might be philosophically interesting. The reference of fictional names presents a potential problem since the fictional characters purportedly referred to do not exist as ordinary physical beings. I shall in a very abbreviated form present how one contemporary New Zealand philosopher, Gregory Currie, proposes to account for the various uses of fictional names.43 According to Currie the nature of fiction lies in the author’s intent. By engaging in an act of fiction-making the author produces a text which is fictional. The fictive intent of the author is to invite the readers to make-believe that the story is true.44 Make-believe is here an attitude we can take towards propositions, just as we can believe and doubt propositions. Currie’s ontological assumption is that there are no fictional entities existing in the world outside of the fiction they are part of. The meaning and reference of the fictional names in a fictional story must be explained text-internally. Currie distinguishes between the fictive, the metafictive, and the 42Cf. Donnellan 1990, p 242. 43 Currie 1988 and 1990, particularly chapter 4. 44This fictive intent is not to be confused with the pretence theory, held by for example John Searle, (See Searle 1979a) and according to which the author of fiction non-deceptively pretends to refer to the fictional characters. For a formal definition of fictive intent, see Currie 1990, p 31.

Reference as context dependent 87 transfictive use of fictional names, in which the fictional names function as bound variables, abbreviated descriptions, and roles respectively. By the Active use of names is meant their use within the fiction itself. Proper names in fiction do not function as rigid designators that pick out the same individual in all worlds. They are rather seen to be bound variables with the whole story as scope. That I can understand the fictional name “Holmes” is a result of my understanding the story as a whole. Thus I can assimilate the full content of the Holmes story without assigning a reference to “Holmes” outside of the story, just as I can assimilate the statement “someone smokes” without asking who that someone is. In order to avoid Kripke’s problem that if fictional names are abbreviated descriptions they may turn out to have accidental reference, and in order to guarantee the uniqueness of reference, Currie introduces the principle that every fictional story involves a fictive narrator who is uniquely responsible for the story’s text.45 Since it is then part of the description of the referent to a fictional name that the activities of the referent is described in the text, it cannot accidentally refer to a real person, since a real person is never as such part of a text. The metafictive use of fictional names refers to when the fictional name is mentioned outside of the fiction in order to say something about the character in the fiction; for example “Holmes is a pipe-smoker”. The fictional name here functions as an abbreviated description: “Holmes” denotes, in each world, the person, if there is one, who is the first member of the unique set-up of things that satisfies the conditions of the story. The utterance is also prefixed so to make possible the assignation of a truth-value to it: “It is part of the Holmes-story that Holmes is a pipe-smoker.” Treating fictional names in this way avoids a threatening circularity of definition in the case one character can be defined only in terms of another. Currie simply defines all characters in one go. Treating fictional names as complex descriptions might avoid unpleasant ontological commitments, but it seems not to do justice to all our intuitions about what is true in fictional stories. For example it seems to be true in the Holmes story that: (i) “Holmes” is the proper name of HOLMES; and (ii) HOLMES might never have done the things told in the stories. In (i) and (ii) “HOLMES” cannot be replaced with the abbreviated description described above, since the propositions expressed by (i) and 45See Kripke 1980, pp 157-158.

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(ii) seem to be singular propositions making use of rigid designators. It is tempting to postulate some kind of fictional people now, but Currie instead chooses to conclude that (i) and (ii) do not express any propositions. So what is wrong with our intuitions? We make a tempting but fallacious inference. Currie illustrates with another example: It is true in Macbeth that Lady Macbeth had some positive number of children; but there is no specific number n such that it is true in Macbeth that she had n children. That inference is fallacious. It is similarly true in the Holmes stories that “Holmes” is the proper name of someone, but there is no one of whom it is true in the stories that “Holmes” is his name. The price one has to pay for assuming that “fictional characters are simply carved out of the stories in which they occur, and have no kind of independent being” is that all the true metafictive statements concerning a given fiction incorporate the whole story.46 The third use of fictional names that Currie identifies is the transfictive use. This is when one compares fictional characters from different fictions, or relate them to the real, everyday physical world of human beings. We may for example say that Holmes would have solved the Yorkshire Ripper case more quickly than the police actually did, or that Holmes’ methods are different from those of Poirot. In Currie’s theory, examples of a transfictive use constitute a problem, since, as they contain non-denoting definite descriptions, they come out false at face value, and on the other hand, they cannot satisfactorily be treated as occurring within the operator “It is part of the story that ... ”. Currie concludes that there is a (partial) function from worlds to individuals that picks out Holmes in each world where somebody is Holmes, and the value of the function for a world-argument is the individual, if there is one, who satisfies the description given for “Holmes” in the metafictive use. This function Currie calls the Holmesrole. Thus being Holmes in a world is a matter of occupying the Holmes-role in that world. Roles are assimilated to a larger class of entities that are similarly treated in a possible world setting, namely offices. The Presidency of the United States is an office, a function from worlds to individuals, which takes the value Ronald Reagan in one world, George W. Bush in some other, and no value at all in yet others. Says Currie: “Roles are just those offices defined in terms of what is fictionally true in a story. Typically they are partial functions that take no value at the actual world.”47 Roles are tied very closely to 46Currie 1988, p 482. 47Currie 1988, p 484.

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the stories from which they are derived, since the individual occupying the role must satisfy the description, which encompasses the whole story. So statements about Holmes in connection with the Yorkshire Ripper or Poirot are said to be understood as judgements about the likely consequences for an individual of occupying the Holmes-role. Currie’s fictive and metafictive uses are similar to what I have described as a purely criterial use of the referring expression, where the criteria for being a referent to the expression are given primarily by the semantic descriptive meaning of the expression. In a fictional story, the semantic descriptive meaning of the expression is given by the story itself. Currie’s transfictive use is closer to my own analysis, as presented in chapters four and five, of other make-believe, mythical, or religious entities that are conceptualized as having some direct relation to our ordinary world, and not as confined to a story. The problem of what, if anything, so-called non-referential terms refer to is not confined to the area of fiction and myth, but occur as well in everyday life and children’s play. The referring expressions in imperfective generative sentences (such as “I am building the house of my dreams” or “We are having our third baby”), for instance, do not have corresponding full-blown referents existing in the physical world any more straightforwardly than unicorns, Sherlock Holmes, or God.48 All these contexts contain referring expressions without physically existing referents. Yet we go on using them. In most normal cases of human communication so-called non­ referring terms do indeed refer, given the context of utterance and the semantic descriptive meaning of the term (including the cultural package going with it and the knowledge of how to use it).49 I prefer to speak of the referent to a referring expression purportedly referring to a non-existing object in terms of a place in a conceptual structure. This conceptual place is determined by the semantic descriptive meaning of the referring expression together with pragmatic components from the context of utterance. The function of filling that place is the referent in question. Sometimes when we talk about a unicorn, it is conceptualized with a stronger dependence on physical characteristics, as in a theatre play, and the function of being a unicorn is partly carried out physically. On other occasions when we talk about a unicorn, it is conceptualized with a very weak dependence on physical characteristics, as in a story­ book, and the function of being a unicorn is carried out solely on the basis of social construction. A view on the referent as being 48See Graves 1997 for a full treatment of imperfective generative sentences. 49See also Stroll 1998a, p 532.

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contextually and linguistically constituted will, I claim, be in a better position to account for the various instances of reference to so-called non-existing objects that we come across in our language use, than a view on the referent as being independent from the context of utterance, and thought of as something that must exist as an unconceptualized object. It may now be thought that I have argued that the referent can be either a fictional object (attributive use), or an ordinary object, like a human actor, or a normal cow (referential use), and that once we have found out (by means of contextual and semantic cues) which one it is, we can discard the context of utterance altogether, since we now have direct access to the unconceptualized referent. That is a mistake. The referent is always conceptualized in a certain context and is constituted in a more complex way than this.

The constitution of a referent Some philosophers are of the opinion that these kinds of clear-cut cases that I have just given as examples are trivial and philosophically uninteresting. Obviously we can refer to a story book fictional object by the use of “the unicorn”, or to a dressed-up actor, but what is so exciting about that? As I see it, what is exciting about philosophy of language is not foremost the construction and solution of sometimes unsolvable and abstract riddles within a certain theoretical philosophical system (perhaps even detached from ordinary language use). What is philosophically exciting is rather exposing our prejudices and presuppositions that underlie our divisions and theories. Exciting is also the possibility of challenging these prejudices and presuppositions and come up with other divisions and theories that will account for our human linguistic practices just as well, or even better. Only relative to some philosophical goal or interest can something meaningfully be said to be trivial or exciting. Anyway, I intend to argue that these trivial cases are not so trivial after all. Imagine for example a context of (D 2 ), “Mummy, I’m scared, the unicorn will hurt me”, in which the child has been scared and molested by a person dressed up as a unicorn. Suppose we can find this person, an actor perhaps, named Mr Green, and present him, well dressed and well behaved, in the courtroom for the child to identify. It may well be that the child denies that this person is “the unicorn” of which he was so scared, and when he grows up and understands better he will refer to the man that molested him as “Mr Green” and not as “the unicorn”. So then, is Mr Green the real referent to “the

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unicorn” in (D 2 )? No, he is not. This is where I want to apply my gradual understanding of the referential-attributive distinction. If we take it that Mr Green is the referent to “the unicorn”, and that the conventional meaning of “the unicorn” plays no part in constituting the referent to the expression, then we supposedly want to claim that the child used the expression with a purely identificational intention to point out a specific object, which he had in mind. However, the object he has in mind is conceptualized partly in terms of being a unicorn. He has a criterial intention to direct the listener’s attention to at least some aspect of the conceptualization and conceptual relations and functions that are associated with the linguistic expression “the unicorn”. The referent is actually partly constituted by the linguistic, physical, social, and cultural context of utterance. What the child said was that “the unicorn” will hurt him or even has hurt him. Because he is a child one would first assume his use of “the unicorn” to be confused, and that he is afraid of some fictional object. Once it is settled, however, that the child is not confusing the world of fiction and fantasy with the world of physical objects and persons, then we can start to decide on a referent. The referent is then an object that has the traits of a unicorn and has hurt the child, and that is always going to be the referent of that specific utterance. Now you may protest and say that this is nothing but the old Evening star-Morning star problem: We have the same referent in both cases, namely Mr Green, but he is referred to by means of expressions with different senses, namely “the unicorn” and “MiGreen” respectively. However, in order to say that Mr Green is the real referent of both “Mr Green” and “the unicorn”, we have to use a linguistic term, for example “Mr Green”, to refer to what is said to be the referent, Mr Green. However, this term is also a linguistic construct, no less than “the unicorn”, and loaded with cultural and social background. Thus we cannot yet claim to have arrived unproblematically at the real and supposedly unconceptualized referent by using the referring term “Mr Green”. In order to arrive at the referent per se, we have to discard also Mr Green as the referent in favour of, say, the man. But in saying that the man is the real referent to both “Mr Green” and “the unicorn” we have to use a linguistic term, “the man”, which also belongs to a linguistic context that constitutes the object it refers to. So let us reduce “the man” to refer to a body with certain characteristics. But then again, in order to state this, we are dependent on a linguistic construction. Each time we arrive at a new referent, in order to say what that referent amounts to we are forced to use yet another linguistic referring expression. No matter how

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far or by what route we take this infinite regress, we will stay within the bounds of language as our vehicle of referring to and conceptualizing our reality.50 Nevertheless, it is understandable that this idea of a referent per se should be so widespread as it is. Since some referring expressions are thought to be more basic than others (“Mr Green” being more basic than “the unicorn”) it is tacitly presupposed that they unproblematically yield the true or real referent, which is not affected by any conceptualizations. But as soon as we see that even these more basic referring expressions are indeed referring expressions within the linguistic realm, then the referent of these expressions must also, in the same way as with more “remote” referring expressions but less obtrusively so, be dependent on language rules in general, and the context of utterance in particular. There is thus no way in which we can separate a referent from its linguistically constitutive context. A referent is a referent only on the basis of having been spoken about, having been referred to in a particular context, in a particular language with its conventional meanings and rules. Let us return to my original example “Santa Claus gave this to me”—Santa Claus being another philosophers’ favourite among socalled non-existing objects. Surely in my examples “Santa Claus” refers, and in non-trivial ways. In the first four cases the referent is not the person in isolation who is the girl’s father and the woman’s husband. When saying that “Santa Claus gave this to me” one is conferring not only that one was given something by someone, but specifically that it was given as a Christmas gift. So for the referring term “this” to be understood as referring to a Christmas gift specifically, the referent to the giver of that gift, the grammatical subject, “Santa Claus”, must be construed (at least partly) as Santa Claus, conventionally the giver of Christmas gifts. The referent cannot simply be daddy. It does not even matter if it was daddy or not who was dressed up as Santa in (1), (2), (3), and (4); although admittedly it does matter in (3) whether it was daddy who actually paid for the gift. So, the referent to “Santa Claus” must partly be Santa Claus. But Santa Claus does not exist, does he? Well, I would turn the question the other way round. To the degree that Santa Claus is referred to, he exists, that is what makes him exist; although now we do not speak exclusively of physical existence, as we implicitly did above when wanting to claim that Santa Claus does not exist. Santa Claus is constituted as a referent by our acts of reference to him, and 50See also Quine 1999, p 53.

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that is what makes Santa Claus an object that we meaningfully can speak about. That it is not only in the case of children who do not know better that the use of “Santa Claus” selects a referent that is not entirely separable from Santa Claus can be seen from (3) and (5). In (5) the man refers to the person who gave him the car unexpectedly as “Santa Claus”. An important constituent of Santa Claus in Western culture and myth is that he is a benevolent giver of gifts for free, without obligations. For the adult the specific Santa’s clothing and white beard are not decisive to identify him, as they may be for the child, it is rather the characteristic generosity of Santa that comes into focus and makes Santa Clause partly the referent of (5). It was not simply a strange man who for some reason or other gave away a car. The father formulated it as if it were Santa himself. By this choice of referring expression he manages to express, not only that he was given the car, but also that the gift was free, it was without obligations, it was by someone not wanting to make claims for gratitude, it was anonymous, and it was benevolent and not malicious in intent. Not long ago the more natural phrase to use to express the same thing would have been to say that the Lord gave, or that the grace of God provided, or some equivalent religious phrase. In some contexts a religious language would still be used when talking about similar events. In (3), when referring to the one who gave her the bracelet as “Santa Claus” while acknowledging that her husband gave it to her by looking at him, the woman pays him a compliment and shows her delight and gratitude. How? The semantic descriptive content of “Santa Claus” is the conceptual space carved out by language, the place in the linguistic structure that concerns generosity, Christmas, and all sorts of good things. When she indicates that her husband is fit to share that conceptual space she tells him that she thinks he is generous, kind, and benevolent. What she accomplishes with her utterance, namely to give him a compliment, is part of pragmatics proper, but the means by which she accomplishes it is part of semantics—pragmatically enriched semantics, that is. The semantic, conventional lexical meanings of words combine with the contextual cues given by the context of utterance, and a general linguistic competence to structure the world purposefully for every single context and occasion. The world may be structured differently at different times. The structuring valid for the moment determines the referents for the referring expressions in the utterances made at that moment. When the woman refers to her husband by using the referring expression “Santa Claus”, she is linguistically structuring up reality at that moment to refer to her

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husband, the kind and loving giver; as contrary to, for example, her husband, the mean bore. Each time she wants to talk about her husband she has to constitute him anew by the referring expression she chooses, and by the context of utterance. She cannot get outside of language and still manage to say something about her husband. So whatever he may be in himself, apart from being part of a linguistically structured reality, that is not what she talks about. Note that I did not say earlier that she referred to her husband as a kind and loving giver. That would indicate that her husband is an independent object referred to in the capacity of being a language independent object, and to which she then ascribes certain characteristics. This, I hold, is not logically possible. She cannot ascribe characteristics to something that is not already linguistically constituted by her referring to it. In order to say anything at all about her husband, she has to make him the referent of her utterance, and she on each occasion refers to the functions of him that seem appropriate. Since her referring acts are always carried out in the language that structures her reality, what she refers to is no more and no less than what she expresses by her utterance. In these last examples, the question of the possibility of continuity of reference and identity is actualized. If referents are constantly being constituted anew, and in differing ways from one moment to another, how then can we ever claim to be able to communicate rationally, or evaluate each others truth-claims? Intuitively, we would want to claim that there is something, an object or a person, which remains the same throughout all our referring to it, no matter by means of what different linguistic expressions. But how can we be justified in claiming that, if we cannot appeal to an independently existing object that we refer to, being confined within the bounds of language with referents that are merely linguistic constructions? Posed that way, the question reflects a misunderstanding of my view. In the view that I suggest, we are not confined within the bounds of language, but within the bounds of reality conceptualized by us. The difference is not insignificant. Let us return to the generous husband in the example above. Suppose the woman’s identificational directive intentions are made ostensively clear, for instance by a gesture. No matter whether she then uses “Santa Claus”, “my husband”, “George”, or “you male chauvinist pig”, or all of them in a row as referring expressions, the referent is conceptualized predominantly in physical terms, and with a strong dependence on certain general and specific physical characteristics. The variable conceptual relations in the different conceptualizations cannot override these constitutive physical characteristics of the referent— apart from in a make-believe context, a case which will be analysed

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in chapter four—but only supplement them. In an act of reference the speaker’s directive intentions and semantically significant cues from the context should make it evident whether the referent should be conceptualized with a stronger or a weaker dependence on physical characteristics. Where the conceptualizations are strongly dependent on physical characteristics, we consider the referents to be physical objects, or to exist physically, or to be physically real. The very characterization of being physically real includes having some degree of permanence in time and space. For something to be considered to be physically real, we have to be (at least potentially) able to relate to it by means of our own physical bodies; that is what we mean by being physically real. The starting-point for my analysis is our own human situation, where we necessarily relate to our surroundings, each others, and ourselves; and where we act from certain interests, of which bodily survival and well-being is highly ranked, followed by cravings for social acceptance, love, and power, among other things. From this startingpoint, being physically real is defined partly in terms of having temporal continuity, since that is what makes it possible for us to relate to most objects in our surroundings. If the objects we confront in our ordinary life were not reliable and stable most of the time, we would never know how to behave in order to enhance our survival and well-being. But they are; and so continuity of identity is part of being a referent in an act of reference where the speaker’s directive intention makes it clear that the referent is to be conceptualized with strong dependence on physical characteristics. When we refer to that which is conceptualized with strong dependence on physical characteristics, the continuity of reference and identity is, so to speak, built into its conceptualization. We need not leave our humanly experienced and conceptualized reality in order to ensure that we can trust that we refer to the same person or object even with a lapse of time between the references. Without the possibility of that certainty, the praxis of reference would have been pointless as a means of communicating information, and consequently would never have developed. What, more specifically, is to be reckoned as “the same”, though, must be decided in the different situations in which the references are made for different purposes. By allowing for a complexity in our concept-forming, we cannot expect definite and general criteria for when things are considered to be the same and when they are not, but this needs to be decided in a context and with a certain function in mind. Considered something to be the same kind of entity as something referred to in another context or another time is not a metaphysical issue, but is, as is deciding what to consider real, something to be

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negotiated with regard to a context, and in relation to a function. A statement like “You are no longer the person that I married” shows that even with physical objects the continuity is not absolute. Conceptual relations may be so important that they decide what is to be counted as being same or not, in one respect. In another respect, though, being conceptualized as being a person, with its physical implications, in itself provides reasons enough to consider the referent to be the same as before. In order to say that something is no longer the same thing, one must refer to it as being the same thing in some respect. In most of our referring acts, what we refer to is conceptualized with a mixture of dependence on physical characteristics and conceptual relations. When it comes to entities conceptualized with only a very weak and even indirect dependence on physical characteristics, conceptual relations alone are constitutive of their conceptualization, which means that these must be somewhat stable for the conceptualization to be a functional one. So here too we have some guarantee for the continuity of reference inherent in the institution of language itself and not depending on reality as unconceptualized. It is often believed that the causal theory of reference solved a difficult problem with the descriptive theory of reference, having to do with continuity of reference.51 We believe that we in some sense refer to the same thing today with, for example, “gene” as one did when the term was introduced for denoting what enabled the transfer of acquired characteristics, rather than inherited; even though the semantic descriptive meaning of the two terms are radically different. In a descriptive theory of reference the two uses of “gene” must, however, refer to different entities. What justifies treating them as referring to the same thing cannot be their intensions, which are different, but is rather that what caused the uses of these terms is the same. According to Soskice, we can in a similar manner argue that we can refer to the same God across traditions and the development of theology through history, even though the descriptive meanings associated with our referring expressions differ.52 The crucial matter is, she says, whether our religious referring practices and expressions are caused by encounters with a real God, and have stood the test of time and use in a religious community. The whole account hinges on a metaphysical realist view on existence as independent and unconceptualized. But even without such a metaphysical realism, we can claim to refer to the same God as did Abraham or Jesus. The continuity of reference 51 See Soskice 1985, pp 126-129. 52Soskice 1985, pp 142-161.

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is preserved through the continuity of language use in a religious tradition, where, as in all human linguistic practices, words slowly transform and take on slightly new meanings, our beliefs and knowledge change, and our values and interests vary; but where, on the whole, words are used with the intentions to refer unproblematically to relatively constant entities. In a certain religious context some things may be seen to be more important in the conceptualization of God than others. Depending on where one places the emphasis and what is seen to be more peripheral, one may arrive at different conclusions when comparing one’s own religious tradition with another and its different conceptualization of God, in deciding whether these refer to the same God or not. Above all, the issue cannot be resolved by appealing to the “real God”, claiming that the conceptualizations of God that correspond to the “real God” refer to the same thing and the others do not. Not if we claim that the “real God” is, inevitably, also a conceptualization. Some readers may have been alarmed by the fact that of the theoretical accounts I have appealed to, some have applied to definite descriptions, others to indexicals of various constellations, and yet others to proper names only. If I use arguments from such different theoretical contexts, how can I then claim to say anything in general about reference? There are three steps in responding to this. First and foremost, I build up an accumulative kind of evidence against the claim for a context-independent referent. Taken together, the different considerations indicate that there is something wrong with the claim. I then also argue from within the different theoretical approaches that presuppose the existence of either an utterance-independent or a context-independent referent to be a prerequisite for reference, that not even from that perspective is the claim valid. As a third step, I claim that some of these specialized arguments can be generalized to other kinds of referring expressions as well. One can for example give a contextual analysis of the reference of definite descriptions in the way one can for indexicals. One of Bezuidenhout’s aims is, as a matter of fact, to provide a unified account for the referential-attributive distinction for both definite descriptions and indexicals. Considerations from these various theoretical contexts I take to establish that the referent to a referring expression cannot be determined apart from the context of utterance, the social, linguistic, and cultural setting, and the over-all knowledge of the participants of the communication act. My further claim that the referent is indeed constituted by the same contextual variables and processes of pragmatic enrichment is, however, not stated by the various theories

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I employ to show the context-dependence. The context-dependence involved in picking out the referent is a prerequisite for my further claim, but is not identical with it. My further claim implies that not even after the contextual variables have done their job in picking out the referent, can the referent be isolated from that context in which it was established. The support for that further claim must be found in considerations and analyses of actual language examples, as has been my method of argument. It is also a natural consequence of my view that reality for us is conceptualized with various degrees of dependence on physical characteristics and social construction, that the referent must be conceptualized in this manner.

The relation between reference and reality Suppose we want to say of something that it is real or not real. In order to be able to say anything at all in the matter, we must first be clear over what it is we are talking about; what object or entity it is that we want to pronounce as real or not real in some respect. Without embarking on metaphysical speculation, it should be fairly unproblematic to say that the object in question is that which is spoken about or mentioned by means of a certain linguistic expression, in a certain situation, and with a certain purpose. Having taken this step, we can then go on to discuss the reality status of something in terms of reference. Instead of some unconceptualized object, which we cannot say anything about, we can carry on the discussion by concentrating on the referent to the referring expression in a certain act of reference, as it is conceptualized in certain ways. By this move I wish to emphasize that we do not speak about things in isolation, but always as referents to a linguistic expression. In order to make a statement about the reality of the referent to a certain linguistic expression as used in a certain act of reference we need to know what the referent is; how the referent is constituted in the act of reference. I suggest that there are two factors that contribute to how the referent in an act of reference is constituted for the listener. Firstly, what constitutes the referent in an act of reference depends on the speaker’s directive intentions, which can be identificational and criterial to various extents, as these are made manifest in the context of utterance by means of drawing on, for instance, common knowledge, gestures, and salient factors in the physical and verbal context (including the physical characteristics of the referent). Secondly, the constitution of a referent depends on what the linguistic expression used in the act of reference conventionally means

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in the conceptual system(s) of the language use(s) in which the referent to the referring expression is conceptualized. That is, with what degree of dependence on physical characteristics is the referent conventionally conceptualized, and what conceptual relations and functions are conventionally supposed to obtain for the concept associated with the linguistic expression? The proportional importance of the second factor depends ultimately on the speaker’s directive intentions. The more criterial the intentions are, the more important the conventional meaning of the referring expression gets. What we can now say about the referent is that it is conceptualized with such-and-such a dependence on physical characteristics, and as having such-and-such conceptual relations and functions in relation to other concepts in its own as well as in other conceptual structures. It is only now that we are in a position to say something about the reality of the referent. The reality of the referent must be understood in terms of why we consider it to be real or not—unless we are to reintroduce metaphysical issues. The reason why we consider something to be real to us in relation to our everyday life is, I suggest, along with Vincent Brummer, because this something makes a (potential) difference to our alternatives for action.53 So if the referent, as it is constituted and conceptualized in the act of reference in question, makes a difference to our alternatives for action, then what is spoken about is considered to be real; and if not, it is not. Reality is a pragmatic issue for us, not a metaphysical. A referential analysis on the lines of what I have suggested here is a potentially useful analytical tool for elucidating issues about why it is we consider some things as real and others not. It makes possible a unified analysis of areas characterized by conceptualizations that are strongly dependent on physical characteristics as well as areas of make-believe and religion characterized by entities that are conceptualized with a weaker dependence on physical characteristics. In fact, speaking about any of the referents to “God”, “the table”, “George W. Bush”, or “Donald Duck”, exemplifying ordinary, religious, as well as fictional entities, as unconceptualized entities, detached from the context of utterance, is not a fruitful way of speaking about their reality. For example, in the much used example of the reference of “Moses” it is assumed that “Moses” refers to the biblical character Moses. Either the biblical character Moses is viewed as a fictional character only, in which case the term is said to lack a referent; or, he is viewed as a genuine historical person, in which case the term is said 53See Brummer 1981, pp 234-238.

