Non-cognitive Content in Analysis of Religious Language

Articles in Press

Document Type : Original Research

Author
Hamed Ghadiri
Assistant Professor, Department of Philosophy, University of Religions and Denominations. Qom. Iran.
10.30497/prr.2026.249668.2088
Abstract
Do religious sentences have factual content and refer to some religious reality? One answer to this question is formulated in terms of the moderate attitude theory. According to this theory, religious sentences conventionally express both non-cognitive states, such as emotions, and cognitive content, thereby expressing the speaker’s religious belief. Michael Scott argues that all attitude theories, including the moderate attitude theory, must provide an account of the attitudes corresponding to religious sentences in a way that be capable of accommodating the distinctions and nuances among such sentences. According to Scott, however, providing such an account poses a serious challenge for these theories, and is more difficult for them than for attitude theories in ethics. In this paper, I argue that, insofar as the moderate attitude theory takes the content of religious sentences to consist of both a cognitive and a non-cognitive component, it can assign the explanatory burden of accounting for the distinctions among the diverse and varied religious sentences to the cognitive component. Thus, either the moderate attitude theory does not face Scott’s challenge in the first place, or, if it does, it can readily meet it. I further argue that this formulation of the moderate attitude theory does not diminish the value or significance of the non-cognitive component in the content of religious sentences.
Keywords
religious language
attitude theory
non-cognitivism
Michael Scott
Subjects
Philosophy of Religion Research

Articles in Press, Accepted Manuscript
Available Online from 04 October 2026