Wittgenstein and cognitivism about religious belief

The cognitive vs. non-cognitive nature of religious belief and language has been a contentious issue for decades in philosophical discourse concerning Wittgenstein and his followers. One recent contribution to this topic is Alois Pichler and Sebastian Sunday Grève’s article “Cognitivism about Religious Belief in Later Wittgenstein” (2024), in which they seek to show that “the Wittgensteinian tradition has wrongly neglected a significant movement towards cognitivism in Wittgenstein’s later writings”. The objective of this article is to examine the perspectives of Wittgenstein and his followers on religious belief and to critique the arguments of Pichler and Grève. The main topics of my presentation are as follows: (1) I will start by briefly describing the sources of Wittgenstein’s views on religion and the problems associated with them. (2) Next, I will outline the change in Wittgenstein’s thought on religion from his early view to his later view. (3) After that, I draw attention to the intricate relationship between Wittgenstein’s thought and modernism in theology, within which the relationship between religious belief and scientific/metaphysical worldviews remains a subject of ongoing debate. (4) I will then turn to a critical examination of Pichler and Grève’s interpretations of the descriptive nature of Wittgensteinian philosophy of religion. (5) Lastly, I deal briefly with Pichler and Grève’s assertion that Wittgenstein’s interest in the works of John Henry Newman contributed to the change in his views on religion.