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to have a referent, namely the person Moses (who may be more or less in accord with the actual biblical description of him). Alternatively, it is argued that the use of the term “Moses” can be traced back to. its origin when it was first used to refer to a sacred stone, in which case the term has a referent, namely this stone. There are of course numerous counter-examples to the supposition that “Moses” must refer to either of the alternatives above: there are thousands of persons, both historic and now living, that listen to the name of Moses. In the utterance “Moses was punished in school today” the reference of “Moses” is not a biblical character or a stone, but the schoolboy named Moses, who is picked out as the referent in the context of utterance. Granting that the context of utterance is one in which knowledge of the biblical character Moses is assumed and there is no schoolboy named Moses eligible as referent, though, the referent to the name “Moses” is unproblematically thought to exist independently of the act of referring to it. Furthermore, the reality of Moses is believed to depend on this being the case. A complex counter-example to the supposition that the referent to “Moses”, as uttered with the biblical character in mind, exists independently of the act of reference, can be taken from a Swedish children’s story by Astrid Lindgren.54 In the story some children come across an abandoned seal cub and name it Moses. They name him this because they have learnt about Moses the infant, abandoned by his mother among the reeds, and now they see this baby seal undergoing the same fate. In the playful mood of the children (by this I do not mean non-serious mood, but that they are for the most part of their day in a make-believe world of play, where they pretend and play roles, often deadly seriously) they see Moses in the water when they see the baby seal. The baby seal is indeed to them to some degree Moses and consequently they name him Moses. Returning to the schoolboy named Moses, the parents might very well have known about the biblical stories about Moses when they named their baby “Moses”, but they most probably did not confuse the two. When it comes to the seal cub, though, it is most likely that the children in their play have both the biblical Moses and the baby seal named Moses in mind when they subsequently refer by means of “Moses”. So in the utterance “Moses was abandoned by his mother” made in a make-believe role-play with the children and the seal, the reference of “Moses” is not all that straightforward. What constitutes the referent to “Moses” in this context of utterance? It is not simply 54Lindgren, 1968.

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the baby seal, and it is not simply the biblical character Moses. I propose that the reference is the function of being Moses, the function being filled in the play by the baby seal having been assigned the role of Moses. Let us look more closely on how a referential analysis may be carried out here. The referent to “Moses” in this utterance is constituted with the criterial intention of picking out something that fits some of the conventional conceptual relations and functions associated with “Moses”; in this case for example being a baby, having been abandoned in the reeds, being adopted by Pharaoh’s daughter, and being depicted in a biblical story. Some of these functions require the referent to be conceptualized with general as well as specific physical characteristics (such as being a live biological organism, and having the physical characteristics of a male baby, located in Egypt, respectively). Other functions involve mainly conceptual relations given by social construction (such as the social institution of adoption). The speaker’s identificational intentions, on the other hand, direct the listener directly towards the seal cub in the reeds, as conceptualized with strong dependence on physical characteristics. We cannot simply say that the referent is the seal, since that would not adequately represent the children’s linguistic activities. In order to do justice to the context of play in which the act of reference is carried out, the constitution of the referent must be understood in the following way. The relative importance of the conceptualizations and conceptual relations associated with the conventional meaning of “Moses” are decided on the basis of the proportional importance of the speaker’s criterial and identificational intentions, as these are made manifest in the context. The speaker’s criterial intention overrides the identificational intention, hence excluding some of the most “sealish” physical characteristics from being part of the intended referent. However, the speaker’s identificational intention to refer to the seal’s more general physical characteristics that allow touching and interacting, becomes part of the conceptualization of “Moses”, and has preference over the criterial intention. Thus, the specific physical characteristics that are required for the conceptual functions to be carried out are excluded from being part of the intended referent. The general physical characteristics required in the conventional conceptualization of Moses, on the other hand, are retained, as these now coincide with the physical characteristics singled out by the identificational intention. The conceptual relations supposed to hold between the concept associated with “Moses” and other concepts, are part of the intended referent

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as well. The functions requiring specific physical characteristics are considered possible to carry out in the play on the basis of conceptual relations only, plus the general physical characteristics. Thus the referent to “Moses” is not Moses (the biblical character), and neither is it the seal (as conventionally conceptualized), but a bit of both. In this context—as indeed in every context—the referent to a referring expression must be carved out from within the available conceptual structures so to best fit the context of utterance. My argument against the realist assumption about an independent referent can be stated from two perspectives. The first perspective concerns the assumed unproblematic language independence of ordinary objects such as cars and little girls. Recall the realist assumption that once the object referred to has been identified by means of a referring expression, the act of reference has no more part to play for the referent which is then treated as if unconceptualized. The referent is thought of as being unconceptualized or as being conceptualized in a certain way which has absolute priority. However, the fact that we can identify an object by means of referring to it does not justify the further step of claiming that we can go from this contextually constituted referent to the object in itself and expect to be able to say something about it. Whenever we refer to an object we refer to it in a particular linguistic, physical, social, and personal context, and the referent is constituted by that very context. Communication presupposes a shared linguistically structured reality, and it is here that reference takes place. Even if we for example want to say that daddy exists, in a way that Santa Claus does not, the means by which we can do this automatically makes both daddy and Santa Claus referents of a particular utterance, dependent on the context of utterance. We may say of “daddy” that he exists with a physical body, and we may say of “Santa Claus” that he is a mythological figure with certain characteristics and connotations. Thus the only way we can go about claiming that daddy exists and that Santa Claus does not exist is by different routes of referring to them. When establishing what we are talking about, we contextually constitute the referent to “daddy” in the context of the very utterance where we claim that he exists independently of language. So, my first response to the realist is that not even ordinary physical objects can be talked about or referred to in any other capacity than as referents to our referring expressions in utterances, made in particular contexts. The second perspective concerns the presumed unproblematic depreciation of so-called non-existing entities. I take issue with the realist who devalues objects that are not physically obvious to us, or

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empirically observable, purely on the grounds that the terms we use for talking about these things do not refer to anything actually existing. It is assumed that there must be a physical object (or at least an entity of some kind) that corresponds to the referring expression if reference is to have been said to have taken place. Let us return to “Santa Claus” and “daddy”. In order to say that Santa Claus does not exist with a physical body as daddy does, we have to talk about him. When we talk about something we refer to it. That is what reference is all about, to make clear to the listener what is spoken about. So the referring expression “Santa Claus” has a referent, just as well as the referring expression “daddy” has a referent. Both are constituted with the help of linguistic, cultural, social, physical, and personal factors in the context of utterance. For both terms it is theoretically possible to describe the processes of pragmatic enrichment that lead to reference assignment. Additionally, for both terms it is possible to give criteria for what constitutes the referent, which will provide the standards for judging when a statement about the referent is considered false and when it is true. For example to say that “Santa Claus is mean and selfish” with a purely criterial directive intention would be false. In another context “Santa Claus is mean and selfish” might be considered true, for example when referring to a grumpy department store Santa. The referents of so-called non-referring terms are constituted by the context of utterance in the same way as are the referents of ordinary referring expressions (referring to objects conceptualized with strong dependence on physical characteristics). That is what makes it possible for us to speak about both existing and non-existing things. A certain preferred kind of existence (for example physical) of the object referred to is not a prerequisite for reference to take place. In fact, it is quite the opposite. If reference did not take place we would be in no position to attribute either existence or non-existence to anything. So, my second response to the realist is that the so-called non-existing objects cannot be discarded solely on the grounds of their purported failure to be successfully referred to. Now, after having examined the two polar positions, and having argued that they both have the contextual constitution of the referent in common, I shall go back to claiming what I have claimed all along: that in most acts of reference there is a blend between criterial and identificational intentions. In practice this means that both perspectives of the realist position and my arguments against it come to be actualized simultaneously. This, I claim, makes the realist’s position even weaker. It is a matter of degree to what extent a referent to a referring expression is constituted as physically

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existing, as fulfilling certain functions, or as potentially having certain characteristics. If indeed what we mean by existence is context dependent and linguistically structured in some way, then what one refers to is also context dependent and linguistically structured, and the dichotomy between existing referent and nothing can no longer be upheld. In the remaining chapters I shall proceed to examine the consequences of this view for how we best should understand reference in human practices predominantly conceptualized with a weak dependence on physical characteristics, such as children’s make-believe play and religion.

4 Reference and reality in make-believe contexts In order for religious language about God to be important and relevant to people it will have to speak of something that is considered to be real, and its expressions will need to refer to something. Unless we want to place the reality of what in religion is considered real, or the referent to the referring expression “God”, in a metaphysical realm, independent of human minds, why we still can consider God to be real will have to be otherwise argued for. I shall consequently now argue that referents constituted mainly as conceptualized with weak dependence on physical characteristics can be considered to be real, without falling back on neither physical nor metaphysical existence.

Real and important As we have seen, the referent to a linguistic expression is not independent of its context of utterance, including the speaker’s intention to use it referentially or attributively to various extents. What we call reality is always humanly conceptualized with various degrees of dependence on physical characteristics. What for us constitutes the reality of the referent to an expression is, besides contextual considerations, dependent on the place and function of the concept with which the referring expression is associated, in relation to other concepts and conceptual structures. Generally speaking, what makes us consider something as real or not in a certain context depends on whether it conforms to how it is conventionally conceptualized in that context. For conceptualizations that are strongly dependent on physical characteristics, considering something to be real has mostly to do with the physical characteristics being 105

106 God in the Act of Reference the way they are conceptualized. For conceptualizations that are less strongly dependent on physical characteristics, what makes us consider something to be real has more to do with the place and function the conceptualization has within its own conceptual structure, its relations to other conceptualizations in other conceptual structures, and the adequacy of the whole conceptual structure for human beings in their coming to terms with their surroundings and needs. If we are to consider something as real in our everyday life context it must in this our everyday life make a difference to our alternatives for action. Even if all of this is granted, it might nevertheless be claimed that only contexts conceptualized primarily with a strong, or relatively strong, dependence on physical dependence and the entities therein spoken about, are what really matter to us. If anything is to make a difference to us in our ordinary life, it must belong to these kinds of entities and conceptual structures. The entities spoken about in contexts that are conceptualized with only a weak dependence on physical dependency—for example make-believe play, theatre acting, fantasy, and religion—are then accordingly not seen to be real enough to place your trust in. Religion, of a realist fashion, seems to claim that in order to be a proper object for religious worship God must be real in a sense that is at least equivalent to objects that are conceptualized with strong dependence on physical characteristics. This is achieved by postulating a metaphysically existing God, whose reality for us is not dependent on our human considerations. Only then can God matter to us. Our problem is then whether God can be considered to be real without the addition of metaphysical existence. Our problem is, moreover, how this can be achieved without getting caught in religious non-realism’s dilemma, namely that God cannot very well be thought to be a “mere construction” and at the same time invoke a religious response in us. Also areas conceptualized with a lesser dependence on physical characteristics are vital in their functionality for us as human beings, without us having to postulate independently existing entities as referents to the referring expressions relevant in the context. The adequacy of these areas for us in life does not depend on them corresponding to a reality which is independent from us. Neither is it necessary that the referring expressions associated with the conceptual structure in question refer to something independent of the context of utterance. Their adequacy for us rests rather on their functionality for the human individual and for the human race from an evolutionary perspective. There is, I claim, no principal or general difference between areas

Reference and reality in make-believe contexts 107 that are very much dependent on human construction and areas that are not so much dependent on human construction that would motivate drawing a sharp line between them. What makes us treat some things as important and real to us, is not that they are conceptualized with a stronger rather than a weaker dependence on physical characteristics, nor that the corresponding referring terms refer to something that has independent existence (in some or other favoured sense of the word— normally physically). What makes us treat some things as important to us can be stated more simply than that; it is that they matter to us in some respect, according to some grounds for attributing value. Whether they are taken to be more or less important has to do with the value-systems we consciously or unconsciously live by. What makes things important to us may of course in many situations have to do with physical characteristics (as when gathering edible plants and avoiding poisonous ones). In other situations, though, what makes things important to us has more to do with social construction, when this is what enables the conceptual relations and functions to be carried out (as when the gods’ approval is needed for some project, or in getting a degree in philosophy).

Some theories on play There are scattered references to play within philosophy. Already Plato spoke approvingly about play, both as instrumental to a good life, and as a metaphor of life itself. Perhaps the first to treat make-believe play as a serious and pervasive philosophical theme was the German writer Friedrich von Schiller (1759-1805).1 According to Schiller, only in play the forces that fight for power within a person—one that craves content and life, and one that craves form and system—can be harmonized and controlled. In effect, Schiller did not pay much attention to children’s actual play, but used the concept of play as a metaphor for our dealings with the aesthetic, which makes for a good life. Another philosopher who has employed the concept of play is Hans-Georg Gadamer. In his hermeneutical project play is used as a metaphor for bringing out the aspects of understanding through eliminating the differences between subject and object. The play area is the area between the work of art and the spectator, and in this area meaning can be created.2 In the 1960s theologians such as Harvey Cox and David Miller emphasized 1Schiller 1954. For an exposition of his play theory, see Steinsholt 1998, pp 51-70. 2See Steinsholt and Traasdahl 1997 for a discussion about the concept of play in Gadamer’s hermeneutics.

108 God in the Act of Reference the human need for play, festivity, and carnival, and proposed that we should view religion as play. Religion would fulfil all these human needs by providing a playful sense of life. Thus we would be able to transcend our ordinary life’s dreariness, and like children in play get carried away by the social fantasies called religious rituals and so lead a happier life.3 These and other scholars use the concept of play metaphorically to illustrate or shed light over some other phenomenon, be it as large as life as a whole, or the mere fragment of an art experience, or a religious ritual. Or, they choose some beneficial (from some point of view) aspects of play and apply them to other activities so to make them appear beneficial as well, or to better understand them as such. In my argument the introduction of play has a different function altogether. I do not say that religion is play, or should be understood in terms of play. In a more roundabout fashion, I first take play as the obvious, prototypical example of a make-believe activity that is relevant and important for us as human beings. The existence of make-believe activities, of which play is a prototypical example, is then taken as a reason for assuming a human capacity for make-believe activities, the instrumental means of which I argue may profitably be analysed in terms of our capacity to form and use conceptualizations that are only weakly dependent on physical characteristics. Religion, finally, being another area that in essential respects is constituted by its use of conceptualizations with weak dependence on physical characteristics, can then be submitted to the same analytical tools and conceptual arguments concerning reference as make-believe play. Play and the language used in play are put forward as illustrative examples of how reference and conceptual structures can be analysed in contexts conceptualized with a predominantly weak dependence on physical characteristics. By a semantic analysis of the conceptual strategies common to play and religion, an understanding and appreciation of the similarities between play and religion is made possible. But without neither on the one hand necessarily making religion and its God into something unreal and made-up, nor on the other hand necessarily requiring God’s metaphysical and mind-independent existence in order for God to be considered real in contrast to a make-believe object in play. In contrast to other make-believe activities, play has the advantage of being social in character and explicitly verbal compared with dreams and private fantasies; and compared with theatre acting and 3Cox 1969; Miller 1970.

Reference and reality in make-believe contexts 109 the reading of literature play is more wholeheartedly engaged in. I shall therefore focus mainly on children’s play and especially on the kind of play that is known as role play, or make-believe play Children’s make-believe play, compared with competitive games, or activities such as ball-games and the like, is the kind of play that most frequently uses conceptualizations with a weaker dependence on physical characteristics. Make-believe play is indeed the only kind of play the very constitution of which relies on the participants of the play to conceptualize with weak dependence on physical characteristics.4 There are competing views—as always within the academy— regarding what play is, what the purpose of play is, and why there is play at all.5 A classic view is the sociological view that play is practice for adult life and more serious behaviour. Play is seen to be an important means by which the child is socialized into a society and internalizes the values and world-view of that society. The child imitates and plays roles that it will live or encounter later in life, and thus becomes socially trained and well equipped to handle all sorts of situations in life. Another classic view of the purpose of play is the psychological view, originating with Freud. This view holds that play is essentially wish fulfilment and a strategy to cope with unsatisfied desires. Frustrations and traumas that the child encounter are re­ enacted in the play. Both explanations deal with the teleological aspect of the purpose of play. If asked, the child’s own answer to the question of the purpose of play would, however, presumably be along the lines that he or she plays for the fun of it. Play is its own purpose. The momentary pleasure in play where time flies and anything can happen is the immediate and intentional purpose of play, without which the other teleological effects would not happen. Playing with the explicit purpose of gaining something—social, material, or psychological benefits— would presumably not be very successful, since that would transform the make-believe play to something else, an exercise, or a therapy, and it would not be play any more. What makes play to be play is thus something other than its effects; it has to do with the make-believe capacity to enter a new and partly humanly constructed world. A classic book on the nature of play is Johan Huizinga’s Homo 4 According to an empirical study (Opie and Opie 1959) over 90% of children’s play is make-believe play, which of course is another reason, although of a different kind, to concentrate on this kind of play. 5For some general overviews and anthologies on play, see Bruner 1976; Cohen 1987; Pellegrini 1995; Steinsholt 1998; and Sutton-Smith 1997.

110 God in the Act of Reference Ludens.6 Huizinga’s starting hypothesis is that culture is permeated with play, and that play has played a vital part in the development of human culture. Therefore, he wants to explain those activities and functions that are important for the development and rise of culture in terms of play. Huizinga singles out a specific characteristic of play that he calls the “agonal” (from the Greek word for contest or competition), the presence of which is then taken as a criterion for cultural activities to be considered to be play. Culture enhancing qualities are for example virtue, nobility, glory, and fame. In order to promote these qualities, agonal activities such as war, fights, philosophical arguments, duels, and the like, characterized by competition and contest, are seen to be vital. Huizinga becomes almost lyrical about the male ideals, fostered in “agonal” environments, and credits them for the success of Western culture. If one were to take a different view on what is valuable and constructive in the making of culture, however, one might not be all that lyrical about the antagonistic, dualistic, and “agonal” qualities and structures in people and societies. I would contend, contrary to Huizinga’s belief, that it is not “beyond all doubt” that the male virtues have been solely responsible for the rise of culture. The virtues traditionally assigned to women, such as co-operation, care, nurturing, empathy, and solidarity may even be seen to present a less destructive way of growing a society than making war and competing. Characteristics of play other than the “agonal” would be emphasized: instead of the individual’s fight against his environment to win glory for himself, one would stress the interaction of the participants, the ability to play roles with empathy for what is involved in the role of oneself and others, the reciprocity in decision-making, and the mutual establishment and upholding of the play’s make-believe reality. That Huizinga overlooks these aspects of play is a result of his antithetical view of play, which means that the element of surprise and suspense is what gives play the higher cultural qualities that build a culture. This antithetical view of play can be seen as resulting from a lack of gender perspective on Huizinga’s part in deciding on what constitutes the desired values of a culture. The concept of play that I work with cannot be Huizinga’s “agonal” and competitive understanding of play, but must in its conceptual structure fairly represent the experiences of both men and women. To build a general theory of play exclusively on boys’ and men’s playing activities, as Huizinga does, is misleading, and will yield a 6Huizinga 1955.

Reference and reality in make-believe contexts 111 gender-biased theory. Women and women’s situations are made totally invisible, uninteresting and indeed non-existent.7 Paediatrician D. W. Winnicott remarks that even though boys and girls soon enough turn to different kinds of objects to use as toys, and different ways of playing, there is no noticeable difference between their way of using the first transitional object.8 The capacity for make-believe play is genderneutral and belongs to both sexes.

Holding two realities for true at the same time When children play, they seem to do so in a special state of consciousness, as if in a light trance. The gaze is lowered and turned inwards; the children are blind and deaf to the outer surroundings and concentrate hard on their play. This state of consciousness yields a sense of well-being and mental recuperation. Play is played for its own sake and is characterized by self-forgetfulness, enthusiasm, and timelessness. In order to play one must know the social and locally conventionalized play signals, verbal as well as non-verbal. From an observer’s perspective, play functions as an aid to assimilate the hard outer objective and social reality in a way that is not threatening for one’s own self. Make-believe activities in general can be said to be activated when the self needs help to integrate new aspects of the world, in for example crises or separations. Play is also characterized by transforming reality and ordinary world objects into something else. A stone can become a bun, a piece of lego can become a cup of coffee, and a piece of bread can become a body. These objects that are one thing in the ordinary world and quite another in the play world are called transformations. Transformations need not be physically similar to what they are supposed to stand for. Neither time, space, roles, 7In Huizinga’s examples of play, persons and pronouns are generally male or masculine, which marks this off as the default case of play. Even when the language used is neutral with respect to gender, it still implicitly refers to men. When there actually is a reference to women, it has to be explicitly made. For example, Huizinga speaks about the Eskimo verbal drum-contests, and adds that “even women participate in them”. Thereby it is indicated that in all other cases, where it is not explicitly mentioned that women participate in the play, they do not participate, even though gender-neutral language may be used. The history of human culture is seen as an exclusively male history. Women have the passive roles of being prices of contests, the reasons for fights, or a necessary part in mating dances. But when women actually participate in a play Huizinga finds that so extraordinary that he has to make a special note of it. 8Winnicott 1971, p 5.

112 God in the Act of Reference nor behaviour are tied to the actual objective reality, but can all be transformed in play. Bearing these general characteristics of play in mind, a potential tension for the person playing can be detected. The tension consists in simultaneously belonging to both the make-believe world and the ordinary world, and handling what is at the same time transformations and ordinary objects. The tension has two aspects, one psychological and one conceptual. I will return to and dedicate most of the remainder of this chapter to the conceptual tension involved in play and makebelieve activities. But let us first briefly touch the subject of the psychological state of mind of the individual person engaged in a game of make-believe. A striking fact about play is that the players know that the play is only make-believe, and at the same time they are deadly serious about what they are playing, as if it were for real. The players have the ability to go in and out of the play or the make-believe area, and view it differently depending on from what point of reference they are speaking. Karl Groos, when writing about play, has expressed this idea in the following way: “the players, like actors, are quite conscious all through the pretense that they are only ‘making believe’. It is a genuine conscious state in which, on the one hand, the illusion is perfect, while on the other there is full knowledge that it is an illusion” .9 What is problematic about assuming the player to be convinced of the reality of the make-believe world of the play while playing, is that this presumably would make make-believe play into a delusion and an error of thinking, which is something negative and harmful, whereas play in fact normally is something beneficial. On the other hand, however, if one emphasizes too much the player’s awareness of the make-believe status of the play, one would be at loss as for how to explain the seriousness of the play and the complete engrossment in it that makes make-believe play into what it is. A solution might be framed in terms of role-taking. A person may be fully absorbed in the role he or she takes in the make-believe play, and in the capacity of holder of that role be fully convinced of the reality of the make-believe world in question. The role-play as a whole is, however, physically located in the ordinary world, in which the player leads his or her ordinary life, and from the perspective of which the make-believe world is not real. So the player could, according to this view, retain a pleasant background awareness of freely participating in a play—which is what marks play off as a playful illusion and not a 9Groos 1976, p 80.

