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title: "Noncognitivism"
description: "Noncognitivism about religious language is the view that statements like \"God loves us\" don't make factual claims at all — they express attitudes, emotions, or commitments rather than describing states of affairs that could be true or false."
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# Noncognitivism

> Noncognitivism about religious language is the view that statements like "God loves us" don't make factual claims at all — they express attitudes, emotions, or commitments rather than describing states of affairs that could be true or false.

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.

## Sources

-   A. J. Ayer, Language, Truth and Logic (1936)

## Related terms

-   [FideismFideism is the view that religious belief does not need — and sometimes cannot receive — rational justification, because faith is either prior to reason or operates on a different plane from it.](/glossary/fideism)
-   [IgnosticismIgnosticism is the position that the question “does God exist?” cannot be meaningfully answered, or even meaningfully asked, until the word “God” is given a clear, coherent, falsifiable definition.](/glossary/ignosticism)
-   [ScientismScientism is the view that the natural sciences are the only or the best source of genuine knowledge, with all other forms of inquiry either reducible to science or epistemically inferior.](/glossary/scientism)

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