Mitchell's Partisan and Hare's Bliks | AQA A-Level Philosophy

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AQA A-Level Philosophy | Free Revision Notes

Estimated study time: 40 minutes

Mitchell's Partisan and Hare's Bliks A-Level Philosophy revision examines two contrasting responses to Flew's falsification challenge. Mitchell argues that religious belief can remain cognitive even when believers continue to hold it despite apparently conflicting evidence. Hare takes a more radical approach, presenting religious belief as a blik, an attitude or interpretation of the world that is not accepted or rejected according to empirical evidence. The central question is whether either response successfully preserves the meaningfulness of religious language.

Learning Objectives 🎯

By the end of this revision page, you should be able to:

• Explain Mitchell's Partisan response to Flew.

• Explain how evidence can count against a belief without immediately falsifying it.

• Explain Hare's concept of a blik.

• Explain the role of Hare's lunatic example.

• Compare Mitchell's cognitive response with Hare's non-cognitive response.

• Evaluate whether either approach successfully preserves meaningful religious language.

Revision Notes 📚

The problem Mitchell and Hare are answering

Both Mitchell and Hare respond to the challenge developed in Flew and the Falsification Challenge [Flew and the Falsification Challenge].

Flew asks:

What would have to happen for a believer to accept that a religious assertion was false?

If the believer answers:

Nothing could ever count against my belief,

Flew argues that the claim becomes unfalsifiable.

The danger is that statements such as:

God loves us.

may gradually lose factual content as they are repeatedly protected from apparent counterevidence.

Mitchell and Hare respond in very different ways.

Mitchell tries to preserve religious belief as cognitive and truth-apt.

Hare questions whether religious language needs to function as factual assertion in the first place.

Mitchell's Partisan

The Partisan example

Mitchell asks us to imagine a partisan living in an occupied country.

The partisan meets a stranger who claims to be the leader of the resistance.

The partisan is sufficiently impressed by this encounter to trust the stranger.

Later, however, the partisan sees events that create difficulties for this belief.

Sometimes the stranger appears to support the resistance.

At other times, the stranger appears to act in ways that help the occupying forces.

The partisan continues to believe that the stranger is trustworthy.

However, crucially, the partisan does not simply dismiss the troubling evidence as irrelevant.

Why the example matters

The Partisan is designed to challenge Flew's assumption that:

continuing to believe despite counterevidence means the belief has become meaningless.

Mitchell argues that there is a third possibility.

Someone can:

• hold a genuine factual belief

• recognise evidence against that belief

• nevertheless continue to trust that the belief is true.

The existence of counterevidence does not always force rational people to abandon a belief immediately.

The religious parallel

The partisan's trust in the resistance leader represents religious trust in God.

A believer may have reasons for believing:

God exists.

or:

God is good.

They may then encounter experiences that appear to count against those beliefs.

The most obvious example is suffering, considered in The Problem of Evil [The Problem of Evil].

A believer may admit:

This suffering really is difficult evidence for my belief in a good God.

Yet they may continue to believe because they judge that their wider reasons for trust remain stronger.

Mitchell's crucial point is:

The evidence against the belief is acknowledged rather than explained away as irrelevant.

Evidence can count against without being decisive

Mitchell distinguishes between:

evidence that counts against a belief

and:

evidence that decisively falsifies a belief.

These are not the same.

Suppose there is evidence supporting a belief and then one piece of evidence appears to conflict with it.

It may be rational to:

• take the counterevidence seriously

• recognise that it creates a difficulty

• retain the belief while further understanding is sought.

Mitchell argues that religious belief can function in this way.

Why this answers Flew

Flew's central concern is that believers allow nothing to count against religious assertions.

Mitchell responds:

Religious believers can recognise evidence against their beliefs.

The believer therefore does not need to say:

Everything supports my belief.

Nor do they need to say:

Nothing could ever possibly count against it.

