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Shiavault - a Vault of Shia Islamic Books Islamic Political Theory (Legislation): Volume 2 Session 40: Religious Knowledge: Fiction or True Reflection? The status of realistic and unrealistic languages During the last session, we discussed the notion of non-absoluteness of opinions and views of individuals and the existence of various interpretations in religion.

In stating the origin of the notion of relativity of views, opinions and interpretations, we said that there are three perspectives and theories on the relativity of knowledge. In this session, we shall deal with two other sources of the notion, viz. “the language of religion” and “hermeneutics” or the science of textual interpretation, which is nowadays considered as one of the important fields of knowledge with which specific departments in prestigious universities in the world are engaged.

In this session, we shall tackle these two subjects. The language of religion and its connection with the theory of non-absoluteness of individuals’ opinions and understanding of religion stemmed from discussions held during the recent centuries in Europe, in the philosophy of religion and new theology on language, asking— Is the language of religion real, or is it symbolic, coded and fictional?

Let us elaborate: In understanding each other—whether in verbal, casual and simple conversations or academic and philosophical conversions—human beings sometimes use expressions with the aim of drawing attention towards an objective reality, and at other times, to subjective realities.

For instance, when a person says, “The conference room is bright,” his intention in making this predicative statement and specific literary compound is to draw the attention of the listener to the fact that there is no need for the lights to be switched on. It is realistic language and speaks about objective realities. Similar language is used in mathematics, logic and philosophy. Of course, in exact sciences and empirical sciences this language is utilized with some modifications.

For this reason, it is said that the language of science and philosophy is realistic and speaks about objective or subjective realities. Yet, there are also times when the use of linguistic expressions and compositions is not meant to present objective or subjective realities. The expressions and compositions are the same, but the speaker or writer does not want to show reality through them.