Wittgenstein on the phenomena of belief

Abstract

The appropriation of Wittgenstein's later work for issues in philosophy of religion is as difficult as it is promising. He sometimes seems to embrace non-cognitivism, the view that religious beliefs are, essentially, not affirmations about what is true or false o f reality, but expressions of the believer's ethical or aesthetic attitudes. But at other times it seems clear that he regards religious beliefs as affirmations that are susceptible in some sense of being true or false. That would mean that religious beliefs had cognitive content, that they were attempts, at least, to state facts of some sort. However, our difficulty in locating Wittgenstein's view of religious language in terms of this dichotomy may be due less to an inconsistency in his treatment of these issues than to the fact that a major part of his later work is an attack on the concepts in terms of which the cognitive/non-cognitive distinction is defined. Central among those concepts is the traditional notion of be l i e f the picture of belief as some kind of mental act of assent or affirmation performed on some propositional or ideational content that purports to represent how some portion of reality stands. Belief, construed as mental assent to a representation of reality, is an official corollary of what Ryle called, in disparagement, "the official doctrine" about minds. In this essay I will investigate Wittgenstein's treatment of the "mental assent" aspect o f this picture of belief. The even more troublesome, and troubling aspect belief as representation will be touched upon only tangentially. In addition, Wittgenstein also devoted a great deal of reflection to expressions of belief (and of knowledge) in the notes published as On Certainty. But because the disposal of a false picture of belief is a necessary prolegomenon to that examination o f the actual use o f talk about believing, in this essay I attend to Wittgenstein's critique of the notion that belief is a feeling. The idea is or was that I am aware of my belief directly through the "feel" of the act o f believing. Locke suggests as much in characterizing belief as a "kind of entertainment which the mind gives [to a] proposition, ''1 and Hume follows the same line of thought in defining belief according to "the manner, in which we conceive [an idea]." Hume, of course, defined that manner as a matter of"liveliness"