Instead, they can say:

There is genuine evidence against this belief, but I do not consider it sufficient to justify abandoning the belief.

This allows evidence to remain relevant.

Mitchell preserves cognitivism

Mitchell treats religious statements as genuine propositions about reality.

For example:

God loves human beings.

remains capable of being:

• true

• false.

The statement therefore remains truth-apt.

Mitchell is not claiming that religious language merely expresses an attitude or emotion.

His response is firmly connected with cognitivism, introduced in Cognitivism, Non-Cognitivism and Verification [Cognitivism, Non-Cognitivism and Verification].

Commitment does not remove factual content

The Partisan example shows that strong personal commitment and cognitive belief can coexist.

The partisan's trust is not presented as:

a belief that ignores all evidence.

Instead, the relationship creates a reason to continue trusting despite troubling evidence.

Similarly, religious commitment may affect the weight a believer gives to different pieces of evidence.

This does not necessarily mean the original belief has ceased to make a factual claim.

Mitchell and the problem of evil

The problem of evil provides a particularly important application.

Suppose the believer claims:

God is supremely good.

Severe suffering appears to count against this belief.

Flew asks:

What suffering would make you abandon the claim?

Mitchell allows the believer to admit:

Suffering genuinely counts against my belief.

However, the believer may continue to trust that there is an explanation they do not presently understand.

This avoids simply saying:

suffering makes no difference whatsoever.

A strength of Mitchell's response

Mitchell takes counterevidence seriously.

This helps answer Flew because the belief is not protected from all possible evidence.

Religious assertions remain connected with reality.

Events in the world can:

• support them

• challenge them

• create rational difficulties for them.

This preserves their cognitive character.

A problem for Mitchell: when should belief be abandoned?

Mitchell's response creates a new question:

How much evidence against a belief can someone rationally accept before they should give it up?

If the partisan continues trusting regardless of how much apparently hostile behaviour is observed, Flew's criticism may return.

The believer could claim that evidence matters while, in practice, never allowing any possible evidence to be decisive.

Mitchell therefore needs some meaningful distinction between:

• reasonable trust

• unfalsifiable commitment.

• 
  

Does Mitchell identify clear falsification conditions?

Flew wants to know what would actually make a believer withdraw their religious assertion.

Mitchell shows that:

evidence can count against religious belief.

But this is not quite the same as specifying:

the exact conditions under which it would be rejected.

A critic can therefore argue that Mitchell softens Flew's challenge without fully answering it.

If no amount of counterevidence could ever lead to withdrawal, Flew might still claim that the religious statement is ultimately unfalsifiable.

Hare's Bliks

What is a blik?

Hare takes a very different approach.

A blik is an attitude towards or interpretation of the world that:

• is not adopted because of empirical evidence

• is not withdrawn because of empirical evidence

• affects how a person interprets experience

• helps determine what counts as evidence

• affects how the person behaves.

A blik therefore operates at a deeper level than an ordinary empirical hypothesis.

A blik shapes interpretation

Suppose two people encounter exactly the same events.

They may interpret those events very differently because they possess different fundamental attitudes towards the world.

A blik influences:

how the evidence itself is understood.

This is important because Flew assumes that religious beliefs are factual assertions that should be tested against independently recognised empirical evidence.

Hare questions whether that is the correct model of religious language.

Bliks are not empirical hypotheses

An empirical hypothesis is normally:

• supported by evidence

• challenged by evidence

• potentially abandoned when sufficiently strong contrary evidence appears.

A blik is different.

It is not held or withdrawn according to empirical evidence.

This means Flew's demand:

What evidence would falsify it?

may be inappropriate if religious language functions as a blik rather than as an ordinary factual hypothesis.

The lunatic example

Hare illustrates bliks using the example of a lunatic who believes that university dons want to murder him.

The lunatic interprets everything through this conviction.

Evidence that might reassure another person does not change his attitude.

