Wittgenstein on the Gulf Between Believers and Non-Believers

In this paper, with the aim of testing Coliva’s thesis that Wittgenstein was not a factual epistemic relativist, I explore Wittgenstein’s later remarks on religious belief, especially on credal statements such as “I believe in the Last Judgement”. Preliminarily, I introduce Wittgenstein’s idea that there is a gulf between (a certain kind of) believers and non-believers (section I). Then, I reject the view according to which the gulf should be explained either in terms of some sort of linguistic incommensurability (section II) or in terms of the dichotomy between the descriptive and the expressive (section III). Rather, I suggest that Wittgenstein’s remarks should be read as advancing an epistemological conception of the gulf in question (sections IV and V). Furthermore, I reconstruct some aspects of Coliva’s argument to the effect that Wittgenstein was not a factual epistemic relativist and argue that the collection of Wittgenstein’s remarks on religious belief, however scattered, shows that Wittgenstein was a special kind of epistemic relativist (section VI). Finally, I make two brief last comments on the overall sense of the paper (section VII).