Reference and reality in make-believe contexts 113 deception—even though the person playing might be totally absorbed in the play.10 In connection with the social interactionalism that arose with pragmatism in North America at the beginning of this century, George Herbert Mead developed a theory of interpersonal communication and action.11 In brief, this theory says that in a social situation the subject is a source of stimuli for the other person. So the subject must not only pay attention to the surroundings, but also to his or her own behaviour, since that is going to influence the surroundings (in the form of the other person), and thus the subject’s own future alternatives for action. By the use of gestures and symbols—specifically language—patterns of mutual expectations will be created, and verified in interaction. Mead coined the memorable phrase uto take the role of other”; that is to place oneself in the place of the generalized other in order to anticipate how the other will respond. When children engage in make-believe play, they take the roles of all sorts of persons and perform all sorts of functions (mother, hairdresser, doctor, fireman, and so on). According to theories about play that build on the role-taking tradition, these latent roles will be activated as frames of reference when the children later in life encounter real doctors and hairdressers. They will provide patterns that will guide them in their behaviour, containing as they do, expectations on the other’s behaviour. Concerning the tension of holding two realities to be true at the same time, which is presupposed in the use of transformations that characterizes make-believe play, the Swedish pedagogue Birgitta Knutsdotter Olofsson says that to “hold on to beliefs, substitutions, and transformations in spite of perceptions of a contradictory reality is advanced brain exercise”.12 From one philosophical point of view one might want to say that holding something as well as its negation as true at the same time is a logical contradiction, and no advanced brain exercise can make it anything else.13 However, in make-believe activities such as play the advanced strategies required do not have to do with trying to make two irreconcilable realities get along well with each other and not contradicting each other. The brain exercise does not consist in trying to convince oneself that a piece of lego really at the same time is a cup of coffee, which indeed would be both 10See Groos 1976, where a solution is suggested along these lines, although in terms of “apparent I” and “real I”, and only hinting at the concept of role-taking. 11 For a short exposition of Mead’s views, see Joas 1985 and 1987. 12Olofsson 1987, p 156 (my translation from Swedish). 13It is even claimed, by Gregory Bateson, that the phenomenon of play involves an innate Russellian paradox. See Bateson 1976, p 12Iff.

114 God in the Act of Reference logically contradictory and psychologically counter-intuitive. No, the stretching of the mind has rather to do with being able to separate the two realities; to be able to be completely absorbed in one of them without denying the other; to be able to freely switch between the realities according to context and purpose; and to be in command of the language, conceptual structures, and attitudes that are needed for this. Of the two realities, one, our ordinary life reality, is predominantly constituted by our outer sensory perceptions and conceptualized with strong dependence on physical characteristics in our everyday ordinary language. The other, the make-believe reality, is constituted by the specific use of language in a play situation, and involves conceptualizations that are only weakly dependent on physical characteristics. The referents, in the case of transformations, may then be constituted partly with a criterial and partly with an identificational directive intention on the part of the speaker.14 The referent to the expression “cup of coffee” in a make-believe play is, for instance, criterially constituted as conceptually fulfilling the functions an ordinary cup of coffee has. It is also identificationally constituted insofar as the functions that can be carried out physically in the play are restricted by the physical characteristics of the piece of lego functioning as a cup of coffee in the play.

Other make-believe activities than play Children’s make-believe play is the most obvious example of an activity characterized by the use of conceptualizations that are weakly dependent on physical characteristics. There are also several other activities and areas that are conceptualized with weak dependence on physical characteristics, and which are relevant for our well-being as human creatures. All of them cannot, of course, be covered within the limits of this one book, let alone be analysed fairly. I shall therefore only give a couple of examples other than make-believe play of how such activities and practices are viewed as real, and as having real effects. 14As a reminder, a criterial directive intention constitutes as referent that which fits into the semantic descriptive meaning of the referring expression; the referent is a function of the conceptual relations and structures of the concept associated with the referring expression in the context of utterance. An identificational directive intention on the other hand, constitutes as referent some object in the context that the speaker has in mind, which means that the physical characteristics becomes more prominent in establishing the referent.

Reference and reality in make-believe contexts 115 Encounters with spirits are in some religious groups, according to anthropologist John Caughey, regarded as authentic experiences of the self, and are a part of the identity work in which we are constantly engaged.15 Thus not only our actual human social encounters challenge our positive conception of self, which we try to maintain; this is also true of encounters with spirits, which are consequently considered to be real. Caughey wants to extend this to secular middle class Americans and claims that in everyday fantasy and daydreaming, important forms of identity work takes place. He argues that fantasy experiences of self are real experiences of self, since they are as subjectively vivid as going to a movie or reading a book; the self-maintaining effects of fantasy are just as significant as in any of these other experiences. He argues further that fantasy is linked to memory as well as to anticipation. Insofar as it shapes the story of the past, and helps forming the future by acting out possible scenarios, fantasy concerns the real. Fantasy and daydreaming are thus possible examples of something that is not real in the sense that it is conceptualized with strong dependence on physical characteristics, but that nevertheless fills an important human function in contributing to our formation and maintenance of identity and affecting our choice of actions. If fantasy and imagining are viewed in terms of muted role-taking, a form of hypothetical or “as if” behaviour, as Theodore Sarbin suggests, then we also have a possible way of explaining why some fantasies are regarded as real and some not.16 In the context of social interaction a person can perform a role with various degrees of involvement, and this can be applied to muted role-taking as well. Sarbin suggests that under high involvement, conditions are created for regarding the hypothetical behaviour as credible. This corroborates well with what I have previously said about children’s play. A high involvement in the game of make-believe is usually significant for when the roles taken within the game are experienced as real by the child. The role-taking concept from social psychology, mentioned earlier, has been adopted by the Swedish scholar Hjalmar Sunden and put to work in the psychology of religion. In a society where there is a religious tradition, the religious roles will be taken up by the children alongside with the roles of hairdressers and firemen. Sunden claims that in order to be able to take up the role of God and see life in religious terms, it is a necessary condition that a person has knowledge about stories where God and human beings have various roles that are 15Caughey 1988. 16Sarbin 1972.

116 God in the Act of Reference possible to take up and identify with respectively.17 For the religious engagement, seen as role-taking, to be long-lasting there must also be some connection between the religious frame of reference and the actual situation of the life of the person. The person will then identify with the human role and take up the role of God. This is when the person encounters the other as a living reality.18 Excessive use of religious quotations and participation in rituals have been shown to lead to the transformation in various ways of the person involved.19 Participation in religious activities, involving conceptualizations that are only weakly dependent on physical characteristics, often lead to a change in perceived identity and value of both oneself and others. Religion is thus yet another area where we make use of our capacity for make-believe activities, that is our capacity for conceptualizing with weak dependence on physical characteristics. In taking part in religious rituals the participants themselves are constituted as referents partly in terms of being conceptualized as standing in a certain relation to God, who is conceptualized with weak dependence on physical characteristics. Other examples of make-believe areas are theatre plays, both acting and viewing them, carnivals and festivities, rituals, fictional literature, dreams, and shorter, isolated instances of fantasy and pretending in conversation and social life, such as jokes and lies, all of which are characterized by conceptualizations that are weakly dependent on physical characteristics and by the use of creativity.20 However, as I have argued before, there is no sharp dividing line between conceptualizations with a weaker dependence on physical characteristics and those with a stronger. Thus there is no sharp dividing line between make-believe activities and ordinary life activities, as far as these are defined in terms of dependence on physical characteristics in their conceptual structures. Make-believe activities involve, as well as conceptualizations that are very weakly dependent on physical characteristics, also conceptualizations that are more strongly dependent on physical characteristics, for example transformations, natural environments, and real people. Likewise, ordinary life activities involve, as well as conceptualizations that are strongly dependent on physical characteristics, also those that are more weakly dependent on physical characteristics, for instance money, love, and professors. 17Sunden 1966, p 47. 18Sunden 1966, p 65. 19See Meigs 1995. 20 See Winnicott 1971, pp 76-100, for a discussion on how human creativity is connected to the early transitional experiences.

Reference and reality in make-believe contexts 117 One interesting borderline area is the role creativity and imagination plays in science and in the development of new ideas. It seems to be the case that in the development of new scientific discoveries and ideas the following procedures are roughly followed.21 There is first a stage of gathering data and facts, collecting information, followed by an incubation stage where no progress is made and the person puts away the whole project and relaxes for hours or months. After that period illumination comes and the person suddenly sees the solution to the whole problem. In one grasp everything is clear; a whole new theory is created or a chemical structure is visualized. August Kekule, the discoverer of the cyclic atomic structure of benzene, reported that the cyclic structure suggested itself in a dreamlike vision in which he saw the atoms so to speak join hands and dance together in a ring, as a snake chasing its own tail. There still remains to work it all out, verify theses, and demonstrate the correctness of the idea, but apparently imagination plays a significant role in getting from a vast amount of data to a new discovery or idea. The leap that puts things together in new patterns and makes us see new connections is mainly attributed to our capacity for imagination. So one might want to claim that our whole scientific progress is due to our capacity for make-believe activities. Fiction, finally, is another area that is conceptualized with weak dependence on physical characteristics. Relating to fiction and fictional characters generally demands less engagement from us than playing a game of make-believe or holding a role in a theatre play. Since religious activities, the main subject of this analysis, usually demand a high amount of engagement, I shall put less emphasis on fiction than makebelieve play. This in spite of the fact that fiction and fictional characters have been more widely treated within philosophy, and as related to religion, than has make-believe play. The common characteristic of such diverse areas as make-believe play and cultural imaginative activities such as drama, role-play, science, and religion is what I suggest we call the human capacity for make-believe activities. T he hum an capacity for m ake-believe activities Several authors have wanted to give an explanation of cultural phenomena such as theatre, literature, art, and religion in terms of play, or have endeavoured to explain our capacity for make-believe play itself 21See e.g. Weber 1992.

118 God in the Act of Reference in psychoanalytical terms.22 Either one says that cultural experiences are made possible by the early transitional sphere experienced by the human infant, and children’s make-believe play, or one equates cultural experiences with play. It is not in my interest to discuss the nature of a possible connection between a specific psychoanalytically described experience, or play, and other cultural experiences, nor to explain wherein the capacity for make-believe activities really consists. The explanation of the origins of play and other cultural make-believe activities given by D. W. Winnicott in psychoanalytical terms has gained a fairly wide acceptance, though, and I shall make a short critical presentation of it. My own conclusions concerning conceptualizations and reference do not hinge on this specific theory about child development; although the philosophical points I make with respect to our human capacity for make-believe activities are in accordance with it. I have already briefly introduced D. W. Winnicott in a previous chapter. His work is highly respected for the wide empirical material it is based on. Winnicott remained for all of his life a paediatrician, even after he turned to psychoanalysis.23 This means that his psychoanalytic theories concerning the infant and mother constellation are based on thousands of actual observations, and not on singular cases, as was the method of Sigmund Freud, the founding father of psychoanalysis. W innicott’s theory takes its departure in the observation that many children have an object that is especially dear to them. The object can be anything from a baby blanket to a Teddy bear, or a part of the mother. These kinds of objects are called transitional objects and they are characterized as being objects that are not a part of the child’s body, but that are not yet acknowledged by the child to belong to the outer reality.24 The first transitional object is normally the mother’s breast. Winnicott places a great emphasis on the experiences from early infancy for our later capacities to relate properly to our shared reality and to ourselves and our inner reality. When the infant first gets hungry, Winnicott theorizes, it stretches outwards and expects something to fill its needs, although there are no manifest ideas of what that might be. This capacity of the baby to so to say imagine and crave something that is not yet there is a basic survival instinct. The infant does not yet know what milk or a breast is, or anything about 22See Gadamer 1975 and 1986; Huizinga 1955; Korsmeyer 1998; Lindquist 1997; Pruyser 1983; and Winnicott 1971. 23For an introduction to W innicott’s life and work, see Winnicott 1996, pp xixxxxii. See also Winnicott 1971 and 1987. 24Winnicott 1971, pp 1—5.

Reference and reality in make-believe contexts 119 its relations as a discrete entity towards other objects, but its bodily sensations prepare it to receive something without which it would die. According to Winnicott, if the mother then presents herself and her breast as that which the infant is willing to receive, the infant gets the illusion that it itself created the breast by means of its own imaginative powers. In this way the mother and other significant persons present bits and pieces of our shared physical and socially constructed reality to the infant, and the child is gradually integrated into this shared reality. The experience between the infant and its mother can be seen to constitute the basis for the development of a sense of distinction between self and others, between inner and outer reality, between fantasy and objective reality. The area between the infant and the mother, where this process of differentiation is carried out, Winnicott calls the transitional area. The transitional area is the area in which reality is not yet external and independent of the infant’s wishes and power to create it, but neither is it completely internal and private to the infant. On W innicott’s view the transitional objects in the transitional area would not be there if the infant had not created them, but neither would they be there if not the mother had provided the means from our shared reality for the infant’s creation of them. The transitional objects are thus not a part of the outer objective world that we share with each other, neither are they a part of the inner psychic world of hallucinations and fantasies. They belong to an area of experiences where the child still can experience his or her “magic” ability to create his or her reality. The reality is then not an inner idea, but belongs to an intermediary area between the subjective and the objective world. This transitional area, Winnicott claims, is the place where the children’s subsequent make-believe play take place, and is also the place where cultural experiences such as religion, music, and art are made possible.25 A problem with Winnicott’s and others’ theories about the infant development in the present context is that it is problematic to ascribe intentions, beliefs, and emotions to an infant, the inner sensations and conceptualizations (if any) of whom are not accessible to us. Also Piaget uses similar terminology when he speaks about the infant and attributes the belief to the infant that its perceptual images are governed by its own desires and intentions.26 Moreover, Piaget and Winnicott want to do this without assuming the infant to have a sense of separate self or being aware of itself as a subject. If there is no sense 25Winnicott 1971, pp 6, 15, and 118. 26Piaget 1959, p 376f. See also p 350.

120 God in the Act of Reference of self, however, no awareness of subject identity, it seems inappropriate to attribute beliefs concerning desires or intentional efforts. There are two reasons for this. Firstly, the concept of having a belief involves the concept of a subject holding the belief. Having a belief is an activity that demands awareness on the part of the subject. Contra this it is sometimes claimed that a subject may hold a belief of which he or she is not aware. But this in its turn requires that the subject would assent to the belief if he or she were presented with it, so the demand for awareness is still there, be it active or potential. Secondly, the contents of the beliefs ascribed to the infant is its own desires and efforts. Thus, even if one might conceive of a general concept of belief that was independent of the subject being (potentially) aware of it, here the very content of the belief requires the concept of self. Desires and efforts are intentional states of mind, and as such are themselves a kind of beliefs. If I am to believe that I have a certain desire, or that my desires have certain effects, this requires second order beliefs, namely that I believe that I believe something. This is certainly impossible to achieve without the subject’s awareness of itself as a self. We need to make a distinction between the empirical observations of phenomena; the theory-dependent explanations, possibly of extrapolating nature, we give to the phenomena; and the theoretical points we draw from them. In the present case, infant behaviour, play activities, and the child’s handling of its objects are the observed phenomena, from which Winnicott extrapolates in order to theorize about the assumed psychological and conceptual processes involved in the inner world of the infant. Making these distinctions is, however, difficult, since even a non-explanatory description of a phenomenon is theory­ laden, as has been shown by among others Lynn Hankinson Nelson in her treatment of socio-biology.27 When a male of a certain species is described as having a harem, Nelson points out that this very description imposes on animal life a specific view of sex and gender, the conceptual requirements of which belong to a human realm. One might just as well describe the phenomenon as a large group of, for instance, female fish keeping a male fish for the single purpose of fertilizing their eggs. Both alternative descriptions are derived from conceptual structures that concern human life and relations, though, and it is not self-evident that we can apply concepts from these conceptual structures to another life form. Conceptualizations concerning intentions (not to get too deeply involved in the finer details of the fish-example) get their meaning from how we human beings 27Nelson 1990, pp 137-160, and 206-212.

Reference and reality in make-believe contexts 121 conceive of intentional acts, and this includes the acts being performed by an active subject. Fish, however, do not have the same genetic set up or brain functions, or the same physical or social surroundings, as we humans have. Bluntly speaking they cannot think, from which it follows that they cannot be said to entertain desires, wishes, fears, and other intentional states, in the same way as humans. Which brings us back to the problem with ascribing beliefs to an infant. In both cases conceptualizations that have their function and meaning in certain situations and that belong to certain conceptual structures, are used in radically different kinds of situations. They are there tacitly assumed to retain the same meaning and function as they ordinarily have, whereas my point is that it is by no means clear what, if any, function or meaning they would have there. All we can do with such “alien” life forms such as fish or infants, where we cannot know by what means, if any, they structure their world conceptually, is to suggest, from our point of view, what such a conceptual structure might conceivably look like. If we take Winnicott’s description of the conceptual structure of the infant’s world to be such a reconstruction, and not a description of the actual phenomena, then my evaluation would be that his reconstruction seems plausible. Infants will eventually grow up and make use of the very conceptual means by which their own pre-conceptual activities are reconstructed, and this makes it appropriate to attribute to them a human conceptual structure. They are after all less of an alien life-form than the fish. For Winnicott, the transitional objects and the transitional sphere with its object differentiation in the individual’s infant development are the prerequisites for all future make-believe play, social encounters, and cultural activities. I shall refer to these transitional processes as originating in a make-believe capacity. The make-believe capacity is then a universal gender-neutral human ability to create a sphere of make-believe activities and objects. This so called transitional sphere transcends both the outer objective reality and the inner private reality of a person. The products of the make-believe capacity, infant object differentiation, children’s play, and other cultural activities are universally found among human beings.28 The function of the practice of play in a wide sense, including also the infant’s handling of transitional objects, is then, from an observer’s perspective, that it enables the human individual to be assimilated into its social and conceptual surroundings. A child that does not know how to play does 28Sutton-Smith 1997, p 46.

122 God in the Act of Reference for instance not develop the same social skills or linguistic competence as other children. The make-believe capacity is, on a conceptual level, the same, capacity that makes it possible for us to conceptualize our surroundings not only in physical terms, but with a weaker dependence on physical characteristics. This capacity is prompted by our needs to relate to each other and to our surroundings in appropriate ways. Make-believe activities, described for example as transitional phenomena, or as makebelieve play, and the accompanying capacity for conceptualizing with a weak dependence on physical characteristics, are central for the human ability to create a world view, to form concepts of objects, and to communicate verbally; and thus necessary for a person to relate at all to his or her surroundings as a human person. I do not claim to have explained, within some theory, what this capacity for make-believe activities consists in.29 My conclusions concerning conceptualizations and reference in make-believe activities do, however, besides being theoretically consistent, have the additional advantage of being consistent with some fairly widely accepted theories about child development and human evolution. The important point here is not what this make-believe capacity may empirically consist of, but rather the one thing shared by the practices characterized by this capacity for make-believe play, transitional phenomena, and cultural experiences, namely a legitimate need to conceptualize reality not solely as physical and devoid of human construction. In order to capture and use this distinctive human trait for analytical purposes, I introduce the distinction between conceptualizations with weak dependence on physical characteristics and conceptualizations with strong dependence on physical characteristics as the extreme endpoints on a sliding scale. The activities and human practices described here as examples of the make-believe capacity are taken as a pragmatic argument for the irreducibility and necessity of conceptualizations with weak dependence on physical characteristics in our ways of relating to our surroundings.

An empirical study of reference in make-believe play In a Swedish empirical study of 26 three-year-olds and their mothers playing with a doll-house, carried out by Sven Stromqvist, the referential behaviour of the children and mothers is described as they 29This has been done in psychoanalytical terms; see Pruyser 1983. It has also been done in evolutionary, neurologically terms; see Peters 1997; and Dennett 1991 and 1995.

Reference and reality in make-believe contexts 123 create a make-believe world, taking the roles of the dolls, as well as the roles of themselves.30 In the study most linguistic expressions were ambiguous to the extent that there was a referent both in the referential domain constituted by the doll’s world (for example the doll-role of “mummy”), and in the referential domain outside the doll’s world (for example the real-world mummy), to which the expression could apply.31 To resolve this ambiguity the acts of reference were marked in various ways to signal what referent was intended. The domain that the speaker has taken as background (from where the speaker is referring) Stromqvist calls the speaker’s background domain. The referential domain is then where the referent is (the domain to which the speaker is referring). The unmarked case, that is, where no extra linguistic markers are required, seems to be that these two domains coincide, and especially reference from and to the background domain. Since the background and the referential domain do not always coincide there may be ambiguities as for how the intended referent is to be understood, and therefore some linguistic marking is required. The linguistic marking normally occurs on linguistic terms referring to something outside the background domain, since the referent is then more distant from the speaker. The ordinary non-play world of the children and mothers serves as the default background domain, to which one can return by default.32 Stromqvist observed that in enacting a telephone conversation in the play, the children and mothers gradually shifted their background from the domain of their ordinary world to the domain of the makebelieve play and then back again as the play drew to its end. In other words, they started by referring to the dolls in the third person, displaying their distance to their “doll-selves”. They then gradually went on to shift perspective and speak in first person, making the make-believe domain the anchoring point of their referring acts. They have now moved into the make-believe world wholeheartedly and enact their roles in the play. As the telephone conversation came to an end, finally, they switched again to third person. All of this shows, according to Stromqvist, that children’s play exhibit a smooth and gradual transition between the world of play and the ordinary world. Stromqvist finds five different kinds of linguistic markers for the purpose of indicating the domain of make-believe as the domain of reference, and so to avoid and resolve possible ambiguities. The pitch, 30Stromqvist 1984. 31 Stromqvist 1984, p 13f. 32Stromqvist 1984, p 42.

124 God in the Act of Reference he notices, is higher when taking the roles of the dolls, and also when making references within the make-believe domain. Stromqvist suggests that the latter may be interpreted as a Peircean icon, in that there is a similarity between the marker and the referential domain (showing the similarity between the dolls’ small world and the small voice used in speaking). The second marker for indicating the domain of make-believe is that when the referential domain is the make-believe domain, special intonation patterns are used, such as making the utterances sound monotonous, or even chanting or singing them. As a third kind of markers to indicate the domain of make-believe, lexical markers such as “make-believe daddy” or “doll’s you” are used when necessary to get rid of ambiguity causing misunderstanding. For instance, if someone in the play is hurt by being addressed with the words “You are stupid!”, this can be amended by the comment “I don’t mean you, I mean doll’s you!” The fourth kind of domain markers are grammatical. Grammatical markers are for example that the doll’s instance of a family member is sometimes marked with the definite article (“the daddy”) whereas the real instance of a family member never is (“daddy”). Another grammatical characteristic of the language used in play is what Stromqvist introduces as a specific mode, only used in make-believe play and related contexts of fantasy and fiction. He names this mode “modus ludicus” and it is characterized by the root-form of a verb being repeated several times to indicate iterative action. Its expressive function is to wish to change the situation directly through the act of speaking, and the object of the manipulatory intention is an action. For example, when children play house and in the play eat a cake, they may not actually put anything into their mouths, but through making relevant motions with their hands, and simultaneously uttering “eat-eat-eat”, they have accomplished the eating of the cake. These utterances are described by Stromqvist as archetypal performatives, whereby uttering it is the same as doing something.33 Finally, some fixed formulas always introduce utterances that take the make-believe domain as its referential domain. The most common formulas were: “Let’s pretend that . . . ” and “Let’s say that ... What I take to be confirmed by Stromqvist’s study and my own subsequent examples is that acts of reference made within a makebelieve play are complex acts that involve advanced linguistic skills, and that, nevertheless, in practice the persons participating in the make33Stromqvist 1984, p 112.

Reference and reality in make-believe contexts 125 believe play unproblematically partake in these complex acts of reference. Stromqvist sees similarities between his own study and Malinowski’s investigations of Trobriand agricultural magic. In both, the speech of magic and play respectively differ from ordinary speech by being used under specific circumstances (the make-believe domain and the ritual domain), and by having special lexical, grammatical, and prosodic features.34 Huizinga similarly pointed out the similarities between play and primitive religion, although not from a linguistic, but from a phenomenalistic point of comparison. I would here want to draw attention to the fact that these similarities would hold just as well between play and contemporary religion as between play and so called primitive religion or magic. Let me exemplify how religious language (especially in the ritual setting of a church service or prayer) can be seen to be marked in a similar way as play language. The iconic features of there being a similarity between the marker and the referential domain might show in the preference of a reverential, solemn, and low-pitched voice to talk about holy things and a great ominous God. The monotone chanting intonation patterns from play-language may be compared to religious chanting of ritual texts, or a traditional monotonous preaching voice, all markers to demonstrate that what is said has the specific religious domain as its referential domain. Lexical markers to clear up potential misunderstandings are used by the priest in pronouncing absolution. To avoid the misunderstanding that it is the priest as a private person who forgives someone who has sinned, the following lexical markers precede the utterance: “On behalf of our Lord Jesus Christ I tell you ... ”. Grammatical markers might in a religious context be exemplified by the use of archaic word forms in prayers, hymns, and holy texts, which includes the pronunciation of the Swedish pronoun “dig” in an archaic way [di:g] rather than in a modern way [dej]. Another example is the use of older and longer verb forms where in ordinary speech the shorter verb form is prevalent (e.g. “Thou canst cleanse our hearts”, where the ordinary verb form would be “can”). Set formulas for indicating some embedded sentences to be about a specific domain are characteristic for religion, perhaps even more than in play. Some examples: “Let us pray . . . ” marks the following utterance as belonging to the religious domain. “In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit . . . ” may either begin or end a string of words or sentences, thereby marking them off as belonging to the religious domain of language use. Another formula that is used to mark the end of a religious verbal activity is 34Stromqvist 1984, p 114; Malinowski 1948.