For example, apparently friendly behaviour from a don may simply be interpreted within the existing outlook rather than as evidence against it.

The lunatic's blik shapes:

• what he notices

• how he understands events

• what he regards as evidence

• how he behaves towards the dons.

Why Hare uses such an extreme example

Hare is not claiming that religious believers are simply lunatics.

The example illustrates the philosophical structure of a blik.

A blik can shape a person's whole interpretation of the world without being an empirically testable proposition.

Importantly, bliks can differ in quality.

The lunatic's blik is an example of an inadequate or problematic attitude towards the world.

The fact that a blik cannot be straightforwardly falsified therefore does not mean that every blik is equally satisfactory.

Hare's response to Flew

Flew argues:

If a religious claim cannot be falsified, it lacks factual meaning.

Hare responds by questioning the assumption that religious language must possess factual cognitive meaning.

Religious language can be meaningful because it expresses and reflects a fundamental blik.

Its significance lies in how it:

• structures interpretation

• shapes attitudes

• affects behaviour.

It does not need to function as an empirically falsifiable hypothesis.

Hare's response is non-cognitive

This is the major difference between Hare and Mitchell.

Hare's account is non-cognitive.

Religious language, understood through bliks, does not describe mind-independent reality in the way a cognitive proposition does.

It is not truth-apt in the ordinary factual sense.

Instead, it expresses a non-cognitive attitude towards the world.

This means Hare preserves:

meaningfulness

without preserving:

factual truth-aptness.

How a blik can be meaningful

A blik can matter enormously even though it is not empirically falsifiable.

It can affect:

• how someone interprets events

• which experiences they regard as significant

• how they behave.

The lunatic's belief about the dons clearly makes a practical difference to his life.

Similarly, a religious blik could shape how someone interprets:

• suffering

• morality

• purpose

• their relationship with the world.

For Hare, this practical and interpretive role gives the language meaning.

Hare avoids Flew's challenge

Flew's falsification test applies most naturally to cognitive assertions.

Hare can therefore reply:

You are applying the wrong test.

If religious language expresses a blik rather than a factual hypothesis, asking:

What evidence would falsify it?

misunderstands what the language is doing.

Hare does not need to make the religious blik falsifiable in order to preserve its non-cognitive meaning.

Mitchell and Hare Compared

Their fundamental difference

Mitchell and Hare offer two very different solutions.

Mitchell	Hare
Cognitive response	Non-cognitive response
Religious claims remain truth-apt	Religious language need not be truth-apt
Evidence can count for or against belief	A blik is not adopted or withdrawn through empirical evidence
Belief may survive counterevidence	Falsification is the wrong test for a blik
Partisan illustrates justified trust	Lunatic illustrates an evidence-resistant worldview
Preserves factual claims about God	Preserves meaning through attitude and interpretation

This distinction is central to the lesson.

Mitchell accepts more of Flew's framework

Mitchell agrees with Flew that religious belief can be treated as making genuine claims about reality.

Their disagreement concerns how such beliefs should respond to counterevidence.

Flew says that refusal to abandon a claim threatens its factual meaning.

Mitchell says that:

a factual belief can remain meaningful even when a believer retains it despite genuine counterevidence.

So Mitchell challenges Flew from within a cognitivist framework.

Hare rejects Flew's framework

Hare's response is more radical.

He questions the assumption that religious language is primarily an empirical factual hypothesis.

If religion functions through bliks, then Flew's falsification requirement does not apply in the first place.

Hare therefore avoids Flew's challenge by changing the account of what religious language is doing.

Which response preserves ordinary religious claims?

Mitchell has an apparent advantage here.

When someone says:

God exists.

or:

God is good,

they often appear to be saying something about reality.

Mitchell retains this.

These statements can still be:

• factual

• true

• false

• supported or challenged by evidence.

Hare's account changes their status.

If they express bliks rather than factual beliefs, then they no longer straightforwardly assert that a mind-independent God actually exists or possesses certain attributes.

