Chloeand Joeyasked:

Do non-cognitive interpretations of religious language create more problems then they solve?

For this answer I have so far looked at the doctrine of analogy by St. Aquinas as it does not use past
experience and it is used to make a statement/ assertion, but I only know of this one variation of a
non-cognitive language and I need more so I can answer the above question with as much
background knowledge of non-cognitive language as possible.

============

The traditional view has it that to say that an indicative sentence has a non-cognitive function is not to
say anything but to show or express something. So there is a prima facie tension in saying that a
non-cognitivist can make an assertion.

Perhaps the best and most well-known background to non-cognitivism about religious language
stems from A.J.Ayer's famous book Language, Truth and Logic.Strictly speaking the non-cognitivist
holds that when we utter an indicative sentence containing religious terms such as 'God exists' we
are not making an assertion or expressing a proposition. That is to say we are not saying that some
state of affairs exists which makes the statement or proposition true or false. Ayer's motivation for this
is because there is no way that we can verify the statement or proposition. Ayer also went on to claim
that the meaning of a proposition resided in its method of verification. This caused almost everyone to
start pointing out how any statement of verificationism could not be verified (and hence could not
really be a genuine statement/assertion).

Whilst verificationism has come and gone the motivation for non-cognitivism about certain forms of
discourse such as religious discourse and ethical discourse has remained. The problem for
non-cognitivists has always been to say what the meaning of the indicative sentence consists in.

This is typically an anathema to religious Christian converts but not always. A branch of the Christians
who follow Don Cupitt calling themselves 'The Sea of Faith' actually hold that religious language does
not function to state facts but instead functions to express emotions and values. This approach
rejects what most people profess to believe and thus requires mass self-delusion amongst religious
converts about what they believe they are doing when they use language. Many critics of this
approach comment that it is supported by people who like dressing up in traditional christian
costumes and preaching or telling traditional christian stories but who lack any real conviction that
God exists.

The latter development is to collapse the distinction between cognitivism and non-cognitivism and
claim that it is impossible to give a theory of meaning for language. This view is influenced by
Wittgenstein's later writings and his followers.

Try Ayer first. Then read some of his critics such as Church. You could then try searching for Crispin
Wright's "The verification theory another puncture another patch" which was a journal article (but i
have forgotten which) but he is difficult to read so leave it till last.

Cupitt is easy to read and gives an historical overview of the non-cognitivist tradition and motivations
for taking this view from a more continental perspective. Try his works in chronological order.

Julian Bennett