126 God in the Act of Reference “.. .amen”, which often indicates that what was previously uttered is to be considered as a prayer.

Reference and reality in make-believe play People participating in a make-believe play apparently manage to make clear what or who the referent is to any referring expression used in a vast range of situations: before the play, in the process of negotiating and establishing what should count as the reality of the play, in the play as well as in temporary breaks in the play, and finally in terminating the play. The participants normally communicate successfully, and there are means to clear up situations where communication does not succeed. I want to emphasize this since I take it to indicate that instances of reference made within a make-believe context are not in actual play situations sharply demarcated from instances of reference made in an ordinary context. There are not two kinds of objects: one kind that exists and that one can successfully refer to, and another kind that does not exist and that one cannot refer to. People seem quite capable of referring to whatever they want to talk about. To say that reference to make-believe objects (or as I prefer to say, to objects conceptualized with weak dependence on physical characteristics) is philosophically problematic cannot be the result of a study of actual language use. It is rather a theoretical conclusion, which stems from the pervasive philosophical idea that reference entails existence.35 W hat deserves a closer look, however, is how we manage to refer successfully to the different domains of make-believe as well as to the ordinary world without confusion. This is what I find philosophically interesting, providing a theoretical analysis of this complex process of reference. Imagine a couple of children playing house in a playground. If one did not know what they were doing, or what play was, one would no doubt find their behaviour quite intriguing. One child walks around, carrying sand from one end of the sand-box to the other, stirring the sand, and shuffling it around in the air, all the while talking incessantly about baking cakes, pouring flour, and opening ovens. The other child displays a no less confusing behaviour in rocking to and through, singing lullabies, holding absolutely nothing in his arms, and yet with the utmost care lays down this nothing to a spot on the ground called “the baby’s cot”. The children finally take handfuls of the sand, lift it towards their mouths and then discreetly drop it to the ground again while making munching movements with their jaws and muttering 35For the prevalence of this idea, see Stroll 1998a.

Reference and reality in make-believe contexts 127 appreciating exclamations of how tasty the cake is. All of this would at face value seem, mildly speaking, incoherent. We do not, however, in real life find the children and their behaviour queer. If someone did, and wanted to correct their behaviour by telling them that they must cease with their activities since there is no flour, no cakes, and no babies in the sandbox, or stop talking about flour and babies and stick to talking about sand and what there really is in the sandbox, that person would surely be considered the queer one. Now then, since we do accept their behaviour together with their verbal utterances as understandable and purposeful—they communicate successfully and benefit from their activities (pick your choice of play theory for a choice of benefits from playing)—we should also endeavour to make a serious attempt to represent their language use in a theory of reference. What do the children refer to in their play with the use of words like “flour”, “baby”, or “cake” ? Let us examine the concept of “flour” as it is conceptualized in the children’s make-believe play of baking a cake in the sandbox, and compare it with the concept of “flour” as it is conceptualized in the ordinary life of a household. Since the two words look the same, sound the same, belong to the same natural language, and seemingly mean the same, there is the temptation to understand them in the same way. They are not, however, the same, because the associated concepts belong to different conceptual structures, the referents are constituted by different conceptual relations and functions (and different kinds of contextual cues), and what constitutes them as real or not depends on different things in the two cases. Ordinary flour is conceptualized with strong dependence on physical characteristics. Its conceptualization includes that it has the physical characteristics of milled grain. Its conceptualization also includes that we can handle it in certain ways: we can touch it, make it into a dough and bake a cake, and eat it. The physical characteristics are vital for these functional relations of the concept to other concepts. For us in ordinary discourse to consider something to be real flour, it needs to conform to all the conceptual criteria of the concept of flour, that is, the flour must consist of milled grain. If the criteria are not fulfilled, what we are talking about is not considered to be real flour (perhaps it is fake flour made out of sand, sold by some unscrupulous businessman). The reason why these criteria must be fulfilled for us to consider what is referred to by “flour” to be real flour, is that unless they are fulfilled the functional relations of the concept of “flour” in relation to other concepts and conceptual structures are made invalid, or unrealizable. Unless flour is made of milled grain we cannot make a cake that we can

128 God in the Act of Reference eat. As the physical characteristics of the referent change, the limits for our ways of acting with respect to the referent change as well. Make-believe flour on the other hand is conceptualized with a less strong dependence on physical characteristics. The conceptualization of make-believe flour in this imagined case includes that the flour can be physically handled in certain ways. If anything is used as flour it is therefore most likely sand, dust, dry earth, or some other material that has a physical texture and outward appearance similar to ordinary flour. Should a child propose to bring a large stone, or a long stick, and add that to the cake-mixture, claiming it to be flour, presumably the other children would protest and correct that child and show him or her what proper make-believe-flour looks like. It is also possible for the game to be carried out with just the correct movements, and the material aspect of the flour and later the cake being merely indicated by gestures. So, for make-believe flour the criterion stating that for something to be flour it must be able to be handled physically by us, is weaker than in the conceptualization of ordinary flour. It is an optional (although frequently occurring) rather than essential criterion. In case the make-believe flour has some dependence on physical characteristics, these physical characteristics are conceived of in terms of a likeness in outward appearance to ordinary flour. The criterion of being made from milled grain is part of the conceptualization of make-believe flour as well, but it need not be physically realized for the flour to be judged by us as constituting something real in the play. It is rather part of the conventional meaning of the concept. Flour is related to grain in that it is supposed to be made out of it. The conceptual relations assumed in the conceptualization of makebelieve flour are basically the same as in the ordinary household conceptualization of flour. They differ only in the degree to which the alternatives for action with regard to the flour are determined by the physical characteristics of the referent. W ith ordinary flour our possibilities to carry out the functions that are displayed in its conceptualization require the physical characteristics to be realized in the referent. With make-believe flour, on the other hand, the functions may be carried out without any (or at least less) correlation between the physical characteristics of the referent and the physical characteristics presumed in its conceptualization, and only depending on conceptual construction. In this specific imagined case of makebelieve play the referent to “flour” is constituted by a criterial directive intention (attributive use of the referring expression) when it comes to some of the conceptual relations. That is to say that the speaker

Reference and reality in make-believe contexts 129 intends the listener to understand the referring expression to refer to the conceptual space delineated by the conventional semantic descriptive meaning of “flour”. The referent to “flour” is, however, also constituted by an identificational directive intention when it comes to the physical characteristics of the referent. That is to say that the speaker intends the listener to identify some physically present object in the context that he or she has in mind, as referent to the referring expression. In the present case this means that the physical characteristics of sand are part of what is referred to as “flour”. Thus the physical characteristics of the referent allow for some functional aspects in the conceptualization of flour, such as baking a cake and handling the dough, to be physically carried out. But they do not allow for functions such as eating the cake, or providing nourishment, to be carried out physically. The former functions may be physically carried out in the make-believe game, but the latter are only indicated. The children would not proceed to actually eat the sand-cake (only very young children would do such a thing, and not as a part of a make-believe play); they would only pretend to eat it, making gestures and chewing movements and sounds. If something is to be considered to be real flour inside of the game of make-believe it must conform to the conceptual criteria of make-believe flour. There is seemingly a paradox in the conceptualization of makebelieve objects. In a make-believe game one pretends that it is as it is in real life. One pretends to bake a cake, or operate a patient, or nurse a baby, but the objects handled in the game—physical objects (transformations) or only indicated, not physically existing objects— do not conform completely to the criteria for the “ordinary world” conceptualizations used in the make-believe game. Thus the referent to the term “flour” must be construed with a criterial intention (as embracing the criteria for conceptualizing ordinary flour)—in order for the game to be about m.aking a cake. On the other hand, the referent must also be construed with an identificational intention (as embracing the physical characteristics of the object used in the game as a transformation for flour, or alternatively no physical object at all)—in order for the game to be a gam,e of make-believe. What happens when these clash, when, for example, the conceptualization of ordinary flour contains physical characteristics that the sand used in the game does not have? In the context of make-believe the carrying out of functions is conceptually severed from the constraints of certain physical characteristics needed in order to carry out those functions. Thus the functions can be carried out without concern for the physical characteristics of the referent and are

130 God in the Act of Reference considered to have been carried out when it is, in some appropriate way, so indicated (by some play signal, for example uttering “eat-eat-eat”, that means that the cake is thereby eaten). The physical means by which the functions can be carried out are, however, dependent on the physical characteristics of the referent. When it comes to physically carrying out the functions, the physical characteristics of the object handled (as it is conceptualized outside of the make-believe game, for example ordinary sand, or ordinary thin air) overrides the presumed physical characteristics of flour in its ordinary conceptualization. Thus, the dough is kneaded and the cake is eaten in the make-believe game, but the degree to which this is accomplished by means of physical manipulation of objects depends on the degree of dependence on physical characteristics in the conceptualization of what is spoken about. There is thus a potential tension in bringing in two realities at the same time in playing and in handling transformations that belong on the one hand to the reality of the play and are conceptualized within the conceptual structure of the play in question, and that on the other hand similarly belong to the reality of the ordinary world and are conceptualized within the conceptual structure of the ordinary world. Referents in make-believe play are predominantly conceptualized with weak dependence on physical characteristics. Even the participants in the play themselves, when taking on roles such as Superman or princess, are construed more weakly in physical terms than they usually are. In the play they have adopted roles that transcend their own physical beings as children. So when a child in a play refers to him- or herself with “I”, the referent is not the ordinary referent to the utterance of “I” by the child when not playing this particular play, but the role the child takes in the play. Here as well we have the potential conceptual tension of bringing two realities together in the constitution of a referent, as we earlier spoke about the psychological tension on part of the player. Let us say that an adult or another person not engaged in the makebelieve game in the sandbox says “Beware, there is cat’s mess in the sand”, indicating the bowl full of sand/flour used for making the cake. This would be an utterance outside of the game, and intended as such, with all conceptualizations made in the ordinary conceptual structure. The children would presumably understand it as such as well, and make a break in the game in order to remove the offending particle from the sand. “Sand” here refers to sand as it is ordinarily conceptualized (that is without any flour-functions). No reconstructive understanding is needed. However, if the person, with the same intentions, were to say

Reference and reality in make-believe contexts 131 “Beware, there is cat’s mess in the flour”, some bewilderment might arise, for the utterance is not relevant on any interpretation. C at’s mess (conceptualized as ordinary cat’s mess) is not present in any flour (as conceptualized in the ordinary conceptual structure), since there is no such flour present. If, on the other hand, flour (as conceptualized in the make-believe conceptual structure of the game) was intended, this would not resolve the confusion either, since cat droppings (as conceptualized in the ordinary conceptual structure) has no role to play in this particular game of make-believe. To say that it has, only displays an inability to use the language of the game.36 Let us take another example. Suppose the newcomer bends down and says: “You need some more flour here, don’t you?”, while scooping up a spade full of sand and pouring it into the bowl. The children would perhaps be delighted with the rare adult participation in their world of make-believe (or perhaps offended if they wish to have no interference in their play). The context makes it clear that the speaker recognizes the make-believe game and thus that “flour” is to be understood as conceptualized within the game, and not as ordinary flour. No misunderstandings or confusions arise here. The adult as well as the children pick out the same referent to the term “flour”, namely the referent constituted in the make-believe game. The same utterance, however, followed by a move to the kitchen in order to fetch some more flour (as conceptualized in the ordinary conceptual structure) would indicate that the referents were differently constituted and communication breaks down. Or, suppose the person says: “You need some more sand here, don’t you?” This would show that the person has not realized that the children are playing a game of make-believe and are not merely messing around with the sand. If the person does realize that there is a make-believe game going on, and intends his or her utterance to be relevant in it, the utterance shows that the person is not familiar with play-language. Perhaps the person does not know how to play, akin to someone who does not know that in other cultures there can be other conceptual structures and other ways of expressing things. A response to this might include an acceptance of the actual behaviour (pouring sand) but a rejection or a correction of the verbal utterance (“this is not sand, this is flour!” or, “you mean flour?!”). The responses show that the use of the term “sand” is not acceptable as referring to the referent of “flour” (as conceptualized in 36Cat’s mess might of course be used as a prop in such a game and prompt an utterance such as “On the top of the cake I am going to spread some chocolate”, in which case an analysis like the one for make-believe flour can be carried out with respect to the chocolate/cat’s mess.

132 God in the Act of Reference the conceptual structure of the make-believe game). Thus, whenever two significantly different conceptual structures are at play in a communication event at the same time, conceptualizations from these different conceptual structures may be found in one and the same utterance. As we have seen above, communicative misunderstandings can easily occur if it is not recognized by both speaker and listener that a referring expression is to be conceptualized from within a different conceptual structure than the rest of the utterance. This is what I have called reconstructive understanding. The referring expression being constituted within another conceptual structure may have no overt lexical signal to mark it off as different, as “flour” in the example above. Out of context, “flour” is ambiguous as for whether it is to be conceptualized as ordinary flour or as makebelieve flour. Without awareness of this, one may understand an utterance as completely conceptualized in an ordinary life conceptual structure, when as a matter of fact it is to be conceptualized within the conceptual structure of a make-believe game. The result may be false utterances, misplaced utterances, meaningless utterances, or simply confusing utterances, which may lead to misunderstandings. The capacity for conceptualizing with a weak dependence on physical characteristics is necessary in the sense that, together with a capacity for conceptualizing with a strong dependence on physical characteristics, it constitutes the means by which we relate to our surroundings in communication and thought. Without this capacity the human race would never have evolved the way it has, since we would not have been able to communicate specifically enough to ensure the transfer of knowledge over the generations, needed to build culture. The capacity for conceptualizing with only a weak or indirect dependence on physical characteristics is not necessary in a logical sense; but for us as human beings it has been, and still is, a necessary precondition for our survival and well-being. Now, according to the religious realist, religious non-realism is not religiously adequate since it does not acknowledge that God is real, or that “God” refers. My suggestion is, though, that giving up metaphysical realism need not entail giving up speaking about God as real, or denying that “God” refers. In order for religious language about God to be important and relevant to people it will have to speak of something that is considered to be real, and its expressions need to refer to something. For something conceptualized with strong dependence on physical characteristics, reality for us has mostly to do with those physical characteristics. But God is not normally conceptualized with strong dependence on physical characteristics in religious traditions.

Reference and reality in make-believe contexts 133 What is required is that what is conceptualized with very weak dependence on physical characteristics can be considered to be real, without the addition of some other kind of existence, for instance metaphysical, to warrant the reality of what is referred to. That we have a capacity to conceptualize our surroundings with weak dependence on physical characteristics I hardly need to argue for. It is quite obvious that we surround ourselves with fantasy-products and social constructions such as Mickey Mouse, abstract philosophy, fairy tales, and nightmares. For enabling a philosophical position that claims that God can be said to be real without being neither physically nor metaphysically real, though, something more is required. It is required that referents constituted mainly as conceptualized with weak dependence on physical characteristics can be considered to be real, and that the referring terms of such contexts refer. For conceptualizations that are only weakly dependent on physical characteristics one can of course always analyse what reality amounts to internal to some conceptual structure. What is more important here, though, is to show that the conceptual structures involving conceptualizations that are weakly dependent on physical characteristics can fill a real and important function in human life, and that what is referred to in those contexts can be considered real on the basis of conceptual construction only. The conceptual structure associated with the language of makebelieve play is mutually constructed by the participants in the play for each single occasion of play. In doing this, the participants have to rely on a common form of communication. In its minimal form this may mean that the play domain is established by means of signs and props only. More complex make-believe games, where the participants continuously negotiate with each other to modify and change the contents of the play, do, however, require a common language. What the participants in the play agree on to be the (make-believe) case, together with the fact that they agree on it, is what uphold the play domain. These agreements for creating and upholding a conceptual structure suitable for make-believe play can be successfully changed by negotiation, or unsuccessfully and wrongfully by violation. Should a child in the midst of a make-believe play suddenly begin to build with the lego instead of treating it as a cup of coffee, the agreement is violated. As for the lego being a cup of coffee or a piece of cake, that is a matter for negotiation. The make-believe domain of a play is typically constituted by utterances such as “Let’s pretend that ... ”, or “Let’s say that ... ”, and any subsequent utterance that introduces something into the play. The participants in the play who

134 God in the Act of Reference enter the conditions established by these kinds of utterances then have a temporary conceptual structure in common. Within a makebelieve play backed up by this kind of mutually established and shared conceptual structure “[i]t is then up to him who signs the suggested make-believe contract to fulfill the presuppositions, e.g. to generate a referent (= to fulfill the existential presuppositions). In this way the make-believe world is created and made intersubjectively shared.5’37 When involved in a make-believe play one does not stop and question the reality of something presumed to exist in the make-believe world of the play. Physical reality, or being conceptualized with strong dependence on physical characteristics, is apparently not an important criterion for considering something to be real within a make-believe play. Even things that are not conceptualized in terms of physical characteristics at all can be considered to be real. Take for instance the imagined baby in the make-believe play mentioned earlier. If the baby was put down at the spot in the sand-box serving as its cot, and the other child mistakenly sits down there, that child is likely to receive a severe scolding from the baby’s Mummy not to sit on the baby. Here it is not the baby’s physical characteristics that affect the person’s action. The baby is considered to be real, and functions such as carrying the baby, or sitting on the baby, are carried out on grounds only of the conceptually constructed relations taken to hold in the shared conceptual structure of the make-believe play in which the baby is conceptualized. Having finished to play though, most children acknowledge that what they played was not for real. That is, what is spoken about in play is not normally considered to be real outside of the playing activity. The play itself and its sensations are considered to be real, but the entities imagined within it are not. Sometimes, however, makebelieve elements from play are considered to be real also in relation to ordinary life situations. An example of this would be when a child has a pretend friend, for whom the parents must lay the table at meals. The reason is that the pretend friend directly fills a function for the child in relation to ordinary life situations, and not only indirectly as part of a make-believe play, which as a whole may fill a function for the child. Relating him- or herself to a make-believe friend may be highly adequate for coping with life in stressful periods, which is what makes the make-believe friend real for the child. Make-believe activities such as play, and other cultural activities having to do with making use of our capacity for conceptualizing 37Stromqvist 1984, p 38.

Reference and reality in make-believe contexts 135 our surroundings with a weak dependence on physical characteristics, do fill a real and important function in human life. There is no sharp dividing line between our conceptualizations of make-believe objects and ordinary objects, such that the first are made up in our make-believe activities and are non-existent, and the second exist independently of our activities. It is therefore not fruitful to say that some expressions refer and some do not refer on the basis of the objects purportedly referred to belonging on one or the other side of the supposed sharp dividing line between real and make-believe. A theory of reference that wants to do justice to our actual speaking practices will recognize that what we speak about is always humanly conceptualized and is so with various degrees of physical dependency. Thus a theory of reference that restricts what a referent can be to what physically exists will definitely leave out much that is actually spoken about, but which is conceptualized without strong dependence on physical characteristics. Such a theory of reference does not recognize that what is referred to is often partly or wholly a matter of human construction. The referent is constituted not only by its physical characteristics, but also by the speaker’s directive intention and the physical and linguistic contextual semantic cues. Failing to take this into consideration makes a theory of reference very limited in its application, and “reference” becomes a theory-specific technical term, useful for some philosophical purposes, but not for much else. A theory of reference that has a wider application would be more fruitful in that it can be used to analyse actual speech situations. It will also have the advantage of better representing our intuitions, as competent speakers of a language, that there is no sharp difference between what we do in play when we refer to flour or babies (sand, or “thin air”) in the process of making a cake or changing nappies, and what we do in our homes when we refer to flour and babies with the same purposes. In both cases we refer to something in order to accomplish something, and in both places the reference can be successful; provided that the participants are competent speakers in the context. A pragmatic theory of reference does take these things into account, and is also able to account for when reference does not take place, because of misunderstanding, incompetence in the linguistic activity going on, or mistaken perception. Physical existence on the part of the referent may play a part in the decision about whether reference has taken place or not, but neither as a necessary nor an exhaustive criterion. Conceptualizations that are only weakly dependent on physical characteristics have been and still are necessary and even prominent

136 God in the Act of Reference in the evolution of the beings and persons we are today. Consequently, since such conceptualizations fill a real function in that they help us to adapt to our surroundings well enough to survive and thrive, a religious use of language is not in special need of defense or explanation for why it may be considered important and as referring to something real. The religious concept of “God” cannot be dismissed as unimportant, irrelevant, or religiously dysfunctional solely on the grounds that the referent to “God” is conceptualized with only a weak dependence on physical characteristics on a par with other transitional objects and make-believe elements, and with a strong dependence on conceptual construction. In other words, holding the referent to “God” to be real on no other grounds than can be found in the conceptual construction of “God”, does not in itself disqualify a religious practice from being meaningful and referential. Using “God” in acts of reference can be meaningful and highly significant for the participants of the religious practice in their relating to their surroundings, especially in terms of their existential experiences of life, such as matters of life and death, meaning, suffering, and longings for security and love in an unsafe world.

5 An analysis of reference and reality in religion So far I have in general terms, and as applied to make-believe play, shown that some commonly held views about reference and reality are problematic. Another area conceptualized predominantly with weak dependence on physical characteristics, religion, with its linguistic practices, will now be subjected to the same kind of analysis of reference and reality. Our capacity for make-believe activities and our capacity for making and using conceptualizations that are weakly dependent on physical characteristics is the point of contact between make-believe play and religious activities. No other systematic comparison between make-believe play and religion is intended, although I do mention some phenomenological similarities in order to illustrate some points I make. The reader is also reminded that this work is not intended to constitute an argument against religious realism, but the intention is simply to investigate how religion fares without it. How can the reference of “God” in religious activities best be understood without appealing to a metaphysically existing God believed to exist quite independently of our conceptualizations?

The nature of religious language Religious language has by some scholars been considered an autonomous linguistic practice, not succumbing to the rules and theories that ordinary language use is judged by. Two approaches are available to justify why religious language should be treated differently from other language uses: the object-oriented, and the languagesituation-oriented . The object-oriented approach starts with the object of faith, the 137

138 God in the Act of Reference object of the religious language: God. It says that God is so utterly and completely different from all that we know and that our language is constructed to talk about, that we cannot expect religious language to be like ordinary language.1 This way of treating religious language presupposes that what we talk about as God or the divine reality is something beyond the reach of our ordinary words. We are only human and our languages about mundane things. The reality that is divine therefore needs a special language if we are to speak about it at all. The language-situation-oriented approach likewise assumes that religious language, even though it appears to consist of ordinary words and propositions, should be treated and understood differently than ordinary language; but motivates it differently. We cannot, it is claimed, talk about meaning and language in isolation and abstraction. Words and utterances are always placed in a context, and their meaning must be determined by their uses in different language situations. According to this view, as developed primarily by D. Z. Phillips within a Wittgensteinian context, religion is a form of life, employing language games with their own internal rules for the meanings of the words and concepts used within it and being constituted by it. A religious use of language cannot be understood and evaluated from how language is used in other language games in science or everyday speech. Kai Nielsen introduced the term “Wittgensteinian fideism” as a characterization of this approach.2 The Wittgenstein-influenced tradition in philosophy of religion does not, however, accept this characterization or the charge of conceptual relativism implicit in it. Several philosophers of religion have opposed the view that religious language is autonomous and therefore more or less immune to external criticism.3 Instead, religious language is seen to be an integral part of ordinary language, as is all language use. An historical example of how religious language is evaluated according to the standards of a non­ religious language use is the way the logical positivists held that the only propositions that are meaningful are those that are empirically verifiable. Propositions about God and other metaphysical entities are not possible to verify empirically; consequently, they held that religious language was mainly meaningless.4 In the wake of positivism attempts were made by philosophers of religion to argue that religious language need not be meaningless in a broader sense, even though it may be 1See Graves and Alon 1994; and Alston 1989, chapters 1—4. 2Nielsen 1967. 3See Penner 1995; and Nielsen 1967 and 1995. 4See also Martin 1990, for a contemporary denial of the factual meaningfulness of religious language.

An analysis of reference and reality in religion 139 meaningless in the respect that it is not empirically verifiable. Religious language was said to express emotions only, or to express a resolution to live according to a certain ethics.5 There are, however, also those who are more optimistic with regard to the meaningfulness and cognitive status of religious language.6 These philosophers claim that we do have common conceptual structures and shared categories that make it possible to evaluate the meaningfulness of some individual part of the whole structure. Religious language should and can be analysed with the same tools as all other language use. For opponents of conceptual relativism and fideism to overly stress that there cannot exist different conceptual structures, is misguided. The crucial point in the argument, and the point which should be stressed, is rather that there must not be watertight barriers between various conceptual structures, language games, frameworks, paradigms, or world views. If there were such watertight barriers between the language use of religion and that of everyday life, religion would be immune against external criticism, attempts to communicate between religious and non-religious contexts would be meaningless, and a theology aimed at integrating all aspects of life would be doomed. One can remain adamantly opposed to watertight barriers, and yet abstain from drawing the conclusion that there is only one conceptual structure within which everything must fit; this conclusion does not follow ad sequiem.7 A way to avoid a dualistic choice between relativism and unificationalism is to allow that we all, as being part of the human race, share the same basic prerequisites for conceptualization, and that, therefore, differences in conceptual structures are always subject to mutual reconstructive understanding. Thus there can be no watertight barriers between, say, religious uses of language and scientific or everyday uses of language, even though functional and contextual considerations are required for arriving at a reconstructive understanding of them. As for example D. Z. Phillips has pointed out in his response to the charge of fideism, there is a considerable overlap between different language uses; religious language speaks not only of gods and supernatural entities, but also of ordinary things, such as tables and human bodies.8 Religious matters are also spoken about in contexts that are not self-evidently religious. Besides the various religious 5See Braithwaite 1971. 6See Soskice 1987; and Mitchell 1971 and 1973. 7Cf. Penner 1995, who seems to take for granted that it does. 8Phillips 1971, pp 120-142.