Hare's potential cost

Hare may successfully preserve meaning, but at a considerable cost.

Consider all the earlier arguments in Metaphysics of God.

Anselm, Paley, Aquinas and others attempt to establish conclusions concerning a God who actually exists.

If:

God exists

is interpreted non-cognitively, the point of these arguments becomes difficult to preserve in its original form.

They appear to be arguing about reality, not merely about which attitude towards reality we should adopt.

This problem becomes important in Religious Language and Metaphysics of God Review [Religious Language and Metaphysics of God Review].

Mitchell's potential cost

Mitchell preserves the factual character of religion, but Flew's challenge may still remain.

The Partisan shows that:

evidence against a belief need not immediately destroy it.

But Flew can still ask:

What evidence would eventually be sufficient?

If the answer remains:

No possible evidence,

then Mitchell may not have fully escaped the charge of unfalsifiability.

So Mitchell's response is strongest if religious believers genuinely accept that some conceivable evidence could count decisively against their belief.

Evaluating Mitchell's Response

Strength: counterevidence is acknowledged

Mitchell does not make religious belief immune from evidence.

The believer can recognise that:

some experiences genuinely count against belief.

This provides a clear answer to the strongest version of Flew's criticism.

The belief is not being endlessly protected by claiming that every apparent difficulty is actually evidence in its favour.

Strength: commitment can be rational

Many important beliefs involve trust extending beyond what is immediately apparent.

A single piece of counterevidence need not rationally overturn everything previously believed.

Mitchell captures this feature of belief.

The existence of commitment therefore does not automatically transform a factual belief into meaningless language.

Weakness: the point of falsification may remain unclear

The response needs some answer to:

When should the believer actually give up?

Without any possible answer, Flew may still argue that the belief is unfalsifiable.

Mitchell therefore successfully distinguishes:

evidence against

from:

immediate rejection,

but may have more difficulty explaining the point at which evidence becomes decisive.

Weakness: trust cannot justify anything

The fact that someone trusts a belief does not itself show that the belief is true.

The Partisan may be correct to trust.

But the Partisan may also be mistaken.

Mitchell primarily defends the meaningfulness of continued belief rather than establishing that the religious belief is true.

That limitation should be kept clear in evaluation.

Evaluating Hare's Response

Strength: Hare explains why falsification may be irrelevant

If religious language is genuinely non-cognitive, Flew's falsification test has been misapplied.

A blik does not claim to be an ordinary empirical hypothesis.

Its inability to be falsified therefore does not destroy its meaning.

This offers a powerful escape from Flew's challenge.

Strength: bliks have practical significance

Hare can explain why religious language matters even without factual truth conditions.

A blik affects:

• interpretation

• evidence

• behaviour.

It therefore has consequences for how a person lives and understands reality.

Religious language is not meaningless simply because it is non-cognitive.

Weakness: does Hare change the subject?

A major objection is that Hare may preserve religious language only by changing what religious believers mean.

A believer saying:

God exists

usually appears to be making more than the claim:

I interpret the world through a religious attitude.

They appear to claim:

There really is a God.

If so, Hare's non-cognitivism fails to preserve an important part of religious belief.

Weakness: can we distinguish good and bad bliks?

Hare's lunatic example demonstrates that bliks can be deeply mistaken or unhealthy ways of interpreting the world.

But if bliks are not straightforwardly assessed as true or false, another question arises:

How should we judge between better and worse bliks?

The example therefore helps Hare show that evidence-resistance does not equal meaninglessness, but it also raises questions about how different bliks should be evaluated.

Mitchell, Hare and the Problem of Evil

The problem of evil provides a useful way to compare them.

Suppose the claim is:

God is supremely good.

Mitchell

The believer can admit that suffering:

counts against the claim.

However, they may still trust in God's goodness because of their wider reasons for belief.

The statement remains cognitive.

