Two ‘logic’ problems for religious expressivists

Abstract

AbstractReligious 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.