140 God in the Act of Reference situations in which references to God are made, there are other, non­ religious situations where God is referred to: in schools, in debates, in anti-religious arguments, in blasphemous speech, and small-talk among friends. In some of these latter situations the intended reference would be to God, roughly as conceptualized in a religious context, whereas in other situations the intended reference would differ to various extents depending on how God is conceptualized. This emphasizes the need to specify the context in which the act of reference is made, so that the referent to “God” may be correctly construed. Not only do we have a general philosophical argument against extreme conceptual relativism, we also have a common sense argument, intimating that we do not in fact totally insulate different subject matters conceptually; mutual understanding, as well as cross-cultural linguistic translations, have in practice always proved possible. In real language situations, I suggest, we can give a unified account for the descriptive semantic content of the utterances, and then let pragmatic processes of enrichment account for the specific allocations of the utterances and their constituents. This acknowledges that we for the most part do understand what we talk about even across language and subject matter borders. It also takes into account that in order to fix the reference of a statement, and to evaluate its truth value, we need to know how and in what context it is used. A conceptual relativism of one kind, admittedly, but a kind that is reconstructively understandable across different subject matters. There is not one privileged viewpoint from which you can compare language and reality and place judgement on different uses of language. Yet, the possibility of taking a standpoint is open, and it is fully possible to argue for the standpoint you choose to take. The relativism enters in that when all other arguments have come to an end, we cannot appeal to pure uninterpreted and unconceptualized reality to decide the issue between us. We can have our reasons, we can be more or less rational in that, and we can argue the validity of our standpoints. But that is all. Religious language, although not a single unified phenomenon, is embedded in the totality of our language uses and conceptual structures, and can be related to all other areas of language use in the human realm.

“God”, a name or what? One essential characteristic of a religious use of language is that it incorporates references to entities conceptualized with weak dependence on physical characteristics, as is typically exemplified by

An analysis of reference and reality in religion 141 “God”. How, then, has the status of the word “God” been understood by contemporary philosophers of religion in relation to their preferred theory of reference; is “God” a proper name, a common noun, or something else? Those wanting to claim a successful reference to God without being able to or wanting to provide a uniquely identifying description has in the direct reference tradition found a promising path. A so called rigid designator is there seen to be able to refer directly to its referent without the reference being mediated by the semantic meaning of the referring expression. If “God” is taken to be a proper name it can be used as a rigid designator to refer with a direct reference. Versions of a direct theory of reference have been found especially useful for critical realists, such as William Alston, Janet Martin Soskice, and John Hick, in conceding that all descriptions held to be true about the referent to “God” may be a product of human culture and psychology, while at the same time maintaining that the word “God” must have a referent that is independent of human minds.9 As long as some causal link can be found that links this ultimate God-referent to the current use of the word “God” it can be claimed that the word refers successfully—a requirement for religious practice to be defensible. Also natural kinds, such as gold and tigers, have been included among those things that can be referred to directly. One could view “God” as the label of a natural kind, with the same result as viewing “God” as a proper name. But, as this will have the disadvantage of treating God in a depersonalized way, something most believers in a theistic tradition would find less appropriate than viewing God as a person, I would not recommend it.10 A direct reference view of “God” as a proper name as a means to explain the reference to God to the satisfaction of the religious realist, of course falls prey to all the general objections towards a direct reference view. One such objection is that if the contribution of a proper name to a proposition is its bearer only, then all statements including names with no bearer would be meaningless; but they are not. There are many statements with names without bearers that are perfectly meaningful, for example those statements containing fictional names.11 Apart from these general pitfalls of a direct reference theory, there are additional difficulties with uncritically adopting a direct reference theory for the reference of “God”. In direct reference theory, for 9See Alston 1989; Hick 1993a; and Soskice 1985. 10Cf. Forrest 1991, who suggests a way in which we can talk about God with natural class terms. 11 See Stroll 1998b, chapter 5, pp 151-188.

142 God in the Act of Reference the referent to be a direct part of the proposition entertained by the speaker, the referent must at some time exist, and exist according to our everyday sense of the word, namely physically.12 It is then not clear how God, who is not assumed to exist physically, can be a direct constituent of a proposition. On a direct reference theory the success or lack of success of the reference does furthermore not depend on any semantic content associated with the referring expression. The religious realist adopting a direct reference theory, however, seems unable to let go totally of descriptive content as a restrictive means to determine the success or lack of success of the reference of “God”. Richard Miller for example points out that on a causal-historical theory of reference (a direct reference theory) there is the possibility that Freud’s criticism of religion will have metaphysical significance. This will be the case if the reference of “God”, by a causal-historical referential chain, will turn out to end up in a psychological inner state of a person. Miller concludes that “if all the referential chains of ‘God’ ’s uses terminated in the egregious misidentification of some internal state of the speaker then no referent has been identified” .13 By what criteria, however, does one judge that the inner psychological state is not what is referred to, if not by some descriptive criteria that must be fulfilled for something to be considered to be God? So in spite of Miller’s pledging allegiance to a direct reference theory, the descriptive content associated with “God” creeps in through the back door to determine the success of the reference. Critical remarks of the same kind have been directed at Alston’s Miller-like comments in his article “Referring to God” and might also be formulated with respect to Soskice’s more sophisticated attempts to secure the correct reference to God by means of employing a causal-social theory of reference.14 My purpose here, though, is not to argue against any specific realist application of theories of reference, but only to indicate that they are not all that unproblematic, whether descriptive or causal. Which brings us to those philosophers of religion who want to claim that there are some defining characteristics that God must have, if God is to be God. They oppose the consequences of the former theory, that we can be mistaken about all we say about God, but still succeed in referring to God. To avoid that consequence, there has to be some semantic content to the term “God”. This can be accomplished either 12This is an explicit criterion, expressed for example in Recanati 1993, p 15, where he says that if there is no existing referent there can be no complete thought. 13Miller 1986, p 9. 14See Alston 1989, p 110; Harris 1991; Houston 2000; and Soskice 1985.

An analysis of reference and reality in religion 143 by treating “God” as a disguised definite description;15 or by retaining “God” as a name, but claiming that although in general we refer rigidly when using names, sometimes and with some names we do not, and “God” is such a name.16 Within a non-realist perspective “God” is sometimes viewed as a name, although constrained to occur solely in a fiction, or in a myth.17 Sometimes “God” is seen more as a symbol.18 Another alternative is to view “God” as having a semantic content that defines God in non­ religious terms, such as for example the sum of our values.19 The status of the term “God”, however, is in religious non-realism not linked to the choice of a referential theory as in religious realism. The wide acceptance by religious non-realism of the realist assumption that reference implies mind-independent existence has entailed that within religious non-realism the discussion about what kind of referential theory can best account for the use of “God” is virtually non-existent. What then is the logical status of the word “God”? As one looks at the religious contexts in which the word “God” is used, it seems to function both as a proper name and as a descriptive term. Vincent Brummer illustrates this dilemma by pointing to the fact that on the one hand Jahweh is addressed as “God”, and on the other hand the word “God” is used to give information about Jahweh, as in “Jahweh is God” .20 Brummer refers to Nelson Pike who says that this is a pseudo­ dilemma and that the word “God” serves as a certain kind of descriptive term, namely a title term, designating the function of somebody having this title.21 In, for example, an utterance like “The president changes every four years” the reference is not to one specific individual that changes every four years. Rather it is the function of being president that is being referred to here; the function remains the same, but the individual may vary.22 There is even the possibility of there not being any individual at all occupying the role as president at that moment. Focusing on what I take to be the likely consequences of this view on the status of “God” for the issue of realism and non-realism I shall quote Brummer: 15See Durr ant 1992. 16See Gellman 1993. 17Braithwaite 1971; and Cupitt 1991. 18Kaufman 1993, p 307; cf. Tillich 1955. 19Cupitt 1984, p 269. 20Brummer 1981, pp 284-286. 21 Pike 1970, p 29ff. 22The term “functional reference” was introduced by Barwise and Perry to account for these kinds of examples. See Barwise and Perry 1983, p 158f.

144 God in the Act of Reference [I]f the statement “God exists” is construed as a statement about a function, it is necessarily true in the sense that it cannot be denied without contradiction, but this has no implications for the question of whether there is someone fulfilling this function.23 Accordingly, I suggest that a functional view on the status of the word “God” as a title would work just as well for the realist as for the non-realist, since it does not imply or presuppose any favoured form of existence for the referent, nor does it preclude it. I shall therefore adopt this kind of view of “God”, and see “God” as a functional term, or a title. In this way “God” still has to face up to the referential question, as if it were a name. Viewing “God” as a title also opens the possibility of attaching to “God” a descriptive content that would eliminate an arbitrary referent to the expression. If “God” is a title, then, I suggest, the referent to “God” can tentatively be described as a role.

The realist and non-realist stands on reference Concerning reference to God it is claimed both that the term “God” does refer and that it does not, depending on the claimant. Both parties then presuppose that a term refers only if it points out an independently existing object, either by means of descriptive correspondence, or by a causal connection, or a combination. By holding on to this presupposition it is thought that the reference to God is treated on the same basis as the reference to other entities, such as persons and physical objects. This, it is understood, is a requirement for philosophy of religion to be scientifically respectable. As in many other cases, this only goes to show that by the time a scientific or philosophic theory or method is incorporated by religion, the theory or method is already outdated, or that one measures religious phenomena or theories by harsher standards than ordinary phenomena or theories. As I have shown, reference to non-religious entities, which the discussions of the reference of God is modelled on, is not straightforward and simple, but extremely complex. It is especially problematic if formulated in terms of a strict dualism between referring and non-referring expressions. If that is the case regarding reference to so-called ordinary objects, no wonder there is seen to be problems with the reference to God if one expects it to turn out clear and unproblematic. Generally speaking, the realist stand on reference is that God is 23Briimmer 1981, p 285f.

An analysis of reference and reality in religion 145 an independent entity to which one can refer by means of linguistic expressions; if God were not that, then religious language would refer to nothing and religious faith is implausible. Non-realists such as Cupitt, Kaufman, and Braithwaite, to take three different examples, are often interpreted as meaning that there is no such independently existing entity that the word “God” refers to. Either “God” does not refer at all to anything real, or “God” refers to some empirical function or disposition, or the psychological state of a person. D. Z. Phillips refuses to be associated with either side, insofar as he does not share the view of God as a (potential) object that can be referred to. According to him both the realist and the non-realist share a representational view of religious language, which he means is a confused view, since it takes God to be an object. His aim has been to disrupt the dichotomy between realism and non-realism by showing the internal relations between the meaning of religious language and the religious forms of life. In this project he has claimed that “God” does not refer to anything, because reference has to do with objects, and “God” is not the name of an object.24 This is still the attitude of many Wittgensteinian philosophers of religion, namely that the notion of reference does not apply to God for grammatical reasons, and that therefore there is no need for a theory of reference that can account for the reference to God without appealing to God as an independently existing object. This group of philosophers probably see my work as misguided, since I should have done better just describing the grammar for the religious use of “God”. However, Phillips now accepts that one may talk about reference to God, as long as one realizes that by doing that, one has yet not reached any conceptual or grammatical clarification. [B]y all means say that “God” functions as a referring expression, that “God” refers to a sort of object, that God’s reality is a matter of fact, and so on. But please remember that, as yet, no conceptual or grammatical clarification has taken place. We have all the work still to do since we shall now have to show, in this religious context, what speaking of “reference”, “object”, “existence”, and so on amounts to, how it differs, in obvious ways, from other uses of these terms.25 I agree. I want to take up Phillips’s challenge to give a conceptual clarification of what it means to say that “God” functions as a referring expression. How we can claim that “God” refers to something we 24Phillips 1993b, p 62. 25Phillips 1995b, p 138 (emphasis in the original).

146 God in the Act of Reference consider real without presuming an object-status on part of God, analogous to that of physical objects, also needs clarification. I am not satisfied with simply stating that religious language contains its own meaning and showing how that is expressed. I believe there is a benefit in being able to speak more generally and theoretically for some purposes, for example the purpose of intelligible philosophical communication. Religious non-realism, including the position of Phillips, does not in general seem too worried about its lack of attention to the issue of reference, and either sees the meaning of religious language elsewhere, or claims that it is enough to describe the use of the word “God” in religious discourse. Any generalized theorizing over and above that is seen to be unwanted and indeed potentially harmful, since it might direct the attention away from the actual language use, and reintroduce metaphysical issues through the back door. Thus the realist’s referential objection towards the non-realist project within philosophy of religion is not taken by the non-realist to be an adequate objection. Apparently, the realist frames an objection in terms of reference, and the non-realist cannot answer it in terms of reference, since that would mean accepting metaphysical realism. The non-realist, on the other hand, presents his or her project in terms of meaning and use, and the realist deems it inadequate since it does not answer the questions of truth and reference. What we seem to have here is a communication breakdown. I propose that the concerns about issues of reference and reality can be taken seriously within the framework of a theory of reference that does not have metaphysical realism as one of its corner-stones. All parties can use such a theory to talk about the reference of “God” without thereby committing themselves to any particular view on God’s metaphysical, unconceptualized, and mind-independent existence. The debate may then go on to deal, in a more constructive manner, with other important issues raised by non-realism in its reaction against traditional religious realism, as well as with the realist responses. W ith regard to both the religious realist and the religious non-realist I want to question their underlying view of reference; and contra the Wittgensteinian philosopher of religion I argue for the relevance of having a view of reference at all. With address to the religious realist I want to show that there is a possible way of accounting for reference to God that does not presuppose metaphysical realism. With address to the religious non-realist I want to propose a religiously more adequate way of dealing with the issue of reference than making it fictional or reductive. W ith address to the Wittgensteinian, finally, I want to show that there is a way of looking at reference that can do justice to the

An analysis of reference and reality in religion 147 grammar of the use of “God”. A pragmatic theory of reference can be a useful tool for theorizing in general, provided that one specifies the purpose and context of what one theorizes about.

A conceptual analysis of God in the act of reference Since the debate on religious realism and non-realism revolves around the notions of reference and reality—if “God” does not refer, then God is not real enough to merit religious devotion—let us review the general connection I see pertaining between the notions of reference and reality. Suppose x is an object we want to proclaim real or not. In order to be able to say anything at all about whether x is real or not, we must first be clear over what x is, what x it is we are talking about. The immediate and, indeed, inescapable answer to that—without going into any metaphysical speculations—is that x is what is spoken about or mentioned by means of a certain linguistic expression, “a”, in a certain situation, and with a certain purpose. In a theory-dependent way of putting things, introduced for sake of convenience, we can then understand x as the referent to the referring expression “a” in a certain act of reference. The issue can now be re-framed in terms of us proclaiming the referent to “a” to be real or not. In order to do this we need to know what the referent to “a” is, how the referent to “a” is constituted. What constitutes the referent to “a” depends on: 1) the speaker’s directive intentions, which can be identificational and criterial to various extents, as these are made manifest in the context of utterance, by means of drawing on, for instance, common knowledge, gestures, and salient factors in the physical and verbal context (including the physical characteristics of the referent); and 2) what “a” conventionally means in the conceptual structure(s) of the language use(s) in which the referent to “a” is conceptualized; that is, with the degree of dependence on physical characteristics according to which “a” is conventionally conceptualized, together with the conceptual relations and functions conventionally supposed to obtain for the concept associated with “a”. Letting the speaker’s directive intentions decide on the relative importance o f the factors, what we would now be in a position to say about the referent to “ a” is that the referent to “ a” is conceptualized with

148 God in the Act of Reference such-and-such a dependence on physical characteristics, and as having such-and-such conceptual relations and functions. Not until we have in this manner elucidated how the referent to “a” is constituted, are we in a position to say something about the reality of the referent to “a” in relation to ourselves. If the referent to “a”, as it is constituted and conceptualized in the act of reference in question, makes a difference to our alternatives for action, then x is considered to be real, and if not, it is not. In order to answer the question of what makes us consider God to be real, we must first of all know what God is referred to. The referent to “God” is constituted anew in each and every act of reference, and presumably in more or less slightly different ways. Thus the question cannot be given a general answer. The more personal and specific the context is, the more detailed an analysis of what constitutes the reality of God for someone in that situation can be provided. Such an analysis would, however, perhaps not be interesting to the average philosopher, as much as to a psychologist or a linguist, since its claims relate only to the individual situation. Therefore, in order to make more generalized analyses, I use plausible and typical examples of language use. The analysis is still context dependent, though, in the respect that one has to postulate a context that is supposed to be typical for the referring use of “God”. Much of what is written about reference to God is about statements about God, taken out of their religious contexts. Religious practice, rituals, or the religious people themselves and their participation in linguistic acts of reference in the context of their engagement in religious activities are not usually topics that are treated by philosophers of religion. Reference, however, is not only a matter of how a word may or may not connect to a referent; but also how people go about making references by various means, and what it accomplishes in and among those people. That is how we can find out how the referent to “God” is constituted and conceptualized in various situations, and why God is conceptualized the way God is conceptualized in various conceptual structures. Without that knowledge we cannot say whether “God” refers or not, or what “God” refers to. Of course, I do not deny that there is a lot of work done on religious rituals and religious psychology and sociology, even with regard to reference and language use.26 These results, however, have not been widely incorporated in the philosophical enterprise of trying to provide an analysis of religious 26See e.g. Foley 1995; Meigs 1995; Morrison 1992; Scheffler 1981 and 1997; and Stern 1987.

An analysis of reference and reality in religion 149 language and the reference to God. It is a matter of some importance to find a philosophically acceptable way of dealing with empirical material, so that it can make its necessary contribution to conceptual analysis. Now, suppose someone believes God to be real, and says, sincerely and in a devotional context, that “God is my everything, my rock and my salvation”. The person’s identificational directive intentions in uttering “God is my everything, my rock and my salvation” I would say is best understood as indicating bits and pieces of personal religious experience. What the person has in mind and wants to direct the listener’s attention to, is a God who is portrayed in a way that the person’s religious experiences have led the person to imagine God; which in its turn is shaped and limited by how the conventional meaning of “God” portrays God. The conventional meaning may here be understood as the contextually determined experiences of a religious community throughout time of what they believed was God, as linguistically codified in a generally accepted and somewhat stable language use.27 Thus even the conventional meaning of God is context dependent. Unless we speak (and we do not) of a totally isolated sectarian, privately practising his or her own secret religion, what the speaker has in mind is mainly a result of the conventional meaning of “God”. The speaker’s identificational directive intentions therefore coincide with his or her criterial directive intentions, with only the possible addition of a personal experience. This personal experience is to a large extent circumscribed and limited by the conventional meaning of “God”; if it were not, it would not count as a religious experience within the religious context in question. The cultural and social influence on our formation of religious concepts, which is well recognized today, is presupposed in my claim about the conventional meaning of “God” being context dependent, both as limited to a certain cultural, social, and linguistic context and as being historically shaped by such factors. What I want to emphasize is that it works the other way as well. Once we assume this contextualized conventional meaning of “God”, it in its turn plays the same role for the individual as other contextual and cultural factors. The conventional meaning of “God” in a certain context partially determines—not only the criterial directive intentions, which is self-evident—but also the identificational directive intentions of the speaker. The referent to “God” is thus constituted mainly (either directly or indirectly) by the person’s criterial directive intention to refer 27See Soskice 1985, pp 137-141, 154, 159.

150 God in the Act of Reference to something that conforms to the conventional meaning of “God”. The conventional meaning of “God” is how God is conceptualized in the conceptual structure of the religious context of the person in question (assumed here for the sake of the example to be a traditional Christian context). In this conceptual structure God is conceptualized as a spiritual being providing salvation to human beings, as being on the receiving end of praise and devotion, and as providing an interpretative meaningful grid for life as a whole, only to mention a few functions God is assumed to have in relation to believers and their surroundings. These functions do not, per definition, depend on any physical characteristics on part of the referent in order to be carried out. In a traditional Christian context God is not believed to be a physical being. Sometimes, however, physical characteristics are conceived to be necessary in order to reveal the divine, as for instance in a Roman Catholic view on the Sacraments. But this is not the same as saying that they are part of the conceptualization of God. The referent to “God”, being conceptualized with a weak dependence on physical characteristics, does nevertheless, by virtue of its functions, make a difference to the alternatives for action for the believer. It would seem that God does provide meaning and salvation to the religious person; he or she spends time in prayer and devotion to God, time that could have been put to other use. The person may abstain from doing some things and go to great lengths in order to do other things that are repulsive respectively recommendable in the eyes of God. And since God, as God is referred to and constituted as a referent in this specific act of reference, thus does make a significant difference for the person’s alternatives for action in his or her life, we can understand why and in what sense God is considered to be real in this kind of general context of devotion in a traditional faith community. Nothing more is necessarily required for that. If it can be claimed that we do not require anything more in the case of bicycles, emotions, and make-believe entities in order to evaluate their reality for us, then it presumably should not be necessary in the case of God either.

Being real in relation to the ordinary world I have suggested that what makes us count something as real to us or not, is whether it makes a difference to our alternatives for action. I have also suggested that what can make a difference to our alternatives for action is not restricted to physical objects. These are general criteria. Sometimes, however, we speak about things as real internal

Ail analysis of reference and reality in religion 151 to some specific conceptual structure, and not as real in the sense of making a difference to our alternatives for action, although this is not always explicitly acknowledged. The criteria for considering something to be real or not, do not then apply to things conceptualized outside of that particular conceptual structure. Often we by “real” implicitly mean “physically real”, that is to say, real internal to the conceptual structure of things conceptualized with a strong dependence on physical characteristics. According to this, however, all one can say about God is that God is not real internal to the conceptual structure of things conceptualized with strong dependence on physical characteristics; but then again, God is not supposed to be. Not only things conceptualized with strong dependence on physical characteristics are, as a matter of fact, considered to be real. I have attempted to show that areas that are conceptualized with weak dependence on physical characteristics are indispensable for human life and development, for our possibilities to relate to and communicate with each other as we do, and for us to have developed the human cultures and languages that we have over time. Religion, as yet another area conceptualized predominantly with a weak dependence on physical characteristics, can be shown to be functional in human life, as are the other areas conceptualized with a weak dependence on physical characteristics, such as make-believe play and related cultural activities. One may, however, remark that there is a significant difference between religion and all these other areas. And that is that in a religious practice God is supposed to be real in a way that makes direct relating to God possible, which is not the case with entities in the other areas. What, then, makes us consider God real in comparison with other entities conceptualized with weak dependence on physical characteristics in the areas of make-believe play and literary fiction? Both God, make-believe objects, and fictional characters are conceptualized with weak dependence on physical characteristics, and this I take to be an uncontroversial claim. Also a religious realist would agree that God in most religious traditions is not conceptualized with a strong dependence on physical characteristics, but rather the contrary. Neither is a fictional character supposed to have a physical body outside of the fictional work of which he or she is a part, or a make-believe object in a play to be real according to ordinary life standards. So in this respect God and the other objects that are conceptualized with a weak dependence on physical characteristics are similar. In a religious context God is considered to be real; in a fictional context a fictional character is considered to be real; in the context of a make-believe play the transformations and imaginary objects are

152 God in the Act of Reference considered to be real; and in an ordinary context of taking a walk, the man I encounter on the pavement is considered to be real. However, claims the realist, there is intuitively a difference between the way God is considered to be real within a religious context and the way for example Anna Karenina is considered to be real within a specific work of fiction, or the way a make-believe baby is considered to be real in children’s play. God is felt to be more like the man I meet on my walk, than the fictional character I read about in a book. This intuitively felt difference is, according to the religious realist, what disqualifies anything that is not realism from being an adequate religious option. Within religion God is considered to be real. Full stop. No qualifiers are needed as in the case of the other make-believe entities, where something was considered to be real only internal to a specific conceptual structure, and not outside of it. God is seemingly considered to be real in relation to the ordinary world and not only internal to a make-believe world of religion. Let us examine what is involved in this claim.