Hare

The religious attitude may shape how suffering itself is interpreted.

The religious blik is not simply accepted or rejected according to individual pieces of evidence.

The language remains meaningful non-cognitively.

The two responses therefore treat evidence very differently.

Mitchell, Hare and Hick Compared

The previous lesson studied Hick and Eschatological Verification [Hick and Eschatological Verification].

All three preserve meaningful religious language, but through different strategies.

Hick	Mitchell	Hare
Cognitive	Cognitive	Non-cognitive
Religious claims can be verified	Religious claims can face counterevidence without immediate rejection	Religious language can be meaningful without empirical testing
Responds mainly to Ayer	Responds to Flew	Responds to Flew
Preserves truth-aptness	Preserves truth-aptness	Rejects truth-aptness as necessary
Appeals to possible post-mortem verification	Appeals to reasonable commitment	Appeals to bliks

This comparison is especially useful for the final Religious Language and Metaphysics of God Review [Religious Language and Metaphysics of God Review].

Which Response Answers Flew Better?

There is a trade-off.

Mitchell

Preserves more of what ordinary religious assertions appear to claim.

But he still needs to explain whether there are genuine limits to religious commitment.

Hare

Escapes Flew's falsification test more completely.

But he does so by denying that religious language needs to function as a truth-apt factual assertion.

The central evaluative question is therefore:

Which matters more, preserving factual content or escaping the demand for empirical falsifiability?

Can Both Responses Be Right?

They cannot straightforwardly be identical accounts because they classify religious language differently.

Mitchell understands religious belief cognitively.

Hare understands religious language through non-cognitive bliks.

However, different uses of religious language might appear to have different functions.

For the specified debate, students should focus on the contrast:

Mitchell retains the cognitive character of religious belief.

Hare offers a non-cognitive alternative.

This distinction should remain clear throughout an essay.

Does Mitchell Preserve Meaning?

Mitchell has a strong case if:

• religious claims really are factual

• evidence can genuinely count against them

• believers have rational grounds for not abandoning them immediately

• continued commitment is not unlimited.

Under these conditions, Flew's conclusion that religious belief must be meaningless appears too quick.

Does Hare Preserve Meaning?

Hare clearly gives religious language a function.

Bliks:

• structure experience

• influence interpretation

• affect behaviour.

So religious language can be meaningful on his account.

The more difficult question is whether it preserves the type of meaning religious believers actually intend.

If believers mean to assert a real God's existence, non-cognitivism may preserve meaningfulness while losing factual religious belief.

Overall Assessment

Mitchell and Hare respond to Flew in fundamentally different ways.

Mitchell's Partisan preserves a cognitive account of religion. Like the partisan who continues trusting the resistance leader despite troubling evidence, a religious believer can acknowledge that suffering or other experiences genuinely count against belief while nevertheless retaining faith. Counterevidence need not automatically amount to decisive falsification.

Hare's blik takes a non-cognitive route. A blik is a fundamental attitude towards the world that shapes interpretation, evidence and behaviour without being adopted or abandoned according to empirical evidence. The lunatic example illustrates how such a worldview can structure every experience.

Mitchell therefore preserves the factual content of religious language more successfully, but faces Flew's continuing question about what would finally falsify the belief. Hare escapes the falsification requirement more decisively, but may do so only by changing religious claims from statements about mind-independent reality into non-cognitive expressions of an attitude towards the world.

Key Words 🔑

Key word	Student-friendly definition	How it may be used in an exam
Partisan	Mitchell's example of someone who retains trust despite acknowledging genuine evidence against that trust.	Use when explaining how religious belief can remain cognitive despite counterevidence.
Blik	Hare's term for an attitude towards the world that shapes interpretation and behaviour but is not adopted or withdrawn according to empirical evidence.	Use when explaining Hare's non-cognitive response to Flew.
Cognitivism	The view that religious claims describe mind-independent reality and can be true or false.	Use when classifying Mitchell's response.
Non-cognitivism	The view that religious language need not describe mind-independent reality or be truth-apt in order to be meaningful.	Use when classifying Hare's response.
Falsification	Testing a factual assertion by identifying conditions under which it would be rejected as false.	Use when explaining the challenge Mitchell and Hare are answering.

