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Two ‘logic’ problems for religious expressivists

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 April 2023

Jeremiah Joven Joaquin Open the ORCID record for Jeremiah Joven Joaquin [Opens in a new window]
Jeremiah Joven Joaquin*
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy, De La Salle University, Manila, Philippines
*
Email: jeremiah.joaquin@dlsu.edu.ph
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Abstract

Religious expressivism is the view that religious sentences, like ‘God is all-loving’ and ‘God offers us the gift of salvation’, are devoid of cognitive meaning. Such sentences are not truth-evaluable: they cannot be judged as true or false. In Religious Language, Michael Scott asked what explains the seeming logical behaviour of religious sentences if they are not truth-evaluable, as religious expressivists claim. In particular, religious expressivists need to explain (i) how a given religious sentence and its negation seem inconsistent and (ii) how religious sentences could figure in logically valid arguments. In this article, I develop a version of Weak Kleene semantics that could address these two ‘logic’ challenges.

Keywords

religious languagenegation problemFrege-Geach problemreligious expressivismWeak Kleene
Type
Original Article
Information
Religious Studies , First View , pp. 1 - 9
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Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press

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