Cognitivism about religious belief in later Wittgenstein

Abstract

Wittgensteinian philosophy of religion has traditionally been grounded in non-cognitivism about religious belief. This paper shows that the Wittgensteinian tradition has wrongly neglected a significant movement towards cognitivism in Wittgenstein’s later writings. The argument proceeds on the basis of two main claims. First, Wittgenstein’s mature philosophy, as expressed in his Philosophical Investigations, clearly favours cognitivism over non-cognitivism with regard to certain linguistic facts about ordinary religious discourse. Second, during the last decade of his life Wittgenstein’s view of religious belief actually underwent a significant shift in the direction of cognitivism, which finds its most striking expression in the analogy he draws to the ‘honest religious thinker’.