Common Mistakes ⚠️

Mistake: Saying Mitchell argues that evidence against religious belief is irrelevant

Why this is incorrect:Mitchell's response depends on the believer recognising that some evidence genuinely counts against the belief.

How to improve:Distinguish evidence against a belief from evidence that is sufficient to make the believer abandon it.

Mistake: Treating Mitchell as a non-cognitivist

Why this is incorrect:Mitchell preserves religious statements as genuine truth-apt claims about reality.

How to improve:Classify the Partisan response as cognitive.

Mistake: Saying a blik is simply a strongly held factual belief

Why this is incorrect:A blik is not adopted or withdrawn according to empirical evidence and functions as an attitude towards the world.

How to improve:Explain how a blik shapes interpretation, evidence and behaviour.

Mistake: Saying Hare thinks all bliks are equally good

Why this is incorrect:The lunatic example itself demonstrates that a blik can produce a deeply problematic interpretation of the world.

How to improve:Separate the claim that bliks are meaningful from the claim that every blik is equally satisfactory.

Mistake: Saying Hare proves religious claims are true

Why this is incorrect:Hare's response is non-cognitive and does not attempt to establish religious propositions as factually true.

How to improve:Explain that Hare aims to preserve meaning, not truth-aptness.

Mistake: Saying Mitchell and Hare give the same response to Flew

Why this is incorrect:Mitchell retains cognitive religious assertions, while Hare rejects the need to treat religious language as factual assertion.

How to improve:Make the cognitive versus non-cognitive distinction central to the comparison.

Exam-Style Questions ✍️

Question 1

Define a blik. (3 marks)

Indicative answer:A blik is Hare's term for an attitude towards the world that is not held or withdrawn according to empirical evidence and which shapes interpretation, what counts as evidence and how a person behaves.

Marking guidance:Credit both its independence from ordinary empirical confirmation or falsification and its role in shaping interpretation or behaviour.

Question 2

Explain the philosophical point of Mitchell's Partisan example. (5 marks)

Indicative answer:Mitchell uses the Partisan to show that someone can recognise genuine evidence against a belief while rationally continuing to hold it. Similarly, a religious believer may acknowledge that experiences such as suffering count against belief in a good God without immediately abandoning that belief. Religious belief can therefore remain cognitive and responsive to evidence.

Marking guidance:A strong response should explain the distinction between counterevidence and decisive falsification.

Question 3

Explain Hare's lunatic example. (5 marks)

Indicative answer:Hare's lunatic interprets university dons through a fixed attitude that they intend to kill him. Evidence does not cause him to abandon this outlook because the outlook itself shapes how he interprets the evidence. Hare uses the example to illustrate a blik, a fundamental attitude towards the world rather than an ordinary empirically testable hypothesis.

Marking guidance:Credit both the evidence-resistant worldview and its role in illustrating the concept of a blik.

Question 4

Explain one important difference between Mitchell's and Hare's responses to Flew. (5 marks)

Indicative answer:Mitchell gives a cognitive response. Religious beliefs remain factual and truth-apt, and evidence can count against them without immediately falsifying them. Hare gives a non-cognitive response, arguing that religious language can express a blik that is meaningful without being an empirically falsifiable factual assertion.

Marking guidance:The cognitive versus non-cognitive distinction should be explicit.

Question 5

Explain Mitchell's response to Flew's falsification challenge. (12 marks)

Indicative content might include:

• Flew asks what would falsify religious assertions.

• He argues that beliefs protected from all possible counterevidence may lose factual meaning.

• Mitchell uses the example of the Partisan.

