As part of getting ready for Budapest, I have been thinking about theological noncognitivism. It is the claim that religious discourse is meaningless, and is related to moral noncognitivism. Most logical positivists were theological and moral noncognitivists, claiming that such discourse was meaningless because it was unverifiable. The verificationist criterion of meaning has been criticised at great length and I would not wish to hang any claims upon it. Yet, I think there is something right about it when it come to religion. One basic difference is that I do not think that the content of religious beliefs is unverifiable simplicita. Yes, it is often such as to make testing it (I use the different term to indicate a less stringent notion) difficult but it is possible to treat religious claims as factual claims about the world and, as such, find adequate evidence for judging it reasonable to conclude them false. However, as I have often stated in this blog, this is definitely not the way religious people normally treat religious discourse, instead ensuring that religious claims are protected against possible falsification. In other words, it is not so much that religious claims are unverifiable but that religious social values make them so. At the same time, theists have to believe the claims to be true in something close enough to their literal meaning to motivate their religious behaviour. This is a position that is difficult to reconcile once it is thought about at any length – witness the great amount of theological discourse that tries to.
For me, the resultant difficulty has been how to express the noncognitivism that is part of my own position. I made an effort to express it in my Fixation of superstitious beliefs paper and will be talking about it in Budapest. Clearly, I can not simply say that religious discourse is meaningless. Firstly, as I’ve just explained, it is not just a matter of the claims made but also of the attitude taken. Secondly, I suspect that religious discourse is full of nonliteral meaning tied to the functions of religious practices. After some toing-and-froing, I’ve come to the conclusion that the best way to express what I am trying to get at is to talk about the noncognitive function of religious beliefs, i.e. the function of the beliefs which is not connected to their truth. This seems to nicely relate my views to those of standard theological noncognitivists, pointing toward both the similarities and the differences. At least, that is my hope.
Just Another Deisidaimon 
Michael Blume
February 6, 2010
Hi Konrad,
the Nobel laureate Friedrich August von Hayek struggled with the same problem in his late “Fatal Conceit” (1988). A confessing agnostic himself, he finally concluded that (some) religious mythologies might be appreciated as functional “symbolic truths”, although they could not be verified empirically.
As a telling example, he referred to people who believed that God had commanded Adam and Eve and all their descendants to “be fruiful and multiply” (Genesis 1,28). Although Hayek was pretty certain that this specific narrative was beyond the sphere of historical verification, he observed those believing in it (in various theological ways) to participate in a reproductive and thus evolutionary advantage.
Arius
February 7, 2010
Interesting piece–myself, a strong proponent of “theological non-cognitivism.
I believe the initial step to disclosing the meaning (if there is in fact one) of “god” is to apply it to propositional logic–ergo, defining it semantically and cognitively.
For the religionist, it really boils down to the differentiation between what is a truth, and what is a fact–albeit, most theist’s perception of the two are extremely muddled–transforming the former (truth) into an actuality (fact)–a blunder to say the least.
Konrad Talmont-Kaminski
February 8, 2010
Arius,
I think that Millikan’s way of talking about language in terms of locally recurrent natural signs (in Language: A Biological Model) is actually much closer to what I am trying to get at here.
Ben Nelson
February 8, 2010
“Meaning” is unfortunately far too unworkable as a term to be able to answer the question. What kind of meaning? According to an ideolect? Then the same theological claim will be meaningless when asserted by A and not by B. Meaningful according to normal expression? Then we won’t know what we’re talking about until we get a consensus. According to its rational defensibility? That might be clear enough, but it won’t generalise across people. Perhaps it’s natural meaning? Then supernatural claims must be meaningless.
Konrad Talmont-Kaminski
February 8, 2010
Ben,
Meaning is a poor term, I agree. Particularly if you think of it in standard analytical philosophy terms. For example, trying to push the question into terms of different idiolects is not the right way to go. Talk of idolects makes it sound like it is primarily a linguistic matter but it is far more complex. The important thing, at a minimum, is the correlation between the willingness of assert certain kinds of (religious) statements and to behave in certain (pro-social) ways, the statements potentially serving as signal to indicate this willingness. Except that putting things this way misses out on the very heart of the matter, i.e. the cognitive mechanisms that underlie the connection. And, apart from that, say hello to Tim Kenyon. He’d have jumped on my loose meaning talk, too.
Edwin McCravy
January 14, 2012
You can’t imagine anything that any adult theist would believe “God” could refer to. So they just have their phony noun “God”. and think it representens something that they worship — but it doesn’t.
Zinc
July 16, 2013
For me, I’m not so sure verification is the sticking point, or certainly, not the only one. I find myself noncognitivist when I attempt to resolve the conflicts that seem inherent in the characteristics that “god” is supposed to have. As “the creator” he could simply be a metaphor for natural processes, and not necessarily self-aware. But it is omniscience that I think is the most irreconcilable, as in order to “know” that you “know all” you have to be able to absolutely rule out all possibility that there could be something you are unaware of, which is itself, logically impossible (you can’t prove a negative)– at least not without some additional logical mechanisms which aren’t available to us lowly humans and therefore are at least to us, incomprehensible. And since the “authority” of god is contingent on being “above all” I’d say this undermines his authority, at least as evaluated in human terms which makes reliance on his authority, an unjustified abdication of responsibility. Given that, the term “god” is incoherent, as without omniscience he would not properly be considered so. And the characteristic of omnipotence is often claimed to have similar difficulties, though I haven’t fully explored these.
edwinmccravy
December 17, 2021
Why doesn’t somebody just describe what they mean by “God”, instead of just saying “It has meaning and you can’t prove it doesn’t”. I’m sure if I said I didn’t know the meaning of “unicorn”, they’d describe one for me by saying “It’s an animal just like a horse with a sharp horn growing out of its forehead”. You wouldn’t just say “The word ‘unicorn’ has meaning and you can’t prove it doesn’t.” So somebody do the same with the word “God”.