Ordinary things Why are so called ordinary objects considered to be real, and in what respects is this similar or dissimilar to why God is considered to be real? To talk about the ordinary world is of course a simplification, since the ordinary world and what is in it is conceptualized with a variety of degrees of dependence on physical characteristics. In this context I mean simply those contexts that are not predominantly conceptualized with a very weak dependence on physical characteristics, so to exclude all clear make-believe contexts. Things conceptualized with strong dependence on physical characteristics are not basic in the sense that they are more real in a metaphysical sense than other objects. However, physical objects (that are not too large and not too small) are very obvious to us as physical beings. Our survival depends on our ability to skilfully relate our physical bodies to a physical surrounding world. So conceptualizations that are strongly dependent on physical characteristics are generally important ones to relate to in life. Since we tend to structure our surroundings around ourselves and our cognitive and perceptive capacities, being physical beings of a certain size and with certain capacities, it is only natural that physical objects have been conceptually basic. As an example of the connection between reference and reality with regard to this area of everyday conceptual structure, suppose that I say “Look at that man!” as I encounter a strange man while

An analysis of reference and reality in religion 153 taking a walk. My directive intentions are mainly identificational; I intend to refer to what I see, the object I have in mind. My identificational intentions would override the conventional semantic descriptive meaning of “man”, as a human male, in case it turned out not to be a man, but a woman in disguise. They would not override the conceptual relations of “man” that deal with being a human with certain general characteristics though. These latter physical characteristics are part of my criterial directive intentions. The referent to “that man” is then by me constituted with a strong dependence on physical characteristics, both in the respect that my identificational directive intentions are based on the physical characteristics I perceive, and in the respect that the conventional semantic descriptive meaning of “man” includes physical characteristics. W hat makes me consider the man to be real is that he, namely the referent that is picked out by means of my act of reference, makes a difference for my alternatives for action in the context of utterance. The man need not actually affect my actions as I might pass right by him; but there must be some alternative action in which the referent being as I referred to it makes a difference. In this case it is simple: there is one route on the pavement I cannot take without bumping into the man. So his possible effect on me (or any other relevant object in the context) is what makes me consider the man to be real. I have taken pains to show that most objects that we speak about and refer to are conceptualized with neither an extremely strong, nor an extremely weak dependence on physical characteristics, but lie somewhere in between. There are not only two alternatives: raw physical reality and humanly constructed reality. No, there is a whole range in between. (Recall the discussion of the reality of a professor in chapter two.) Some of the functions a professor has that make a real difference to our alternatives for actions are not real only because of some physical characteristics of the professor, but also because of social construction. There is nothing else, over and above these considerations, that constitutes the reality of the professor for us. The similarity between the man on the pavement and the professor at the university on the one hand, and God on the other, is that all make a potential difference to my alternatives for action; provided that I meet the man on the pavement, relate to the professor at the university, and participate actively in a religious practice, respectively. The difference between them, on the other hand, is a matter of why they can make a difference. The referents to “that man” and “the professor” both make a difference largely because of them being conceptualized with a more or less strong dependence on physical characteristics; whereas in the

154 God in the Act of Reference case of God, this is not so. God makes a difference to a person solely because of the conceptual relations and functions in terms of which the referent to “God” is conceptualized, and not depending on physical characteristics.

M ake-believe objects Turning to transformations in children’s play, the principles for why something is considered real or not are the same. If what is referred to as “flour” in make-believe play is to be considered to be real makebelieve flour within the play it will have to fulfil the criteria for makebelieve flour, as these are encoded in its conceptualization. Since we here speak of a transformation, the criteria will also here be of two kinds. The physical characteristics require that the object referred to has similar tactile physical characteristics as ordinary world flour. The criteria having to do with conceptual relations stipulate that real makebelieve flour must be thought of in the play to function as ordinary world flour does in being eatable, and being used in making cakes. If someone in the play changes those conceptual functions for what is used as a transformation, the play will move on to something else, and the sand will no longer be make-believe flour. The similarities between transformations in a make-believe play and God is that both make a difference to a person’s alternatives for action, and both do it on the grounds of conceptual relations and functions. However, there are differences as well, in the areas of context and grounds. The transformation is considered real and makes a difference only to the person as a role-taker in the make-believe play, whereas God is considered real to the person as a human being participating in ordinary life. Also, the transformation is conceptualized as being related to other make-believe objects within the game, but not to things outside of the game (not in the capacity of being a transformation); whereas God is conceptualized as being related to ordinary things in the world. Thus the grounds for them to be considered real are in both cases conceptual, but the conceptual relations have different extensions in the two cases. The similarity between transformations in a make-believe play and bread and wine/ the body and blood of Christ in the celebration of the Eucharist has been alluded to in works on play.28 Both transcend the limits of matter and time. Both use bits and pieces from the outer reality, which are then thought to be something else in the 2801ofsson 1992, p 7.

An analysis of reference and reality in religion 155 context of the play and the communion respectively. This is about as far as the allusion goes in the literature. I shall attempt a further analysis and comparison between make-believe flour/sand and the body of Christ/unleavened bread, and analyse in referential terms the minister’s utterance to the communicant: “The body of Christ, given for you”, which is what is said in the Lutheran Church in Sweden. From the context it is clear that the speaker at least partly intends the referent to be constituted by means of its physical characteristics, since by bodily emphasis the piece of unleavened bread is the salient object in the context. From the context of shared beliefs and surrounding linguistic utterances it is also clear that the speaker intends the referent to be constituted by means of certain specified conceptual relations and functions. Thus the criterial intention of the speaker draws attention to the semantic descriptive meaning of “the body of Christ”, and more specifically to its conceptual relations in functional terms (salvific and sacrificial), rather than in terms of physical characteristics (bearded and male). The identificational intention of the speaker draws attention to the physical characteristics of the unleavened bread in the hands of the minister. The constitution of the referent in this way, namely as dependent both on physical characteristics and on conceptual functions, is made possible by the incorporation in a context, which, like a make-believe play, has been established as a context characterized by a weak dependence on physical characteristics. Children establish the makebelieve world as the referential domain of their subsequent utterances by saying for example “Let’s say that . . . ”, or “I’ll be the mummy”, or “This will be flour” (indicating some sand), and thereby beforehand resolve the would-be ambiguities of the referring expressions to be used in the play. In a similar way a referential domain for resolving the would-be ambiguity in the utterance “The body of Christ, given for you” is established by the formal setting of the communion service, the telling of the story of the last supper, explicit designations such as “This is the body of Christ; take and eat”, and other markers. These factors ensure that no one will expect to feel anything but the taste of unleavened bread, neither will anyone be expected to ask for butter and cheese. If someone does, it only shows that they have not understood the religious context, and that they did not manage to pick out the correct referent to the minister’s or priest’s referring expression “the body of Christ”. The tactile physical characteristics of the sacramental wafer need to make possible the eating and breaking of the referent, but do not need to resemble any other specific attributes of a human body, since those are not part of the conceptualization of the

156 God in the Act of Reference referent. The referent is also conceptualized in terms of a human body, and all the functions that depend on that can be carried out solely on grounds of the conceptual relations assumed to hold between the conceptualization of the referent and other relevant conceptualizations. It is like when in the make-believe play the physical characteristics of the sand need to enable mixing and moulding, but not actual eating. The eating of the resultant mud-cake is possible solely on the basis of the conceptual relations that are assumed on part of the referent to “the cake”. The cake is eaten in the play, although the sand is not chewed. Likewise, Christ is consumed in communion even though the communicant feels only the taste of the unleavened bread. Another kind of make-believe object is the imaginary friend, which is a quite common phenomenon at some stage of a child’s development. The imaginary friend is conceptualized by the child as having direct relations with him or her, which makes the imaginary friend real to the child in the ordinary world, and not only confined to a specific time and place of active play. The reality of the imaginary friend is unstable though. As the child grows older, he or she normally abandons all ideas of this friend, and it sinks into oblivion. The reality of the imaginary friend was established only on the grounds of some very limited conceptual links to the ordinary world, namely the links that joined the imaginary friend and the child—and the child’s immediate surroundings—whose friend it was. The difference from a religious context is that the reality of God is upheld by a widespread and complex system of conceptual relations, and does not hinge on one single person making the conceptual connections. The conceptual connections are there already for anyone to use or pay attention to, as they are encoded in a communal language. There are also psychological and sociological differences between imaginary friends and God, regarding the upholding of their reality. The origin of the imaginary friend is a private mind and personal psychological needs. The surrounding social structures are on the whole negative towards private imaginations assumed to be real, at least in the case of adults, for the sake of the stability of the social structure. The reality of God, on the other hand, may, from one perspective, be said to originate from psychological needs that are not private, but shared. There are also socially accepted institutions and commonly held vocabularies that legitimate and uphold religion. And there are corresponding psychological and sociological theories about religion and how its reality structures are maintained.29 I am, however, solely 29See e.g. Berger 1967 for a sociological theory, and Rizzuto 1979 and 1998 for a

An analysis of reference and reality in religion 157 concerned with the conceptual and referential aspects of the conceptual structures and language use associated with religious activities.

Fictional characters Dealing with fictional characters is somewhat different from dealing with transformations used in play, since fictional characters are not supposed to have any physical characteristics whatsoever in the ordinary world, even though they are conceptualized as having physical characteristics within the work of fiction. The criteria for Anna Karenina to be considered real within the work of fiction in which she occurs are thus that what is referred to as Anna Karenina fulfils the criteria laid down in the conceptualization of Anna Karenina: she is to have certain characteristics and certain relations to other fictional characters and objects. She is considered real internal to the fictional work, as far as she therein is not an impostor, a ghost, or a figure in a dream, but a real woman and the real wife and mistress of certain men. Criteria for Anna Karenina to be real outside of the world of fiction are lacking. The conceptualization of a fictional character does not include such criteria, and therefore the issue of Anna Karenina’s reality in the ordinary world cannot be coherently raised, apart from in a purely metaphorical sense. We do, admittedly, react emotionally to her tragic fate when reading the book, but that is not conceptually constitutional for the conceptualization of Anna Karenina herself, but has rather to do with our relation to the whole area of fictional literature (and other media). Thus, Anna Karenina is only indirectly related to the conceptualizations of the ordinary world, by means of the book she is part of. So what makes us consider fictional characters as being unreal in the context of our ordinary world, is that they, as they are conceptualized within the fiction, do not have any direct conceptual relations to conceptualizations within the conceptual structure of the ordinary world, and specifically not to the reader of the fiction. When someone acts the part of a fictional character in for instance a theatre play, the role of the fictional character is partly conceptualized as being directly related to the conceptual structure of the ordinary world of the spectators. In this situation fictional characters resemble transformations in children’s play. Speaking about God on the other hand, it is not the case that the religious conceptual structure, within which God is conceptualized, is a psychoanalytical theory.

158 God in the Act of Reference closed world with no conceptual relations to the ordinary world. On the contrary, part of what makes up the conceptualization of God is that God is assumed to have a variety of relations to the ordinary world, and specifically to the religious believer him- or herself. What makes God a real God according to the religious internal criteria of Christian belief, could, among other things, be that God has a relation of love towards the world and the believer, that God has saved the believer from sin and has given him or her eternal life, that God listens to prayers from the believer, or that God is able to actively interfere with the physical world, such as in healing a person from illness. Thus the conceptualization of God is linked functionally to conceptualizations that are strongly dependent on physical characteristics in the ordinary world of the believer and his or her surroundings. Consequently, God’s reality is not confined to a religious context. God may be considered real within the conceptual structure of the ordinary world.

Religious entities God, as well as fictional characters and other make-believe objects, is conceptualized with very weak dependence on physical characteristics. The criteria for considering God to be real, according to a conventional conceptualization of God, include no physical characteristics, similar to fictional characters, and unlike transformations. The criteria do include the stipulation that the concept should be functionally related to other conceptualizations that are strongly dependent on physical characteristics, as with transformations and dissimilar to fictional characters. Which would lead us to assume that God is conceptualized with a somewhat stronger dependence on physical characteristics than fictional characters. It would also lead us to assume that God is conceptualized with a weaker dependence on physical characteristics than transformations in a make-believe play. So what is needed for something referred to as “God” to be considered to be a real God, is that the conceptual functional relations that are part of the constitution of the referent are in accordance with the conventional conceptualization of God, and that they constitute a difference for the person’s alternatives for action. As in the case of the professor, there are some functions that are bestowed on the referent by means of the conceptual structure employed and the conceptualization used to pick out the referent. For the professor to be considered to be real there are additional physical characteristics that have to be fulfilled, but for God, there are no such additional conditions. W hat constitutes the reality of God for us can be taken

An analysis of reference and reality in religion 159 to be fully and exhaustively determined by the functional conceptual relations assumed to exist between God and the world in the conceptual structure of which God is a part. I want to stress, finally, that what makes God, as opposed to a fictional character, or a make-believe object in children’s play, real in relation to the ordinary world is not that one of them exists and the other does not. The reason why God may be considered real in the ordinary world is not that for God we can assume an independent referent, whereas that is not the case with the others. In this purely conceptual analysis I claim that we can perfectly reasonably understand the reality of God without taking refuge in metaphysical statements of independent existence of any kind. My analysis does not exclude the possibility of imposing such a metaphysical level if one wanted to do so, but neither does it require it for providing an explanation for why we consider God to be real in the ordinary world in a way that we do not do with, for example, fictional characters. One need not claim that there must be something over and above these functional relations between God and the ordinary world that constitutes the reality of God for us.

Independent existence The question about reality is sometimes, in a realist view, framed as if what is real must have independent existence, exist independently of human minds. The man on the pavement exists independently of me and my thoughts; God, the realist claims, exists independently of human minds; but fictional characters and make-believe objects do not exist independently of human minds. This question about existing independently of human minds can, however, be understood in different ways. Firstly, it can be understood as a question about the existence of the external world as a whole. This is a perpetual philosophical question, debated throughout the centuries, and its meaningfulness has been repeatedly questioned. According to Carnap, for example, within the “thing structure”—the language introduced for speaking about things—it is only possible to ask questions of the existence of the things within the structure, but not an external question about the reality of the whole system.30 That question is better framed in terms of pragmatic relevance. Is the thing language a useful language for us in the world? And of course it is. And that is the end of the question. 30Carnap 1983, pp 242-243.

160 God in the Act of Reference It is not really meaningful to question the existence of the external world as such, since in our very lives and language uses we presuppose objects external to ourselves. A second way of viewing the question of independent existence is to take it as a matter of the existence of individual objects, or classes of objects. We naturally consider physical objects, other than, possibly, our own neural transmissions, to be external to our own minds. On this interpretation a man on the pavement is of course considered to be real in a sense that a make-believe object is not. Although, it must be added, the matter is not all that straightforward. We also generally consider objects that are conceptualized to a lesser degree in physical terms to be real. The complications involved in talking about the independent existence of individual objects might be further illustrated by some distinctions made by Uskali Maki in the context of economy, and applied by Eberhard Herrmann to philosophy of religion.31 Maki distinguishes between objective existence , which means that the existence of something is not constituted by its description (for example, intentions, preferences, and expectations, when described from a third person’s view); external existence , which means additionally that something exists outside of the human mind (for example social entities, professors, and the like); and finally, independent existence , which means, in addition to what is already implied in the first two distinctions, that something exists independently of the human mind (for example material objects). Herrmann points out that religious realism argues that God’s existence must be of the independent existence kind. It must be independent in order to keep separate the questions of our reasons for holding something for true on the one hand, and what makes it true, what is the case, on the other. However, Herrmann argues, speaking about objective existence alone is enough to accomplish that. We then admittedly have to rely heavily on consensus for evaluating truth claims, but truth will not be defined in terms of consensus, as in a thorough relativism, like Don Cupitt’s. Herrmann suggests that what belief in God is about, may be considered to have objective existence, according to Maki’s terminology. When a person’s belief in God is described from a third person’s view, the belief is not constituted by that description. Neither is the description a description of the mental phenomenon in the person having the belief in God, but of the belief. This manoeuvre enables Herrmann to differentiate between two 31 Maki 1996; and Herrmann 1999, pp 10-13.

An analysis of reference and reality in religion 161 different kinds of criticism against religious realism. One that denies God’s existence altogether and thus shares the realist view that independent existence is what is at stake. And one that avoids an outright denial of God’s existence by accepting with the realist that the reality we speak about is not only a human linguistic construction. Its departure from religious metaphysical realism lies instead in holding that this reality is always reality conceptualized by us. This is a differentiation that I make too, although I make it primarily in terms of reference. On the one hand, as a reaction to religious realism, several non-realists claim that “God” does not refer to an independent referent, and thus God does not exist. Wanting at the same time to avoid a dismissal of religion, they hold that although religious language is not referential, it may still be meaningful, as emotive, or fictional. On the other hand, as another reaction to realism, one can choose not to accept the underlying view of reference. It is then possible to claim, as I do, that since referents to linguistic expressions are always contextually constituted and bound up in our conceptualizations, indeed no language use can refer to independent and unconceptualized referents. Thus “God” does not have to refer to an independent and unconceptualized referent in order for God to be considered to be real and be a religiously adequate object for worship. However, in order to go on and analyse the difference between, for example, God, unicorns, Anna Kareninas, imaginary friends, and professors, it is not enough to invoke the distinctions between independent, external, and objective existence. Since they all can be said to have objective existence, this cannot be the only reason why in certain contexts some of them are considered real and some not. Something more is required. Herrmann attempts to take this further step by arguing that religion should be seen as a possible adequate response to life’s experiences.32 This is important, and if participating in a religious practice, or reading fiction, or engaging in other cultural or play activities, were not adequate responses in our lives, then we should not and most probably would not engage in these activities. Yet, something more is still required for it to be possible to distinguish between these areas. For this purpose, I additionally propose the conceptual analysis presented in this book to account for how and on what grounds the entities referred to in these areas are considered real or not. Let me illustrate the benefits of such an analysis with a couple of examples. If the entities referred to make a difference to our 32Herrmann 1999.

162 God in the Act of Reference alternatives for action, then the practice they are part of can be understood as being adequate for life in a more thoroughgoing way than if they do not. This would provide an explanation for the difference between the practice of religion and the engagement in fictional literature. Both are (potentially) adequate responses to our experiences in life, but the difference, in semantic terms, is that religious entities are conceptualized as having a direct bearing on the life of the believer, whereas fictional characters are not so conceptualized. Another point is that the more the entities referred to are conceptualized primarily in physical terms, the more inescapable and less open for rejection is the praxis; one cannot for example choose not to participate in the praxis of relating to and talking about physical objects, and still remain a living human being. One can, however, choose not to participate in a certain social setting and, so to speak, put oneself outside of society. One can relate to a professor as a human being and at the same time refuse to acknowledge his or her academic function and status, even though it would be considered rather odd. An actual example of this kind of opting out would be the resolution of certain clergy in Sweden not to consider a woman who has been legally appointed bishop as a real bishop, the spiritual head of the church, but only as an administrative executive director of the diocese. Since being part of the clergy involves relating to the bishop of the diocese, it is not possible to opt out completely of the context where the bishop is conceptualized. But by conceptualizing her in this way, reducing the amount of conceptual relations and functions conventionally taken to hold for a bishop, they have found a way to relate to her as their superior without compromising their convictions. At the other end of the scale, participating in religious activities, and more specifically relating to the religious entities, being, as they are, conceptualized not primarily in physical terms, is completely optional; at least in our present Western secularized society. Bearing in mind that the issue is more complex than dividing the world into physical and non-physical objects, I have never denied that the reasons for our evaluating a man as being real are much more dependent on the physical characteristics of the man, and thus, if you want, his physical existence, than are the reasons for, say, considering as real the make-believe flour in a children’s game. Saying that a man has physical existence can then be understood as saying that the man is conceptualized primarily in physical terms, and only to a lesser degree in terms of other conceptual functions and relations. However, this interpretation of what it means to exist independently of human minds would not do the trick for the religious realist, because God is

An analysis of reference and reality in religion 163 conventionally in theistic religious belief explicitly conceptualized as not having physical nature. To say that we consider God to be real because God is a physical object would not be a religiously adequate thing to say. A third interpretation of what is meant by considering something real because it exists independently of human minds is to add “metaphysical existence” as another kind of independent existence than physical existence. Existing independently of human minds can then mean either physical existence or metaphysical existence; or only metaphysical existence if physical existence is taken to be included in it. The latter would be equivalent to Maki’s “independent existence”. In either case it can then be claimed that metaphysical existence rather than physical is what justifies us to consider God (or physical things as well—if physical existence is viewed in terms of metaphysical existence) to be real. For two reasons I do not agree with this suggestion: Firstly, a purely pragmatic reason; on the analysis I have presented, it seems an unnecessary move to introduce a new kind of reality only to account for why we consider God to be real. The reality of God can be analysed without introducing metaphysical realism, as I have argued, and with a method of analysis that can be applied to everything else we speak about and relate to. There is thus a possible and coherent alternative to religious realism that dispenses with metaphysical realism; a sufficient reason to avoid introducing metaphysical existence. The second reason for why I am opposed to introducing metaphysical existence as a criterion for being considered to be real is that introducing the concept of metaphysical existence does seem to reintroduce in a different guise the first interpretation of the realityquestion: whether the external world as a whole exists. Saying that a man has physical existence is for me a shorthand version of saying that the man is conceptualized with strong dependence on physical characteristics. However, saying that something has metaphysical existence is on a different logical level and more equivalent to a metastatement. It means saying that something exists in itself, over and above any considerations of human conceptualizations. You cannot say that existing metaphysically means being conceptualized with strong dependence on metaphysical characteristics; it means rather not being necessarily conceptualized at all. What could it possibly mean, over and above considering a man real on the basis of how the man in an ordinary everyday context is conceptualized in primarily physical terms, to say that the man exists metaphysically? Or what would it mean, over and above considering God real on the basis of how God is

164 God in the Act of Reference conceptualized in a religious context, where God is related to as real without being conceptualized in physical terms, to say that God exists metaphysically? As for the man, if it is to mean anything, it apparently means the same thing as saying that the external world exists, that is that there are physical objects, and more precisely that this physical object, that is called a man, exists. But this we have already dismissed as a superfluous statement. It is either trivial to state that the man exists as a physical object, since this is what is meant by being spoken about as a physical object; or it is meaningless as an ontological statement. To state that the man exists metaphysically seems to deflate into a simple statement that the man exists; but this we already knew, by means of his physical characteristics effecting our alternatives for action. Might it not, however, be meaningfully and non-trivially stated about God that God exists metaphysically, since with God we cannot point to any physical characteristics? It is true that we cannot point to any physical characteristics when it comes to God. But, as God is not expected to have any physical characteristics, their absence cannot be seen as a deficit in God’s reality that needs to be supplemented by metaphysical existence. No such supplement is needed. Thus, also here the statement deflates into a simple “God exists”. And this we already knew—if we are involved in religion—from how God, as conventionally conceptualized, affects our alternatives for action. Attributing metaphysical existence does not seem to add anything to reality conceived by us; and how we conceive of things is, arguably, the basis for our attributing reality to them or not. Reality per se, which is often invoked at this stage, is not the reality we encounter—if indeed it is a meaningful concept at all—and is thus not appropriate to invoke as a reason for considering something to be real.

Emotional attitudes and existence W hat I have suggested so far is a theory of reference that coherently explicates how we can refer to God successfully, and a conceptual analysis of what we mean by calling God real, neither of which assumes metaphysical realism. However, the debate on religious realism and non-realism is not only—although most centrally—carried out in terms of reference. There are also arguments that pin-point the supposed inability of religious non-realism to instil in people the proper religious feelings and attitudes required for religious worship and devotion.33 33See e.g. Hebblethwaite 1993, pp 137-140. See also White 1994.

