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God speaks. The Bible records the first speech and God makes it. If the chronology of scripture is to be believed, God could speak prior to creation and, therefore, God can speak sans creation. He could use a language in eternity past. This seems clear: he is the first to utter a word (Gen 1); he determines the world and everything in it including all the languages, sentences, and what they mean prior to creation; and God, the Son, is identified as the “Word” that pre-exists creation (John 1). He doesn’t actually have to say anything, but he has to be able to express his thoughts in a language. On one attractive picture, God is able to speak in virtue of an intra-Trinitarian conversation. The Triune God is a linguistically capable community of persons. As McCall suggests, Father and Son are “distinct in speech and action…The Father and Son are (or have) distinct centers of consciousness.” [1] The Son talks to his Father from his perspective. In order to have a perspective one m...

Does the private language argument succeed if we apply it to God? Could God have a private language? A private mental entity (PME) is an entity only accessible by the mind that has it. A sensation, like toothache, is a good example (L. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations ). No one apart from the person with toothache has access to that toothache. But a thought might also count as a PME. A human thought is usually about something public, a tree perhaps, but it might be about something private like a sensation. Thoughts like these are privately owned.  My thought that the Christmas tree looks good is my thought; I own it, it is had by me, and only I know I am having it (of course, God knows I have this thought and now I have hit "publish" you know that I have had this thought). However, the only way for you to know that I have had the thought is through my expression of it through a sentence in natural language. Consider now a singular mind. Call it the Divine ...

What is the purpose of language? Where did it come from? For much of Western history we have vacillated between the theory that meaning is in the object and the theory that meaning is in the mind. Perhaps it was Wittgenstein who turned all this on its head. After making the argument for the former, Wittgenstein changed his mind and thought that the problem would be solved by resisting the temptation to define language ostensibly. Instead, language, and, more basically, meaning, is functional. Language is used in what Wittgenstein called, "language games," a complete activity, a way of doing things not merely naming things. Language has since been top of the philosophical to-do list. One view that holds popular sway is that language is not determined by events but determined by the naming of events in discourse, meaning is made , determined by a collection of human subjects or one human subject. What then is the Christian view of language? First, Christians...

Ludwig Wittgenstein Essentialism  suggests that a word is a sign for a meaning which correlates to an object. The way words connect with the world is by picturing a state of affairs by the use of names/signs which have determinative meanings. The object in the world has a sign. The meaning  is  the object in the world. The essence of the word  is  the meaning, the object. This, it is assumed, is known through the pointing and repeating the name of the object you are pointing to. This is an  ostensive  definition. To ostensibly define something is to point at something and say its name. For example, I can point at a chair, and say, “chair.” My son then learns the name of the object. The essence of language, therefore, is ostensive – it is the naming of objects. Names are then combined in sentences to create pictures of reality. Anti-essentialism,  as espoused by Ludwig Wittgenstein, is the denial of essentialism by asserting that the...

One wise professor once told me that to use Ludwig Wittgenstein in a paper was to invite derision. He evidently felt that Wittgenstein is so variously interpreted that one will always be wrong about what he meant. Another professor once told me that it was possible to write a paper without mentioning Cornelius Van Til. Possible, but, for this Van Tillian blogger, quite unlikely. So I offer some interaction between Van Til and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein is most commonly taken to be opposing a foundationalist theory of knowledge. He writes “Really 'The proposition is either true or false' only means that it must be possible to decide for or against it. But this does not say what the ground for such a decision is.” 1 While Wittgenstein might reach “the bottom” of his convictions, those convictions remain ungrounded. If he feels that he has reached the foundation of all his beliefs, he is confronted with the question of what kind of belief that m...