The Notebooks of Schubert Ogden

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In my discussion of inferences I draw from Arthur Danto's reflections on truth as "correspondence" (6 September 2004), I say that bearing witness as such is the action of putting sentences (in the case of explicit witness) or actions (in the case of implicit witness) in position to correspond or not to correspond in the various ways in which witness claims that they do. By contrast, I say, doing theology as such is the different action of saying of given sentences that, were someone to assert them, or of given actions, were someone to perform them, she or he would assert or perform something that would or would not correspond in these various ways.

The more I think about it, however, my problem with this formulation is that the neat distinction it makes (following Danto) between "sentences" and "assertions" in the case of explicit witness has no comparably neat counterpart in what it says about implicit witness, where it speaks simply of "actions" and "performing actions." The question that has occurred to me as I've thought about this is whether I might be able to improve upon my formulation by reflecting further along the lines of Bochenski's distinction between theoretical and practical propositions. In other words, could one say, perhaps, that, while bearing implicit witness as such consists in performing actions, even as bearing explicit witness as such consists in asserting sentences (or propositions), doing theology as such, in the case of implicit witness, consists in saying of given practical propositions (or sentences) that, were someone to perform the action corresponding to them, she or he would perform an action that would or would not correspond in the various ways performing it claims, implicitly or explicitly,
that it does?

This raises the further question of whether what doing theology as such has to do constructively in specifying the implicit witness that is to be borne if it is to be both adequate and fitting is not simply to formulate the practical propositions asserting what is to be done. My thought, in other words, is that, while bearing witness as such consists in performing the actions corresponding to these practical propositions, doing theology as such, so far as it is constructive as concerns bearing implicit witness, consists simply in formulating these propositions themselves.

26 September 2004

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