An analysis of reference and reality in religion 165 A person taking an active part in religious activities is expected to display certain attitudes, and, indeed, taking part in religious activities consists partly in having these attitudes. In devotional prayer, for example, the person participating expresses verbally, and supposedly sincerely, a devotional attitude towards God without which devotional prayer would not be devotional prayer. One cannot trust, love, or pray to someone that one believes does not exist. A religious realist argues that this is, nevertheless, what a religious non-realist must do, if prayer is to be accommodated within religious non-realism; namely presume to be able to pray to, or trust, a non-existing God, which is paradoxical. Within the subject of philosophy of mind and aesthetics the issue is raised why we react emotionally to fiction. Fiction, in the sense of made-up novels, detective stories, horror movies, and theatre plays, belongs to the subject matter of make-believe, which means that it contains vital elements that are conceptualized with weak dependence on physical characteristics. How can we feel sorry or fear for purely fictional characters and their fates in films, books, and plays? Drawing from these discussions, we shall address the question of the possibility of reacting religiously in prayer to God, who is likewise conceptualized with weak dependence on physical characteristics; without reference to metaphysical realism as the grounds for such a reaction. In drawing this preliminary parallel between reacting emotionally to fiction and reacting religiously to God, I presuppose that trusting God and praying is not only an intellectual process; it is also an emotional process. Believing in God is not only a matter of holding certain propositions about God’s existence and nature for true. It is also, and mostly, I would say, an attitude of trust, faith, awe, submission, and love towards God. These attitudes, or intentional states of mind, in the believer make up the basis for the believer feeling safe and saved, happy about his or her salvation, or sorry for his or her sins. They also make up the basis for the believer to act in specific ways in life, for example to pray in a difficult situation, give money to charitable purposes, forgive his or her neighbour, participate in religious rituals, suppress his or her own will to do something that is supposed to be God’s will, and a multitude of other things a religious believer may occupy him- or herself with. So, in this context, by reacting religiously to God, I mean reactions such as fearing God, loving God, trusting God, respecting God, and having faith in God, all of which are emotionally tinged intentional states of mind in the believer. In our relating to fictional and representative works of art, such as novels, films, and plays, there seems to be a paradox. You fear the green slime that comes oozing towards you on the screen. You also

166 God in the Act of Reference firmly believe that the slime does not exist to be a real threat to you. You may pity Anna Karenina and shed tears for her sake. At the same time you realize very well that Anna Karenina is not an actual person, but only a character in a book. The paradox is: how can it be that we can react emotionally to fictional entities that we believe do not exist? The paradox is typically generated by presupposing some kind of cognitive theory of emotions, which also places restrictions on what kinds of solutions are possible. According to a cognitive theory of emotions, emotions are (at least partly) constituted by being directed towards an object, concerning which one must have beliefs that provide grounds for the emotions. Above all, the object must be believed to exist in order to be able to be in a situation that could call for emotional reactions. I may for example pity an abused child because I believe the child has suffered pain. But when someone pities Anna Karenina he or she does not have any accompanying beliefs about the person Anna Karenina, where Anna Karenina is an actual person. He or she rather has the belief that there is no such person. The paradox with respect to fictional entities thus arises from the impossibility of reacting emotionally towards something one believes does not exist in real life, but only in fiction. In the current debates within aesthetics there are, as far as I can see, three general ways of approaching this paradox. 1) Accept a cognitive theory of emotion and admit that we cannot rationally have genuine emotions towards fiction. a) Deny that the emotions experienced towards fictional objects are genuine, real emotions and thus avoid the paradox. The emotions are quasi-emotions (since the cognitive element is defective); in a game of make-believe one make-believedly fears or pities something or other.34 b) There are no emotions involved but only reactions; one is not afraid, but in a state of shock.35 c) The paradox is there, and we are therefore irrational and immature in holding inconsistent beliefs when we have emotions towards fictional beings. The paradox need not be solved, rather, we should be more rational in our emotions.36 2) Accept a cognitive theory of emotion but suggest modifications to its cognitive element. The cognitive element in a cognitive theory 34Currie 1990; Walton 1978 and 1990. 35Neill 1991 and 1993; Saatelaa 1994. 36Radford 1975, 1990, and 1995.

An analysis of reference and reality in religion 167 of emotion need not involve conscious belief that something exists in real life. a) The beliefs are true in the tar get-world of the fiction; in a possible world both fictional object and reader can meet and genuine emotions are generated. This presupposes that we have more than one belief forming device and several belief dossiers.37 b) The cognitive component of emotions is not the belief that something exists in real life, as an ordinary object or person, but a construal of a situation, bringing some concept or image to bear on an object or situation.38 c) From the perspective of thought-theory a mere thought is enough to produce emotion.39 d) Arguing from a functionalist/evolutionary view, it is claimed that the belief generating the emotions can be caused by cerebral mechanisms outside of voluntary control and need not be consciously entertained. Thus it need not be consistent with the person’s other beliefs.40 3) Sidestep cognitive theories of emotion altogether. a) A Wittgensteinian approach sees this as just another legitimate use of “fear” or “pity”, where, as with the presentational phase of emotions in children’s development, no beliefs are necessary.41 The very first of all these alternatives, which was presented by Kendall Walton and which places the emotions towards fictional characters within a make-believe setting, has received some attention lately. It has also been suggested as suitable for solving the parallel paradox in religious non-realism of how one can react emotionally toward a God that one does not believe exists. Imagine a person watching the movie “Jaws” and feeling fear as the shark approaches. There is a vast difference between saying that the person make-believedly fears the shark, and saying that he or she fears the make-believe shark. In the first case the person can be said to participate in a make-believe game, 37Zemach 1996. 38Dadlez 1996. 39Gron 1996. 40Hartz 1999. 41Hanfling 1996.

168 God in the Act of Reference in which he or she uses the film as a prop. The person participates as an observer of the events in the make-believe world of the film. In that game the person fears the shark. In the second case the person can be said to keep his or her distance from the make-believe world of the film, and yet he or she genuinely fears an object in the film, which is paradoxical. In the first case we make use of the wide scope of the operator “It is fictionally/make-believedly true that ... Walton argues that the feeling of fear the person experiences is best explained by the first account.42 Our emotions towards fiction are make-believe emotions. We make-believedly fear the shark, or weep for the heroine, or rage at the villain in a work of fiction. We are perfectly aware that the events we get so emotionally involved in are only events in a particular fictive world; a film, a book, or a theatre play. In line with Walton’s argument I agree that it would be paradoxical to argue that a religious believer trusts a make-believe, unreal, madeup God, as often seems to be the way that non-realist faith is described by religious realism (not always without reason either). I would be the first to agree with the realist that this would certainly make praying very difficult, if not psychologically impossible. No, the believer must trust in a real God on all accounts; you would not trust something that you did not consider to be real. There is, however, always a context in which terms like “trust” and “reality” are used, and in which it is relevant to trust or believe in certain kinds of things, but irrelevant to trust or believe in other kinds of things. To begin with, let me question the understanding of the cognitive theory of emotions underlying Walton’s account. It states that in order to have an emotion towards an object of some kind, one must have relevant beliefs about it, and a prerequisite for this is that one has the belief that the object exists. We find exactly the same idea here as in a traditional view on reference, namely the idea that an object must exist in order for us to be able to refer to it, only here the object must exist in order for us to be able to have emotions towards it. In neither case is it clear what exactly is required, since it makes no sense to talk about an object as existing out of a context. To cite Quine, the ontology of a theory is determined by what bound variables are presupposed.43 To be pragmatic, all that surrounds us, is of importance to us, interests us, hurts us, puzzles us, or concerns us in any way is what makes up our world, our reality. We never deal with “raw” unconceptualized reality, we always encounter it in and through 42Walton 1978 and 1990. 43Quine 1953a, p 13f. See also Quine 1953b.

An analysis of reference and reality in religion 169 our experiences of it. It is always a mix; and I do not mean a mix of reality as such (whatever that might be) and our human conceptualizations of it. On the contrary, and this is a point I want to stress, the mix consists in the fact that we necessarily conceptualize reality by means of conceptualizations with various degrees of dependence on physical characteristics and on conceptual relations and functions. Conceptualizations of visual perceptions are for instance strongly dependent on physical characteristics, in comparison with conceptualizations of social institutions such as money or presidents, which also include important elements of social conceptual construction. In a religious context one is not supposed to be able to visually perceive God as we visually perceive ordinary household items. That, I think, most of us can agree on. God and other religiously significant elements in religious language use are conceptualized with a very weak dependence on physical characteristics; even more so than socially constructed reality. In the latter case we usually have some material stuff, conceptualized with a strong dependence on physical characteristics, which we, by means of a constitutive rule, agree to count as something else by ascribing a function to it. For example, we count certain bits of paper as money.44 In talking about God we cannot make this partial reduction to physical reality. That is to say, in a reductive view, God might possibly be seen to be bits and pieces of religious experience, psychological or mental objects. From the point of view of a religious believer not wanting to assert God’s metaphysical and independent existence, physicalist reductionism ought, however, to be just as much a piece of unwarranted metaphysics as is the active claim of religious realism. God cannot be reduced to these bits and pieces, just as money cannot be reduced to mere paper. What takes us from those bits and pieces to God, is that we count their function as being God. By use of our language we conceptualize a religious reality where “God” is a place-holder for the function of being God, as this is conceived in the religious context of beliefs and practices. The context for talking about God as existing is a religious context, characterized by conceptualizations that are weakly dependent on physical characteristics and by being a human practice considered by the practitioners to be highly relevant to their lives. Returning to the paradox concerning how we can have emotions towards that which we do not believe exists, we need to rephrase it to take into consideration the point that existence for us is contextually 44See Searle 1995, pp 37-57.

170 God in the Act of Reference determined. As rephrased regarding fiction, it will now have something like the following content: how is it that we can react emotionally

to something that is conceptualized with weak dependence on physical characteristics in the context of a work of fictionl The supposed paradox as restated regarding religion could be phrased similarly: how is it that we can react emotionally to something that is conceptualized with weak dependence on physical characteristics in the context of religion ?

I believe there remains a genuine difficulty for some emotional attitudes towards fictional characters even after the paradox is rephrased that does not remain for having emotional attitudes towards God. A novel or a film is a closed world, and is not conceptually directly related to the conceptual structures of our everyday lives. Only indirectly is a fictional character conceptually so related, by being part of, for instance, a book that someone reads and is affected by. It is in fact part and parcel of being a fictional character not to have any direct relations with anything in the ordinary world; thus a fictional character is not considered to be real external to the work of fiction in which it occurs, or to be able to affect our alternatives for action in our everyday life. The conceptualization of God within the context of religion, on the other hand, among other things includes that God is directly related to human beings by love, by providing salvation, and by being the recipient of prayers and devotion. W ith respect to God a religious person is expected to entertain strong emotions of love or even hate; anything but a distanced, lukewarm engagement is considered a natural religious response. God is also conceptualized as being involved in the whole of the life of the believer; it is in the very (existential) experiences in life that religion has a function. So the paradox turns out to be unparadoxical as I have described it. It would rather be strange if we did not react emotionally towards God, as conceptualized within the context of religion, since it is part of the conceptualization of God that we do so. A difference that is not purely conceptual between relating emotionally to a fictional character and God is that the engagement in a work of art is temporary, which is not the case with a religious engagement. The religious believer ideally lets his or her beliefs and attitudes about God influence the rest of his or her life in significant ways. Religion is not something to be enjoyed once in a while and then put away at will, as one might do with a book. Robin Le Poidevin does, however, not think that this is a good argument against applying

An analysis of reference and reality in religion 171 Walton’s account to religion.45 It is true, he says, that engagement with fiction is occasional, but so is religious engagement. Formal religious observance is likely to take place only once a week or even more seldom. And even if religious engagement may be lifelong— although occasional—so can engagement in a work of fiction be too. Soap-operas on TV may go on seemingly for ever, and indeed occupy the minds of people in between broadcasts as well. Le Poidevin claims that the constancy of religion in comparison with most works of fiction, is only due to the fact that religion is more dramatic and complex than most works of fiction, and thus can capture our minds longer; and not because fiction is only fiction and religion is something true. W hat I have to say about this is first of all that Le Poidevin makes the correct observation that the two human practices of engaging in fiction and engaging in religious activities are not separated by watertight barriers; there are similarities. However, even though there might be exceptions, it would only be fair to concede that a work of fiction is not as a rule expected to provide lifelong involvement, but only a momentary involvement, with a possible emotional engagement of some degree. Likewise, it would also be fair to concede that religion as a rule is expected to provide lifelong involvement, and presumes a high degree of personal emotional engagement. If by refusing to attribute the constancy of religion to its being true, in contrast to fiction, which is only fictional, Le Poidevin means to show that the correspondence theory of truth is problematic, then I have nothing to disagree with. If, however, which is more likely, his statement implies that neither religion nor fiction is true because the entities presupposed within these contexts do not correspond to anything real, then I must disagree with his presuppositions even though I agree with part of his conclusion. The reason why religion to many people is an adequate and life-long occupation is not because religion is true (in the sense of a correspondence theory of truth); but neither is the reason for why fiction is not a life-long occupation because it is not true (in the sense of a correspondence theory of truth). The reasons are rather both pragmatic and conceptual. Religion admittedly fills a function in people’s lives, and possibly in the evolution of the human race and culture.46 We can reach an understanding of why and how religion fills this function by analysing the way its conceptual structures are organized and related to other conceptual structures, 45Le Poidevin 1996, p 120f. 46See e.g. Gillett 1999; Hefner 1998; and Peters 1997 for some suggestions for religion’s role in the evolution.

172 God in the Act of Reference and the way its entities are conceptualized. Undertaking such an analysis, and refraining from introducing metaphysical issues in so doing, is, however, not the same as reducing religion to a function, as in instrumentalism.

Instrumentalism and prayer Non-realists who in opposing religious realism claim that God does not exist are forced to reinterpret religious talk about God as meaning something else. One such reinterpretation is to make talk about God equivalent to non-religious fictions. This has been the strategy of, among others, Braithwaite and Cupitt in his early writings. God is made into a fictional character, and the function of religion is seen to be similar to that of other great fiction. Religion provides stories to live our lives by, to be inspired and challenged by. W hat becomes problematic in this strategy is the question of emotional involvement with God, as is emotional involvement with fictional entities. The problem of reacting emotionally to a God conceived of as a fictional character has not explicitly been addressed by either Braithwaite or Cupitt. Robin Le Poidevin suggests, however, that the paradox inherent in religious non-realism, concerning having emotions towards a fictional God, can be resolved by making use of Kendall Walton’s make-believe theory about emotions towards fictional characters.47 Le Poidevin holds that the best route available for the radical theologian wishing to abolish metaphysical religious realism, is to adopt a theological instrumentalism where religious statements are seen to be fictional statements. By conceiving of the engagement in religious activities as being engaged in a game of make-believe, where one makes believe that God is such-and-such, the non-realist can avoid two main moral objections against theism, realistically understood, Le Poidevin claims. Firstly, the problem of abundant evil can simply be eradicated from the religious fictional story, since we are the ones who make it up, and this is a better alternative than the only route available to the realist, namely to try to ignore the facts. Secondly, the moral autonomy of the agent can be preserved, since the believer does not act because God requires him or her to do so, but may in the religious game of make-believe come to hold beliefs about what he or she ought to do. Theological instrumentalism construed in this way can then, according to Le Poidevin, be seen to constitute a defensible alternative to traditional atheism, and, granted the applicability of a deflationist 47Le Poidevin 1996, chapter 8; Walton 1978 and 1990.

An analysis of reference and reality in religion 173 argument a la Carnap, it is indeed the only option.48 However, a religious non-realism that equates religion with fiction and that, for its plausibility, hinges upon Kendall Walton’s theory about make-believe emotions, I believe suffers from two major faults. Religion cannot be equated with fiction for reasons already stated (differences in praxis and in conceptual structures and relations). Neither is Walton’s theory in itself so widely accepted or plausible that it can constitute the grounds for the plausibility of something else.49 Even conceding that Walton’s account holds for emotional attitudes toward fiction, there would still remain the problem of how to account for the strong emotions of love and devotion appropriate toward God, but not toward fictional characters; and the practice of addressing God that takes place in prayer, which has no parallel in fiction. It is rather a hallmark of the specific emotive reactions toward fictional characters that one does not try to contact them—to help, to warn, to console; even though one may pity them, fear for their safety, or grieve with them. Although I hold that the reasons why we consider God to be real are partly conceptual, my view is not to be equated with an instrumental and functional view on God’s existence, where God’s reality is seen to consist solely in the function belief in God has for a person, or for human beings. It might, for example, be said that religion gives people a sense of security which is good for their mental health, and therefore we can say that God is real: God is the function, and the function is real enough. As I see it, this as well is an attempt to pin­ point God’s reality in metaphysical terms, although reductionistically. It falls prey to the objection, proclaimed by Freud and Marx among others, that if God can be completely and ontologically reduced to some function or other, then talk about God is obsolete and should better be abandoned. Why should it be considered beneficial to keep the language about God along with the function God is reduced to, while being aware that “God” refers only to the said function? The basic problem with many variants of religious non-realism is that they assume such a reductionism, where the metaphysical reality of 48This being the case since the question concerning God’s reality must then be understood as a question concerning the advisability of adopting the theistic framework, and not a question about whether talk about God reflects reality, which is how an atheist must understand it. Le Poidevin also suggests, though, that a deflationist argument is only applicable to talk about God if God is thought to exist outside of time, on a par with abstract objects, such as numbers. See Le Poidevin 1996, pp 124-134. See also Carnap 1983. 49See Hartz 1999.

174 God in the Act of Reference God is questioned by way of being denied, rather than by way of being treated as a pragmatically superfluous concept, as I would suggest. By denying God’s metaphysical existence one has made a metaphysical statement about reality as such, and said that the only reality that is, is the empirical, or the physical, or some other specification of reality that is measurable for us humans. Then, if God is to mean anything to us, talk about God must be understood as being about something else than God, since there is no God, as traditionally understood; hence all the reductionist theories about religious language and religious belief. The preservation of religious language (in its present, or in a remodelled form) must then be argued for by appealing to things like its poetic value, the moral impact of its stories, or our need for paradoxes. It is doubtful, however, whether such functions of religious language as its literary qualities (even though they do have a value), can provide sufficient motivation for people to give their lives to God, or make religion meaningful in the peak experiences in life, where religion traditionally has supplied a sense of meaning and commitment. Religious non-realists choosing this route have escaped some difficult questions (concerning God’s existence), posed by empiricists, positivists, and post-modernists; but they have landed instead in a quicksand of other difficult questions (concerning the adequacy of religion and the possibility of faith) posed by the believer and the psychologist alike. It is to avoid both of these standpoints that I advocate a view on reference that is not restricted to physically existing objects, but that still does not require any special arrangements in terms of metaphysical reality or the like, for explaining the reference of “God”. Prayer has a central place in traditional Christian practice. Worship is a basic religious activity in most religions, and prayer is a constituent element in many religious rituals. Sociological surveys show that in times of need and crises, often people who are not normally religious pray. Prayer seems to be indispensable for an active participation in religious activities. It is often pointed out by the realist that in order to pray, one must interact with God, and in order to interact with God, there must be someone there to interact with. This is not the case on a non-realist account, and therefore, the realist claims, religious non-realism is not religiously adequate. The assumption is that in order for prayer to be meaningful one must first grant the existence of a God who is prayed to. Only then can one meaningfully engage in prayer. Someone taking the position that there is no God who is addressed in prayer should, to be consistent, hold that engaging in prayer, traditionally understood, means to embrace falsehoods or

An analysis of reference and reality in religion 175 nonsense. These positions are acceptable from a realist point of view. However, the realist views with suspicion anyone who concludes that there is no God who is addressed in prayer, but who nevertheless wants to go on praying. Non-realists have generally tackled the realist claim that religious non-realism cannot accommodate prayer by simply accepting the charge and letting go of all claims to address God in prayer. The practice of prayer is then understood as meditation, as self-reflection, as thinking about a problem or one’s loved ones in the context of what makes life meaningful, or as an expression of community with others.50 In retaining the religious terminology, it is acknowledged that by using “God” as an invocatory phrase in prayer, one uses metaphorical or poetic language without the pretension of referring to something. It must, however, be emphasized that prayer does not constitute a problem for non-realism alone, but just as much for religious realism, as many of the problems associated with prayer concern the internal conceptual relations that are presupposed in a certain religious tradition. The religious believer is faced with the problem of explaining what is accomplished in prayer, especially petitionary prayer, where something is requested from God. If God already knows everything, why do we have to pray? Can it really matter for God’s intervening in the world whether someone has prayed or not? How could God, the eternal and immutable, be influenced by prayer? Questions like these have been discussed by philosophers of religion, and even from realist quarters it has been suggested that we should understand prayer primarily as a means for the praying person him- or herself to be changed and transformed.51 Neither are issues about what, if anything, according to the criteria of a specific religious context, should count as an instance of actual answers to prayers, revelations from God, miracles, or failures on the part of God to answer a prayer, affected by a realist or non-realist stance. God’s metaphysical and purportedly unconceptualized existence is not (and cannot be) invoked as a factor that will settle any of these matters. So understanding prayer and what counts as an answer to prayer has really nothing to do with denying or accepting religious realism, but needs to be worked out in the context of the religious practice itself, where the conceptual relations and functions taken to hold between God and human beings and their world are encoded in 50See Hart 1993, pp 69f and 91; Dawes 1992; and Freeman 1997, pp 31-33. 51See Briimmer 1984. See also Gellman 2000 for a discussion on Judaic perspectives on petitionary prayer.

176 God in the Act of Reference a fairly stable way by means of accepted language use.52 The religious person who engages in prayer to God will have to sort out what prayer amounts to, regardless of his or her philosophical affiliation. In practice then, I suggest, the non-realist attempts to reduce prayer to some psychological or sociological function are unnecessary. The God that is addressed in prayer is the God who is conceptualized in certain ways in a certain religious practice and is addressed in a specific context of utterance, where the referent to the invoking expression is constituted accordingly. This analysis can be made without invoking the distinction, characteristic of metaphysical realism, between referring to a metaphysically existing God and referring to nothing, and also without reducing prayer to something other than prayer. We can thus provide a satisfactory account of religious devotion, including God and the religious believer, that is not dependent on metaphysical realism.

52D. Z. Phillips has suggested, as against both realists and non-realists, an understanding of the internal relations between prayer and the religious context where prayer takes place. Phillips 1965.

6 Concluding remarks Other examples might have been used and other philosophers quoted than the ones I have chosen, as means to the same end. My selection of scholars and theories is not necessary in the sense that it is the only or exhaustive choice; but I trust it has been sufficient to state my case and reach my aims. My aims have been to show the need for an alternative way of looking at reference and reality in general and to God in particular that will unsettle the dichotomization characteristic of the realist and non-realist debates within philosophy of religion; and to indicate what such an alternative might look like. In a dualistic manner, the general view of reference that underlies many of the discussions in the realist and non-realist debates of today presupposes that objects either exist or do not exist, and that only that which exists can be referred to. Such a view is problematic for anyone wanting to reject religious realism and at the same time wanting to promote the continuation of a religious practice that involves referring to God. Religious non­ realism holds that “God” should not be understood as referring to a metaphysical God existing independently of our conceptualizations. There are then seemingly only two alternatives left for the religious non-realist for how to understand the reference of “God”. The referring practice involving “God” can be interpreted as not referring to anything real, in line with talk about other non-existing fictional characters such as Anna Karenina or Sherlock Holmes. Engaging in religious practice is then like being inspired by great literature, or being carried away by compelling myths. The other alternative is to interpret religious language use as indeed referring to something, although not God, but, for instance, emotions, an internalized father figure, neural transmissions, or sociological values. The religious realist attacks both these alternatives as being religiously inadequate and rightly holds that a person who seriously 177

178 God in the Act of Reference believes that “God” refers to nothing, to a fictional character, or to his or her own psychological illusions cannot consistently, seriously, and wholeheartedly the way religious engagement demands, be engaged in a religious practice where God is addressed in prayer and worship. A way for the religious non-realist to tackle this accusation of religious inadequacy is to reconstruct the traditional religious context, making it into a new kind of religious practice that does not require the idea of a metaphysically existing God, and where consequently “God” can be given any desired meaning. If one, for example, disposes of the practice of prayer and replaces it with a practice of meditation, then one need not face the problem of what it might mean to pray to someone that does not exist. This, however, is an alternative that I have not paid any attention to, for the simple reason that it presents no philosophical problem, having erased all that would cause such problems. My purpose with this book has been to provide a tenable alternative for the person who wants to remain an ordinary religious believer, worshipping God and attending religious ceremonies just as they are, without having to neither construct a new religious practice nor embrace religious metaphysical realism. In the debates on religious realism and non-realism it is assumed that an entity either exists or does not exist according to some unproblematic context-independent standard of what it entails to exist. It is also assumed that either one refers to an unconceptualized and independently existing object by the use of a linguistic expression, or one does not refer at all. From these assumptions stems the realist’s referential argument against religious non-realism. The referential argument states that any position that does not embrace religious realism is religiously inadequate since it does not acknowledge that “God” refers to an unconceptualized and metaphysical independently existing entity. I suggest that this argument can be made invalid by its premises being put into question. My claim is that there is a way of speaking about reference and reality that will be able to encompass the religious realist’s as well as the religious non-realist’s uses of “God”, and that does not depend on metaphysical realism and a view of the referent as being properly treated as if unconceptualized. I have suggested that we accept that reality for us is always reality conceptualized by us with various degrees of dependence on physical characteristics. Ordinary trees are usually conceptualized with strong dependence on physical characteristics; professors are conceptualized with a somewhat less strong dependence on physical characteristics; and finally God, fictional characters, and make-believe entities are conceptualized with only a weak dependence on physical

Concluding remarks 179 characteristics. In order to pronounce something as real or existing in contrast to unreal or non-existing we have to refer to it. W hat we consider to be real or not is thus not an unconceptualized object, but something that is conceptualized by us, and constituted as a referent to a certain linguistic expression that we use in order to refer to it. I have also suggested that we speak of the referent to a linguistic expression in a certain act of reference in terms of being constituted by the speaker’s directive intentions as these are manifested in the context, together with the conventional meaning of the referring expression and those physical characteristics and conceptual functions and relations associated with it. This will give us the means to analyse the referent as being conceptualized with a certain degree of dependence on physical characteristics, and as having certain conceptual relations and functions with respect to other conceptualizations. Analysing the referent in this way allows for detailed analyses of why and in what respect we consider different things to be real or not that do not fall prey to the oversimplifications of a dualistic view of existence. A dualistic view of existence has no means of explaining what goes on in make-believe contexts, or to appreciate the differences that exist between referring to fictional characters, imaginary friends, and God respectively. Our linguistic and human practices show that these differences exist. Human practices that are conceptualized predominantly with a weak dependence on physical characteristics are significant, so they should not all be lumped together under the heading: non-referential terms and non-existing objects. The criteria for why we consider something to be real or not, finally, I suggest are best formulated in pragmatic terms of what makes a difference to our alternatives for action. A person is not automatically obliged to view all contexts as equally important or adequate to various aspects of life. It is of course possible for someone to conclude that religion, without metaphysical realism, does not match any situation in life where it would be appropriate to trust God. However, it is equally possible to conclude that religion, without metaphysical realism, is important and adequate to various situations in life. Omitting all reference to God’s metaphysical existence does not necessarily lessen the real impact God makes in life. The human capacity for make-believe activities has proved to be essential for the human child’s relating properly to his or her surroundings, and even necessary for conceptualizing them. Makebelieve contexts are not dispensable only on the grounds that they are make-believe. The human capacity for make-believe activities is, on the contrary, indispensable, as is the corresponding capacity

180 God in the Act of Reference for conceptualizing our surroundings not only in physical terms, but making use of conceptualizations that are only weakly dependent on physical characteristics. It may well be that religion, and its secular counterparts for that matter, understood without the addition of metaphysical realism, are such indispensable make-believe contexts for people in their coming to terms with life and its contingencies. For each specific or more generalized religious context of utterance we can ask how the referent to the linguistic expression “God” is constituted, and how God is conceptualized. The answer to that question has a bearing on whether we consider God, thus conceptualized, to be real, in which case we may want to engage in the religious practice; or whether we consider God not to be real, in which case we may choose not to engage in the religious practice. When all this is done I believe we have said all there is to say about the reference of “God”. W hat according to this account would be meaningful to continue to discuss in a realist and non-realist dialogue is not whether “God” refers or not, but how the referent to “God” is constituted in various situations, cultures, religions, and philosophical traditions, and why it is so constituted. To state simpliciter that in religious non­ realism “God” does not refer and thereby dismiss the whole non-realist enterprise as religiously inadequate is to overlook what is important for evaluating the adequacy of a human practice, namely the function the practice has for people in their relating to their surroundings and to themselves with their existential needs. Within the framework of a theory of reference that does not have metaphysical realism as one of its corner-stones, one can talk about the reference of “God” without thereby being committed to any particular view on God’s metaphysical, unconceptualized, and mind-independent existence. The debate may therefore go on to deal in a more constructive manner with other important issues raised by non-realism in its reactions and challenges against traditional religious realism. Whether the debate should continue within the existing realist and non-realist frameworks of various kinds is, of course, up to the participants in the debate to decide. W hat this work has suggested as an option, though, is a philosophical position that stands clear of religious metaphysical realism and non-realism alike in questioning their shared referential and existential assumptions. The position is for that sake not reducible to a Wittgensteinian position, although positive towards many conceptual points there made. It is closely related to what is known as internal realism, although elaborating its view on reality as conceptualized, and suggesting adequate ways of

Concluding remarks 181 dealing with reference. I present this position as a tool for testing and with the hope that we can get on with our philosophical work by means of communicating with each other rather than merely categorizing each other.