• The partisan trusts the resistance leader.

• Some experiences support that trust.

• Other experiences appear to count against it.

• The partisan nevertheless continues to trust.

• Crucially, the negative evidence is acknowledged as genuine counterevidence.

• Counterevidence does not always amount to decisive falsification.

• Religious believers can similarly acknowledge difficulties such as evil.

• Religious belief can therefore remain responsive to evidence.

• Mitchell retains a cognitive account of religious language.

• Religious assertions remain truth-apt.

Marking guidance:A developed answer should explain why continuing to believe despite counterevidence does not automatically make a claim unfalsifiable or meaningless.

Question 6

Explain Hare's response to Flew's falsification challenge. (12 marks)

Indicative content might include:

• Flew assumes that meaningful religious assertions should be open to falsification.

• Hare introduces the concept of a blik.

• A blik is an attitude towards the world.

• It is not adopted or withdrawn according to empirical evidence.

• It shapes how evidence itself is interpreted.

• It affects behaviour.

• Hare's lunatic example illustrates this.

• The lunatic's attitude towards the dons shapes every experience.

• Hare applies the concept to religious viewpoints.

• Religious language can therefore remain meaningful without functioning as an empirical hypothesis.

• Hare's response is non-cognitive.

• It preserves meaningfulness without requiring truth-aptness or falsifiability.

Marking guidance:A strong answer should explain why Hare believes Flew's falsification test is inappropriate for language expressing a blik.

Question 7

Evaluate Mitchell's and Hare's responses to Flew. (25 marks)

What a strong answer should include:

A developed answer could consider:

• Flew's requirement that genuine factual assertions allow possible falsification.

• The problem of repeated qualification.

• Mitchell's Partisan.

• The distinction between counterevidence and decisive falsification.

• Whether rational commitment can survive contrary evidence.

• Whether Mitchell identifies any point at which religious belief should be abandoned.

• Mitchell's preservation of cognitive, truth-apt religious language.

• Hare's concept of a blik.

• The lunatic example.

• How bliks shape interpretation, evidence and behaviour.

• Hare's rejection of the need for empirical falsifiability.

• Hare's non-cognitivism.

• Whether Hare preserves meaningful religious language but loses its factual content.

• Whether claims such as "God exists" appear intended as factual statements.

• Whether Mitchell therefore better reflects ordinary religious belief.

• Whether Hare provides the stronger answer to Flew's actual falsification test.

• A reasoned judgement about which response is more successful.

Marking guidance:The strongest responses will compare the approaches throughout, particularly the trade-off between Mitchell's preservation of truth-aptness and Hare's more complete escape from falsification.

Question 8

Evaluate whether religious language can remain meaningful if it is not falsifiable. (25 marks)

What a strong answer should include:

A developed answer could consider:

• Flew's argument that factual assertions should exclude some possible states of affairs.

• Why complete immunity from counterevidence threatens cognitive meaning.

• The "death of a thousand qualifications".

• Mitchell's argument that evidence may count against belief without decisively falsifying it.

• Whether Mitchell successfully preserves genuinely falsifiable religious assertions.

• Hare's argument that bliks need not be empirically falsifiable.

• The distinction between cognitive and non-cognitive meaning.

• Whether the practical and interpretive significance of a blik is sufficient for meaningfulness.

• Whether religious believers intend statements such as "God exists" to be factual.

• Whether Hare's solution therefore changes the meaning of religious belief too substantially.

• The relationship with Hick and Eschatological Verification [Hick and Eschatological Verification].

• Whether meaningful religious language must be capable of either verification or falsification.

• A reasoned judgement about whether falsifiability is necessary for all religious meaning or specifically for cognitive factual religious claims.

Marking guidance:A strong response should distinguish the question "Is this language meaningful?" from "Is it cognitively truth-apt?". Hare may preserve the first while giving up the second, whereas Mitchell attempts to preserve both.