Thus, I answer the question of the book, namely whether Jews, Muslims, and Christians worship the same God. All have the same singular conception of God, because the three texts (the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament, the Quran) are in a sense one. Both the New Testament and the Quran complete (and sometimes aim to correct) the text on which they are based, and it is this fact (alone) that provides a common understanding of the proper name “God,” in whatever language it is written.
NOTES
1. Durrant (The Logical Status of “God”), 2ff argues that from actual occurrences of “God” in religious language, citing examples of prayers, such as “Almighty God, the fountain of all goodness, we humbly beseech thee . . .” the term “God” is not a proper name. The main examples I shall use in this book are not from prayer, but rather the three scriptures themselves, but even in this prayer, it seems that “Almighty God” co-refers with “thee,” suggesting that “Almighty God” is a referring term.
2. The Quran opens “bismi al-lāhi al-rraḥmāni al-rraḥīmi,” “In the name of God, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful.” Transliteration by Ali, The Glorious Qur’an, 6. Note that in the Arabic itself (not the transliteration), the word “God” is not the second word, given that Arabic script reads right-to-left.
3. That is, assuming that the tokens “God” and “Allah” have the same meaning in the identity statement as the same tokens in the original texts. I shall discuss the question of disquotation in chapter 9.
4. In the 1952 edition of Translations from the Philosophical Writings of Gottlob Frege, Max Black and Peter Geach translated “Über Sinn und Bedeutung” as “On Sense and Reference.” The German word Bedeutung actually means “signification” or “meaning.” Peter Long and Roger White were the first to translate it as “meaning” in the English version of Frege’s Posthumous Writings. In the third (1980) edition, Geach and Black changed to “meaning” (thus “On sense and meaning”). However, as Dummett pointed out, the term “reference” could not be dislodged by a quarter of a century of philosophical discussion and commentary on Frege’s work, and the original English usage has stuck.
5. “A proper name [is] a word which answers the purpose of showing what thing it is that we are talking about, but not of telling anything about it” (Mill, A System of Logic, 1. ii. 5, my emphasis). See also Prior, Objects of Thought, 155, Strawson, “On referring,” (Logico-Linguistic Papers), 1–27.
6. Ibid., Antequam musicus esset, Socrates dictus est, vel postquam filius Sophronisci non erit, Socrates dicetur.
7. Devitt, “Against direct reference” (On Sense and Direct Reference: Readings in the Philosophy of Language), 463.
8. The idea that a sentence expresses its truth value can be found as early as Frege’s Grundgesetze §32. He says that a significant sentence determines under which (truth) conditions (Bedingungen) it signifies the truth value True, and that if it does signify the True, it is a sort of name for the True, and the sense of this sentence-name is the thought is that the (truth) conditions are met. Actually the idea can be found much earlier in Buridan’s Treatise on Consequences (King 1985, Book I chapter 1), but it is doubtful that Buridan had any influence on Frege.
9. Evans, The Varieties of Reference, 10.
10. Frege, Posthumous Writings, 174, see also p. 130. Frege’s position here is somewhat muddled by his attribution of “sense” to empty terms, so that proper names can have at least some kind of meaning, as well as a designation or reference. This is irrelevant to the present discussion, but see Evans, The Varieties of Reference chapter 1 for ample Frege exegesis.
11. Geach and Black, Translations from the Philosophical Writings of Gottlob Frege, 69, except I am translating Frege’s “Bedeutung” as “significance” rather than “reference.” This is consistent with the rest of the third edition translation, which aimed to replace “reference” with meaning, with the dictionary translation, where “Bedeutung” is given as signification, meaning, standing for, and so on, and (I believe) with Frege’s intention. The passages from Frege’s comments on Schroeder are barely intelligible otherwise.
12. Frege clearly presumes that if a sentence is meaningful, then it is meaningful whether true or false. But if the sentence asserts of any of its components that the component is meaningful, and if the meaning of the sentence depends on its components, the sentence would not be meaningful if false.
13. Geach, Logic Matters, 52.
14. Ibid., 59.
15. Frege, G. (1895) “A critical elucidation of some points in E. Schroeder’s Vorlesungen Über Die Algebra der Logik,” Archiv fur systematische Philosophie, 1895, 433–56, trans. Geach in Geach & Black, 86–106, p. 454, my emphasis. See also “On concept and object,” G&B, 42 ff. “A concept . . . is predicative. On the other hand, a name of an object, a proper name, is quite incapable of being used as a grammatical predicate” (p. 43). We can, of course, say that someone is Alexander the Great. But this involves a different use of the word “is,” that is, the “is” of predication versus the “is” of identity, which I will discuss later.
16. The term is Brandom’s (Brandom, Making it Explicit, 301).
17. There is a dispute about whether Frege’s account of reference implies the standard theory, but I am not concerned here with matters of Fregean exegesis. Evans, The Varieties of Reference chapter 1 is the locus classicus.
18. Aristotle, On Interpretation, 17b1.
19. Aptus natus est praedicari de uno solo. Quine (Word and Object, 96, my emphasis) says “a singular term is one that purports to refer to just one object.”
20. Kretzmann, William of Sherwood’s Introduction to Logic, 110.
21. In Aristotelian semantics, a proposition is a type of sentence which, unlike a question or a command, is capable of truth or falsity. In Fregean semantics, the sentence expresses a proposition, an extra-mental Platonic truthbearer.
22. Traditionally, the proposition is the bearer of truth and falsity. Aristotle distinguishes (On Interpretation 17 a4) a sentence (λόγος, oratio) from a proposition (ἀπόφανσις, propositio) or declarative sentence (λόγος ἀποφαντικός, oratio enuntiativa), for only the proposition is capable of truth and falsity. Thus, a prayer is not a proposition (nor is a question or a command). He dismisses all other types of sentence in order to focus on the proposition, saying that other types of sentence are the domain of rhetoric or poetry. Contemporary philosophers take a different view of the proposition, regarding it not as a type of sentence, but rather as the meaning or thought or “Russellian proposition” expressed by the sentence. Some regard it as a wholly extralinguistic item, which includes as a component the object that the proposition is about, although Russell himself did not seem to have endorsed this. Whenever I use the word, I shall mean an assertoric or declarative sentence, a form of words in which something is propounded, put forward for consideration, and which is thus capable of being true or false, rather than a thought or a meaning. People who don’t like “proposition” can replace it mentally with “statement.”
23. Significare sequitur intelligere.
24.