Witti-Buch2 2001.qxd - Austrian Ludwig Wittgenstein Society

Religious Truth and Realism in Wittgenstein and the Wittgensteinians
reductionist in form but clearly belonging to "the mystical", somehow far beyond the
world of facts. There seems little doubt that LW's attitude to the "facts" then reflected
a realism based on his notion that meaning in language was provided by "picturing"
the logical form of facts, and that his view of religion was then non-factualist. It
would seem equally clear, however, that LW abandoned the view of religion as
necessarily non-factualist with his abandonment of the picture theory of meaning
during the 1930's. Though he continued to regard himself as a non-believer, he was
now able to appreciate and respect religion differently as a way of life of which
religious discourse was an essential part. The fundamental point of the new way
was, however, the total freeing of itself from the distinction between realism and nonrealism.
2. It seems to me that what may have been behind this abandonment of the realist/nonrealist
distinction was at least in part a realization that the whole model (or "picture")
of "corresponding" with the facts was inappropriate. The "realism" here (preserved
even in so-called "minimal realism") involves likening our thoughts or propositions to
something which "points" at its object, when this is misunderstood as passively
taking note or "seeing". In his later work both "pointing" and "describing" are
recognized to be what J.L.Austin later called "speech acts", i.e. each is a sign/move
which is part of a "language-game."
3. This being so, then while "description" may indeed be contrasted (as by R.M.Hare)
with "prescription", this is because each represents different functions of linguistic
discourse, or as LW puts it, each is a different "language-game."
4. Hare was therefore right to regard his "prescriptivist" theory of ethics as a great
improvement over "descriptivism", which had misled earlier philosophers to adopt
"emotivism" as a theory of ethics out of the recognition that we were not "describing"
the facts. This is exactly parallel to adopting "expressivism" as a theory of religion
out of the recognition that we are not simply describing the facts.
5. I do not believe that Hare's "universal prescriptivism" offers an adequate theory for
ethics. But the improvement brought about by the very introduction of the distinction
between description and prescription is significant. A recognition of different
communicative functions of language is thereby inaugurated, in place of the
distinction between "facticity" and "non-facticity" as interpreted according to the
older (and more muddled) distinction between objective and subjective. This
suggets the possibility that there may be many more such functions to be listed.
Perhaps what we have here is merely part of a wide-open and not necessarily
limited list of possible language functions that we may care to consider.
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