Noncognitivism

The position grew out of logical positivism in the mid-twentieth century. A. J. Ayer, in Language, Truth and Logic (1936), argued that the only meaningful statements are those that can be verified empirically or are true by definition. Religious claims like "God is love" failed this test: no conceivable observation could confirm or disconfirm them. Ayer concluded that such sentences were not false but meaningless — literally not the kind of thing that can be true or false.

Later noncognitivists softened the verificationist criterion but kept the core move: religious utterances are not failed attempts to describe reality, they are successful expressions of something else. R. B. Braithwaite argued that they express commitment to a way of life. D. Z. Phillips, building on later Wittgenstein, argued that religious language operates inside a "form of life" with its own internal grammar and is misread when extracted and treated as metaphysical claims.

Noncognitivism is attractive because it lets religious practice continue without committing to embarrassing metaphysical baggage. It is also hard to square with what most religious practitioners actually think they are doing. Ordinary believers, when they say "God heard my prayer," are not expressing a commitment or performing a language game — they are making a claim about what happened, and they will usually defend it as such. Philosophers have occasionally gotten into trouble for telling believers that their apparent truth-claims were really something else.

For a secular reader, noncognitivism is worth knowing because it names a position that many liberal theologians and some contemporary philosophers of religion hold without saying so. When a theologian says "the resurrection is true in a way that goes beyond the merely historical," noncognitivism is often in the neighborhood. Naming the move is the first step to asking whether it is honest.