Tuesday, June 2, 2009

Language and Meaning

Since all assertions about authority are made via language, I feel obliged to make a few (further) observations about language and meaning.
  • Modernism - meaning is ultimately grounded in the individual's ability to observe (empiricism) and reason (rationalism). Language is a tool for representing the truth that results from these two activities. A symbol (word) and what it refers to (object) are decoupled with a one-way relationship from symbol to object.
    Language = Truth.
  • Postmodernism (or hyper-modernism) - meaning is unknowable; language/symbols are treated playfully (Pop Art), negatively (feminism), or other? A symbol and its referent are arbitrarily tangled in a way that reflects & reinforces existing power structures.
    Language = Power.

Both approaches reflect a limitation of a human-centered epistemology. Modernism is overly optimistic; postmodernism is overly pessimistic.

A Christian worldview is ultimately grounded in Christ and avoids both extremes (more below).

Modernism correctly appreciates that the world is knowable, that relations in the world can be modeled in language and communicated to other places/times, and that there is a stable relationship between the world and these models. However, it fails to appreciate the limits of our ability to sense (the quantum world) and reason (paradoxes like "this statement is false" where symbol and referent are tangled).

Postmodernism latches onto these limitations (hence the term hyper-modernism) to highlight the fact that a human-centered knowing ultimately has a Wile E Coyote problem (picture him running over a cliff, then looking down, then looking at the camera)...all such knowing is ultimately grounded on thin air.

A few years ago Ken Boa and Robert Bowman wrote a nice overview of apologetics (Faith Has Its Reasons; see Boa's site for the entire text). In it, they describe a taxonomy of 4 approaches :

  • Classical - emphasizes reason
  • Evidential - emphasizes evidence
  • Reformed - emphasizes special revelation
  • Fideist - emphasizes experience

Not surprisingly, they propose to integrate all four approaches. The first two seem to be toward the modern end of the spectrum, the last seems more toward the postmodern end.

The third approach (Reformed) is the most difficult to understand. It asserts that for knowledge to be coherent, it must presuppose the truth of the Bible...especially the truth of Jesus.

Even Christians often struggle with this since, in the Western world, we are grounded in and saturated by a human-centered way of knowing from the time we're born. Moving to a way of seeing that is truly grounded in God's special revelation takes time and reflects a certain degree of maturity (see I Cor 1-3).

And, our limitations bubble to the surface when we consider that all our knowing is mediated through experience and reason....another tangled hierarchy since our apprehension of the Word is mediated through these two, but what we come to understand from the Word dethrones us (along with our experience and reason) as the ultimate knower and puts God on that throne.

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