Meaning Is Use, but Not How You Think

Richard Braithwaite gave the 9th annual Eddington lecture 19 years after A.J. Ayer had ejected all religious language, so Ayer thought, off the field of meaning. For Braithwaite, there are chinks in the positivist armor (most notably with regard to moral speech). He concedes to the positivists that religious language fails the test of empirical observation, hypothesis, and analytic entailment. But he denies that failure against this criterion implies failure of meaning. Moral statements, for example, seem to have meaning beyond either assertion of fact or expression of taste: they can compel us. The force of this objection, Braithwaite notes, has caused subsequent thinkers either to fudge on "verification" or on "meaning"; Braithwaite does the latter, adapting a doctrine of Wittgenstein's to argue that if use guarantees meaning then the meaning of a statement "is given by the way in which it is used." Nor does this move, he insists, constitute a defection from empiricism. In fact, an empiricist discovers how a word is used by way of "empirical inquiry" alone. 

What exactly is the moral sense of this?

And that use, he argues, is moral; religious statements encrypt a kind of morality. To make way for this thesis, Braithwaite first examines the nature of moral language. So-called "emotive theories of ethics," like that proposed by Ayer, describe apparent moral assertions as mere expressions of taste; they evince rather than assert. Yet that way of characterizing such language, Braithwaite argues, fails to account for the fact that often people assert to be right a course of action for which they feel no special regard. For him, "no emotion of feeling of approval is fundamental to the use of moral assertions." Instead, moral assertions are used as expressions of intent to behave in a certain way. "What is primary is intention." In this way, Braithwaite thinks he has rescued religious belief for an age of scientific advance.  
 
Braithwaite's suggestions are brilliant. By focusing on the moral sense of Christian language, he thinks he can solve the empirical puzzle and leave Christian practice more or less intact. It is true, that is, that Christian theologians have thought both that Scripture and the Rule of faith tell a story with intense moral implications. And it is also true, or was in Braithwaite's place and time, that most people tend to have a moral compass that is oriented in pretty much the same way. 

But can we really ground moral language itself—let alone coded moral language—in the way Braithwaite thinks we can? For one thing, if we evaluate the statement "x is right" as a cipher for "I intend x," and the latter statement is indexed to a moral system in which "x" is held to be right, have we really broken free of the Verificationist trap? It seems that the move merely circles back to a claim that is either morally significant because it claims some truth about right and wrong behavior or we have let it borrow its significance from an intention that itself borrows meaning from a system of right behavior. I do not see how we can avoid either a claim to some kind of truth or an infinite regress. And if this is true of moral language, it seems just as true of his mirroring move with respect to religious claims. If religious language, such as "I believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the only begotten Son of God" is really a code for "I intend to live my life agapeistically," and if that latter statement only finds its specifically Christian character with reference to the Christian story, it seems we are not yet free of deciding whether the statement "I believe in one Lord Jesus Christ..." has its own meaning. I suspect that clever Verificationists would view this entire program as so much handwaving, demonstrating even more clearly that we can arrive at a basically moral society without reference to all of these complicated religious systems.