ABSTRACT
Ludwig Wittgenstein was concerned both with language and with religious approaches to life and its problems. This chapter provides an account of his doubts as he expressed them during his lifetime. It also provides distinction between the doubts that are characteristic of his early work and those that he expressed in his later work and toward the end of his life. The notion that religion somehow defies expression in language appears to have appealed to Wittgenstein throughout his life. In his early work, he articulated and defended a boldly radical version of this notion. Wittgenstein's specific rejection of religious expression in the Tractatus was connected to the work's novel view of language. He believed that all meaningful propositions are truth-functions of elementary or atomic propositions. Wittgenstein focuses on the source of differences between religious and factual assertions. He emphasizes how the tendency to think of religious belief as a type of factual belief leads to mistakes and misunderstandings.
