ABSTRACT
I claimed earlier that the Neo-Wittgensteinian critique of traditional philosophy of religion mirrors Wittgenstein's critique of philosophy generally in that they aim to show that whenever a rule of grammar is treated as a truth about reality, one has slipped into a confused metaphysics. We saw in the previous chapter that for Wittgenstein, the confusion lies in appealing to reality in order to justifY meaning claims. Because rules of grammar are construed as meaningconstituents, the distinction emphasises what for Wittgenstein is a trivial truth; that it makes no sense to think that we can coherently explain or justifY meaning by appealing to a reality independent of it because to do so implies the possibility of getting outside meaning and that idea is incoherent. Outside meaning there is not further meaning, but no meaning at all. The idea of explanation in connection to meaning is therefore suspect (I "explain" nothing if I say "this is (means) 'red' because this is red"). We also saw that the criterion for whether a proposition was to be counted as a rule or a statement was not the positivistic one of whether experience could be appealed to in order to verifY or falsifY it, but the use to which the proposition was being put. Grammatical propositions tum out to be those propositions that are deeply embedded in the game. That is how they acquire their status as rules. Doubting them brings the intelligibility of the entire game into question. Therein lies their necessity.