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202 God in the Act of Reference W eb ster, A liso n 1996 Theological non-realism. Feminists’ dream or nightmare? Talk at a workshop at the 1996 SoF UK conference. In http://www.sofn.org.uk/webster.html W ettste in , H ow ard K . 1998 How to bridge the gap between meaning and reference. In Kasher, Asa (ed), Pragmatics: Critical concepts. Volume 3. Indexicals and reference. London and New York: Routledge, pp 43-62. Originally published in Synthese, vol. 58, no. 1, 1984, pp 63-84 W h ite, S te p h e n R o ss 1994 Don Cupitt and the future of Christian doctrine. London: SCM Press W h orf, B e n ja m in Lee 1956 Language, thought, and reality. Selected writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf. New York W inch, P e te r 1999 Understanding a primitive society. In Frankenberry, Nancy K. and Hans H. Penner (eds.), Language, truth and religious belief. Studies in twentiethcentury theory and method in religion. Atlanta, Georgia: Scholars Press, pp 342-377. Originally published in American Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 1, 1964, pp 307-324 W in n ico tt, D o n ald W oods 1971 Playing and reality. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books 1987 Babies and their mothers. The Winnicott Trust by arrangement with Mark Paterson. Winnicott, Clare, Ray Shephard, and Madeleine Davis (eds.). Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley Publishing Company 1996 Thinking about children. Johns, Jennifer, Ray Shephard, and Helen Taylor Robinson (eds.), Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley Publishing Company. Y ule, G e o rg e 1996 Pragmatics. Oxford: Oxford University Press Zem ach, E d d y M . 1996 Emotion and fictional beings. Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 54, no. 1, pp 41-48

Index adequacy of a human practice, 10, 15, 161–162, 179 aesthetics, 165 Allwood, Jens, 69–71 Alston, William P., 2, 60, 141, 142 ambiguity, 43–44 pragmatic, 74–75 semantic, 74–75, 77, 80 Anderson, Pamela Sue, 47n anthropology, 33, 34 anti–realism, 6, 7 religious, see non–realism atheism, 2, 5, 13, 172 attributive/referential distinction as gradual, 74, 80–81, 91 introduction of, 58–59, 73–74 semantic and/or pragmatic, 74–75, 80–81 Azande culture, 41–43 basic concepts, 36–38 behaviour, 44, 55 Berger, Peter, 4, 19 Bergstrom, Lars, 48, 49 Bezuidenhout, Anne, 77, 80, 82, 97 bivalence, 6 Briimmer, Vincent, 99, 143 Braithwaite, R. B., 10, 145, 172 Bush, George W., 82 Carnap, Rudolf, 159, 173 Cartesian view of knowledge, 46 Caughey, John, 115 203

causal theories of reference, 7, 59– 60 and continuity of reference, 96 applied to God, 142 criticism of, 59–60, 85–86 code–switching, 45 cognitive benefit and cost, 77 cognitive theory of emotions, 166– 168 colour–concepts, 45, 46 communication and reference, 44, 58, 62–63, 66, 95, 102 evolutionary aspects of, 26, 37, 47 failed, 65, 76, 126, 131–132 in philosophy, 14, 181 in play, 126–127 means for successful, 36, 43, 44 prerequisites for, 20, 23, 26, 36, 37, 51, 66, 71, 102, 132 prerequisites for rational, 94 required for conceptual struc­ tures, 133–134 with aliens, 35 with fictional entities, 32 concepts, 22–23, 27 as functional, 22, 29, 43 basic, 36–38 conceptual differences, 36–38, 43, 45 conceptual relativism, 33–34, 39, 48–50

204 God in the Act of Reference and fideism, 138 arguments against, 139, 140 conceptual schemes, 22, 33–34 in general, see conceptual structures conceptual structures and language, 19, 22–23, 26, 34, 41 and non–existing objects, 89 and prerequisites for concep­ tualization, 36–40 and reality, 24, 33–36, 54 as incompatible, 46 awareness of, 38 construction of, 133–134 functions of, 26, 32 in religion, 45, 47–48, 53 in science, 45–47 radically different, 34–37, 120–121 reconstruction of, 121 same/different function, 47, 49–50, 53–56, 120–121, 127–132 translatability of, 34–36 conceptualization affecting alternatives for ac­ tion, 29–30, 42, 53, 128– 130, 134 and human interests, 28–29 capacity for, 25, 108, 116 evolutionary aspects of, 20, 25, 36, 38, 132, 136 example of breast, 54–56 flour, 44, 126–132 money, 25 professor, 25–27, 33 functional aspects of, 27, 29, 30, 89, 135–136 in infancy, 17–19, 21, 51, 54– 55, 66–67, 118–121

in make–believe play, 44, 114, 133–135 of God, see God on a gradual scale, 24, 33, 89, 95, 116, 127–136 prerequisites for, 26, 36–40, 44, 47, 51, 122, 139 with weak dependence on physical characteristics, 27, 52–53, 122, 180 as functional, 21, 29, 133 conceptualized reality, see reality constituted reality, see reality constructed reality, see reality construction view on language, 8, 33 contextual cues, 44, 65, 93, 95, 98 and reference assignment, 82 and relevance theory, 79 speaker’s intentions, 64, 80 continuity of reference, 94–97 conventional meaning and reference, 76, 79, 98 as context dependent, 71, 149 definition of, 71 conversational implicatures, 72, 78 correspondence theory of truth, 61, 171 Cox, Harvey, 107 creativity, 116, 117 critical realism, 6, 60, 141 cultural differences, 33, 38, 43, 45 cultural–linguistic systems, 45, 46, 53 Cupitt, Don, 2, 10–13, 15, 145, 160, 172 Currie, Gregory, 86–89 Davidson, Donald, 22, 34, 36, 49 daydreaming, 115, 117 definite descriptions, 58, 73 deixis, 82 demonstratives, 60, 68, 72, 73

Index 205 descriptive meaning, see conven­ tional meaning descriptive theories of reference, 57–58, 73 and continuity of reference, 96 applied to God, 142–143 criticism of, 59 direct reference theories, 60–61, 77, 82, 141–142 directive intentions, see speaker’s intentions disambiguation, 77 division of linguistic labour, 60 Donnellan, Keith, 58, 73–74 Dummett, Michael, 6 Einstein, Albert, 47 emotions cognitive theory of, 166–168 towards fictional entities, 91, 157, 165–168, 170, 172– 173 towards God, 165, 170, 172– 173, 179 empirical material in philosophy, 5, 149 eucharist, 154–156 Evans, Gareth, 60 Evans–Pritchard, E., 41, 42n evil, 172 evolution, 20, 25, 36, 37, 106, 122 existence in a pragmatic theory of refer­ ence, 83 independent, 102, 159–164, 178 metaphysical, 23, 163–164 required for reference, 1, 61, 82, 126, 177, 178 existential experiences, 136 existential needs, 27 fantasy, 55, 115, 119, 124

feminism, see gender aspects Feuerbach, Ludwig, 10 fiction conceptual structure of, 32, 117 function of, 32 in relation to everyday life, 56 fictional entities and God, 32, 33, 158, 172–174 as non–existing, 82–90, 102– 103 as real, 31–33, 52–53, 157 conceptualization of, 29, 31– 33, 151, 157 emotions towards, 91, 157, 165–168, 170 in relation to everyday life, 13, 32, 88–89, 157, 170 reference to, 61, 86–89, 102– 103 fictional names, 86–89 fideism, 138, 139 formal languages, 62 free enrichment, 77 Frege, Gottlob, 57–58 Freud, Sigmund, 4, 109, 118, 142, 173 functional reference, see pragmatic theory of reference Gadamer, Hans–George, 107 gender aspects, 9–10, 29, 46–47, 110–111, 120 general terms, 60 gestures, 64, 94, 98 God affecting alternatives for ac­ tion, 150, 154, 158, 164, 179 and fictional entities, 158, 172–174 as conceptualized, 30, 116, 132–133, 136, 151, 169, 180

206 God in the Act of Reference as fictional, 172, 177–178 as functional, 32, 53, 143–144, 150, 169, 173–174, 177 conceptualization of, 30, 32, 47, 97, 148–150, 157–159, 162, 163, 170 emotions towards, 165, 170, 172–173, 179 in non–realism, 11–12, 106, 143 in relation to everyday life, 152, 154, 159 independent existence of, 12– 13, 15, 160–161 reality of, 33, 53, 106, 108, 136, 148–150, 156, 158– 159, 180 without metaphysical real­ ism, 132–133, 159, 163– 164 reference to, 60–61, 96–97, 132–133, 136, 140–150, 177, 180 without metaphysical real­ ism, 4, 15, 83, 96, 105, 143–144 relating to, 96, 151 Groos, Karl, 112, 113n Henderson, David, 40–41, 43, 44 Herrmann, Eberhard, 2, 3, 160–161 Hick, John, 2, 6, 11, 60, 141 Hirsch, Eli, 39 holism, 41, 46, 49 holy communion, 154–156 Huizinga, Johan, 109–110, 125 human interests, 95 human organisms, 36, 38–39, 95 human practices as adequate for life, 10, 15, 161–162, 179 opting out of, 161–162 hybrid theories of reference, 60

illocutionary force, 70 imaginary friends, 156 imagination, 117 incommensurability, 49 independent existence, 102, 159– 164, 178 independent referent, 60, 61, 65– 66, 90, 159, 161, 178 arguments against, 102–104 indexicals, 73, 82 infant development, 17–19, 37, 47 infants and conceptualization, 17– 19, 21, 51, 54–55, 66–67, 118–121 instrumentalism, 6, 13, 172–174 intensional meaning, 69 intentionality, 63–65, 119–121 internal realism, 2, 6, 7, 180 intertranslatability, 8, 34–36, 43 intranslatability, 34–36 intuitions, 63, 78 Kaplan, David, 60 Katz, Jerrold J., 59, 60 Kaufman, Gordon, 145 Kekule, August, 117 knowledge, 46–47 Kripke, Saul, 59, 60 Kuhn, T., 46 language and conceptual structures, 19, 22–23, 26, 34, 41 and reality, 33, 94 origin of, 20, 38 views on, 7–8 language acquisition, 66–67 Le Poidevin, Robin, 2, 170–172, 173n Lindgren, Astrid, 100 linguistic community, 23, 25–27, 44 and context dependency, 71 division of labour within, 60

Index 207 incorporation in, 67 linguistic division of reality, 39 logical form, 77, 83 logical languages, 62 logical positivism, 138 Luckmann, Thomas, 19 Lynch, Michael, 36–37 Maki, Uskali, 160, 163 magic, 125 make–believe and child development, 55 attitude towards fiction, 86 capacity for, 61, 108, 121–122, 179 in science, 117 make–believe activities as real and functional, 114– 117 continuous with everyday life activities, 116 establishing conceptual struc­ tures of, 133–134 origins of, 117–122 other than play, 114–117 play, see make–believe play make–believe entities affecting alternatives for ac­ tion, 154 as real, 52–53 definition of, 126 in relation to everyday life, 89, 154, 156 non–existing objects, 83 make–believe play and human construction, 109 as functional, 111, 121, 151 characteristics of, 109, 111– 112, 123–124 conceptualization in, 44, 114, 126–135, 151 reality of, 112, 115, 134 reference in, 100–102, 122–135

relation to religion, 108, 137 Malinowski, Bronislaw, 125 Marx, Karl, 173 Mead, George Herbert, 113 metaphors, 68, 69 metaphysical existence, 23, 163– 164 metaphysical realism, 83 as unnecessary, 174 metaphysics, 52 as unnecessary, 24 methodological aspects, 5, 97–98, 120, 177 Miller, David, 107 Miller, Richard, 142 modus ludicus, 124 Morning star/Evening star, 58, 91 Moses, 59–60, 99–102 mythical entities, 83–86, 89–92 natural kind terms, 60 Nelson, Lynn Hankinson, 46–47, 120 Newton, Isaac, 46, 47 Nielsen, Kai, 138 non–existing objects, 82–90 and referential failure, 85–86 as real, 102–103 fictional characters, 86–89 mythical entities, 90–92 reference to, 15, 82–90 Santa Claus, 92–94 non–realism and emotions towards God, 172–174 and prayer, 175 and reference, 9, 13, 57, 145– 146, 161, 177 as religiously inadequate, 2, 106, 132, 152, 164–165, 168, 174–175, 177–178 choice of terminology, 7

208 God in the Act of Reference theological advantages with, 172 non–referring terms, 85–86 Olofsson, Birgitta Knutsdotter, 113 paradigm shift, 46 Peircean icon, 124 performatives, 124 perlocutionary effects, 70 Phillips, D. Z., 2, 12–15, 138, 139, 145–146, 176n philosophically exciting/trivial, 34–36, 48–49, 86, 90, 126 philosophy of mind, 165 philosophy of science, 4–6 physical characteristics, 27 and conceptualization, 24–27, 153 and God, 29, 30, 33, 151, 158, 163 strong dependence on, 31, 106–107, 127–128 together with social construc­ tion, 27, 28 weak dependence on, 29, 31– 33, 52, 96–97, 106–107, 122, 128, 140, 151, 153 physical magnitude terms, 60 physical needs, 27 physical reality, 26, 95 and God, 169 as basic, 20–21, 52, 106, 152, 162 definition of, 95 Piaget, Jean, 17–18, 119 picture theory of language, 7 Pike, Nelson, 143 Plato, 107 play, 18 make–believe, see make– believe play

purpose of, 109 religion as, 108 theories on, 107–111, 118–122 postmodernism, 3, 4, 11, 14 power, 28, 29, 95 pragmatic enrichment, 72, 77–80, 82, 140 pragmatic meaning, 71, 76 pragmatic theory of reference, 14– 15, 83, 135–136 in religious language, 146–147 reasons for adopting, 62 pragmatic wastebasket, 82 pragmatics, 68–73, 93 prayer, 1, 10, 32, 126, 150, 165, 168, 170, 173–176, 178 prerequisites for conceptualization, 36–40, 44, 47, 51, 122, 139 pronouns, 60, 68, 73 proper names, 58–61, 73, 141 Putnam, Hilary, 60 quibbling persons, 75–76 Quine, W. O., 20, 22, 46 real affecting alternatives for ac­ tion, 99, 106–107, 148, 150–151, 153–154, 161– 162, 179 criteria for being considered, 99, 105–107, 127–136, 150–159, 179 in a make–believe context, 114 in relation to everyday life, 31, 99, 106–107, 114, 152, 154 internal to a conceptual struc­ ture, 31, 152 realism and ontological relativism, 48 definitions of, 3, 5–7 internal, 7, 180 metaphysical, 83

Index 209 religious, see religious realism realism and non–realism conflict, 2, 9, 57, 146, 177 dialogue, 3, 180–181 reality per se, 8, 164 and reference, 98–104, 147– 148 as conceptualized, 3, 8, 23–25, 39, 50–53, 94, 105–107, 161, 168–169 with different degrees of dependence on physical characteristics, 83, 127– 136, 169, 178–179 as constituted, 23–25, 31–33, 52–53, 83, 99, 180 as constructed, 4, 8, 23–25, 33 as objective, 19–22 as relational, 52–53, 83 as unconceptualized, 8, 20, 24, 50–52 functional aspects of, 24, 31– 33, 133 linguistically structured, 66, 94 more than physical, 52–53 physical, 20–21, 26, 30, 51, 105–107 social construction of, 19–22, 24, 26, 27, 51 to an infant, 17–19 Recanati, Frangois, 60, 71, 77, 78, 82 reconstructive understanding, 36, 40–45, 53, 139 and truth, 49–50 in make–believe play, 132 of religious language, 47 reductionism, 4, 9, 12, 13, 169, 173–174 reference

according to Phillips, 145 and correspondence theory of truth, 61 and reality, 98–104, 147–148 and speaker’s intentions, 63– 65 as speaker dependent, 62–63, 148 context dependency of, 54, 69, 72, 76 continuity of, 94–97 existence required for, 1, 61, 82, 126, 177, 178 in make–believe play, 100–102, 122–135 in non–realism, 9, 13, 57, 143, 145–146, 177 in realism, 8, 10, 13, 141–145 infinite regress of, 91–92 origins of, 65–67, 95 ostensive, 59, 64, 94 pragmatic view of, 14–15, 135–136, 146–147 purpose of, 62–63, 65 to fictional entities, 58, 61, 86– 89 to God, see God without metaphysical real­ ism, 4 to non–existing objects, 82–90 traditional view of, 2, 7, 10, 15, 102–104, 144, 168, 177 unsuccessful, 7, 85–86, 135 without metaphysical realism, 180 reference assignment, 76, 82 and the attributive/referential distinction, 80–81 in relation to reference consti­ tution, 97–98, 102 reference constitution, 44, 147– 148, 179

210 God in the Act of Reference in make–believe play, 114 in relation to reference assign­ ment, 102 in religious practice, 116 means of, 92, 94 referent a function, 89, 101, 143–144 as real, 98–104 context independent, 73, 81, 90, 97 contextually constituted, 24, 66, 81, 91–94, 97–104, 127–132, 147–148, 179, 180 continuity of identity, 94–97 independent existence of, 57, 60, 61, 65–66, 90, 159, 161, 178 terminological use of, 72 unconceptualized, 7, 65–66, 90, 91, 102 referential objection, 9, 15, 57, 102–104, 132, 146, 178 referential theories and ontological relativism, 48 causal, 59–60, 96 criteria for, 75, 82 criteria for evaluating, 62–65 descriptive, 57–58, 73, 96 direct reference, 60–61, 82 pragmatic, 14–15, 83, 135–136 referring expression, 44, 105, 106, 114, 128, 132 referring expressions, 63, 75, 92 relativism, 33–34, 39, 48–50 conceptual, see conceptual relativism ontological, 48 strong, 33, 49, 160 weak, 44, 50, 140 relevance theory, 77 religion

adequate response to life, 22, 136, 161–162 and evolution, 171–172 and play, 108, 116, 137 as functional, 4, 9, 32, 56, 151, 171–172 conceptual structures of, 47– 48, 157–158 constant engagement in, 170– 171 criticism of, 4, 142 definition of, 4–5, 47, 108 emotions in, 165, 170, 171 transformations in, 154–156 without metaphysical realism, 179–180 religious anti–realism, see non­ realism religious entities as real, 52–53 God, see God in relation to everyday life, 89 non–existing objects, 83 religious experience, 149, 169 religious language and continuity of reference, 96–97 as adequate, 105 as fiction, 172–174 autonomous, 137–138 characteristics of, 125–126, 140 external understanding of, 47 non–autonomous, 138–140 use of, 93, 148 religious realism, 106 and reference, 8, 13, 144–145 criticism against, 11, 161 terminology, 6 Riesebrodt, Martin, 5n rigid designators, 59, 88, 141 roles, 88–89

Index 211 and gender, 110 in a pragmatic theory of refer­ ence, 101, 143–144 in make–believe play, 101, 109, 112–113, 115, 123, 130 in psychology of religion, 115– 116 in theatre acting, 157 muted role–taking, 115 Runzo, Joseph, 2 Russell, Bertrand, 58, 83 Santa Claus, 80–81, 86, 92–94, 102–103 Sarbin, Theodore, 115 saturation, 77 Schiller, Friedrich von, 107 science, 10, 46–47 and make–believe, 117 male bias in, 46–47, 120 Sea of Faith, 11 Searle, John, 19–21, 52 semantic meaning, see conven­ tional meaning semantics, 68–73, 93 Semmelweis, Ignaz Philipp, 54n sense, 58 sentence–tokens, 62 sentence–types, 62, 72, 76 Sherlock Holmes, 86–89 singular terms, 60, 73 social construction, 19–22, 24, 26, 27, 89 together with physical charac­ teristics, 27, 28 social institutions, 19, 27, 52 and religion, 22 resistance to, 21–22 social interactionalism, 113 social needs, 27 socialization, 8, 44 socio–biology, 120

Soskice, Janet Martin, 2, 60, 96, 141, 142 speaker’s intentions and reference constitution, 63–65, 74, 101, 128–129, 135, 147, 179 criterial, 80–81, 89, 149 directive, 98–99 identificational, 80–81, 149 on a gradual scale, 81 part of contextual cues, 80, 95 speaker’s reference, 62–63 Sperber, Dan, 77 Stenmark, Mikael, 47n Stromqvist, Sven, 122–125, 134n Strawson, Peter, 36 Stroll, Avrum, 61, 126n structuralism, 41 Sunden, Hjalmar, 115, 116 superstitious beliefs, 42 surroundings as conceptualized, 25, 26, 45 necessity of relating to, 95 physical, 152 relating to, 17, 19, 20, 23, 26, 27, 32, 37, 55, 122, 136 syntax, 68 theism, 172 transfer, 78 transformations and fictional entities, 157 as real, 154 in make–believe play, 29, 111– 114, 129, 130, 133, 154 in religious practice, 154–156 transitional area, see transitional objects transitional objects, 18–19, 55, 111, 118–119, 121–122, 136 Trigg, Roger, 2 truth, 3, 6

212 God in the Act of Reference about fictional entities, 87–88 and different functions, 49–50 and relativism, 48–50 correspondence theory of, 61, 171 criteria for evaluating, 94, 103, 140, 160 unicorns, 83–86, 90–92 utterance meaning and relevance theory, 79 components of, 78 definition of, 71–72 place of attributive/referential distinction, 80 utterances, 62 values and conceptualization, 50 and gender, 110 and reality, 20, 107 and socialization, 109 God defined as, 143 in science, 46

Walton, Kendall, 167–168, 171– 173 weak dependence on physical char­ acteristics, 24–25, 153 and continuity of reference, 96–97 and reality, 29, 31–33, 52, 85, 106–107, 122, 133, 151 God, 33, 140, 150, 151, 165 Wettstein, Howard, 64 Whorf, Benjamin, 33, 45n Wilson, Deidre, 77 Winch, Peter, 42n Winnicott, D. W., 18–19, 55n, 111, 116n, 118–121 Wittgensteinian philosophy of re­ ligion, 2, 7, 12, 14, 138, 145, 180 Zande language, 41–43