Hostname: page-component-89b8bd64d-n8gtw Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2026-05-06T11:13:50.041Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

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
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

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

Information

Type
Original Article
Information
Religious Studies , Volume 60 , Issue 2 , June 2024 , pp. 235 - 243
Check for updates
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Article purchase

Temporarily unavailable

References

Ayer, AJ (1952) Language, Truth, and Logic, 2nd edn. New York: Dover Publications.Google Scholar
Beall, J (2012) A neglected reply to Prior's dilemma. In Maclaurin, J (ed.), Rationis Defensor: Essays in Honour of Colin Cheyne. Dordrecht: Springer, pp. 203–208.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Beall, J (2016) Off-topic: a new interpretation of Weak Kleene logic. The Australasian Journal of Logic 13, 136–142.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Blackburn, S (1993) Essays in Quasi-Realism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bochvar, DA (1981) On a three-valued logical calculus and its application to the analysis of the paradoxes of the classical extended functional calculus. Bergmann M (trans.) (from the original 1938 paper). History and Philosophy of Logic 2, 87–112.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Braithwaite, RB (1955) An Empiricist's View of the Nature of Religious Belief. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Ciuni, R and Carrara, M (2019) Semantical analysis of Weak Kleene logics. Journal of Applied Non-Classical Logics 29, 1–36.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Francez, N (2019) On Beall's new interpretation of WK3. Journal of Logic, Language and Information 28, 1–7.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Geach, PT (1965) Assertion. The Philosophical Review 74, 449–465.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hare, RM (1992) Essays on Religion and Education. Oxford: Clarendon Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Joaquin, JJ (2020) Beall-ing O. Logic and Logical Philosophy 29, 213–221.Google Scholar
Joaquin, JJ (2022) A reinterpretation of Beall's ‘off-topic’ semantics. Journal of Logic, Language and Information 31, 409–421.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kleene, SC (1952) Introduction to Metamathematics. Princeton, NJ: North Holland.Google Scholar
Omori, H and Szmuc, D (2017) Conjunction and disjunction in infectious logics. In Baltag, A, Seligman, J, and Yamada, T (eds), Logic, Rationality, and Interaction. Berlin: Springer, pp. 268–283.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Priest, G (2008) An Introduction to Non-Classical Logic: From If to Is, 2nd edn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schroeder, M (2008) What is the Frege-Geach problem? Philosophy Compass 3, 703–720.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Scott, M (2010) Religious language. Philosophy Compass 5, 505–515.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Scott, M (2013) Religious Language. London: Palgrave Macmillan.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Searle, JR (1962) Meaning and speech acts. The Philosophical Review 71, 423–432.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Van Roojen, M (1996) Expressivism and irrationality. The Philosophical Review 105, 311–335.CrossRefGoogle Scholar