The Thinkableness of All Thoughts and the Irreplaceability of Pictures: Cora Diamond on Religious Belief

Under the ideas of ‘hinges’ and ‘pictures’, as these relate to deep disagreement, Wittgenstein’s view of religious belief is a multifaceted challenge to conceptions of thought-world relations. In this article, I discuss Cora Diamond’s analysis of this challenge. Diamond herself is not particularly interested in hinges; I try to understand why. I first bring in a discussion between Michael Williams and Duncan Pritchard on how to read <i>On Certainty</i>. This allows me to identify Diamond’s perspective on deep disagreement and pictures: she concentrates on making sense, and not directly on knowledge. To further clarify her perspective, I introduce Hilary Putnam’s reading of the <i>Lectures on Religious Belief</i>, which proposes a cognitivist view of religion as ethics, centering on the notion of picture. Although Diamond is close to Putnam, for her, the most important challenge posed by religious belief lies not with epistemological issues of rational versus arational grounds of belief, or cognitivism versus non-cognitivism in ethics, but rather in making us drop the Fregean (and Tractarian) idea of the thinkableness of all thoughts, making place for ‘irreplaceable pictures’. I end by suggesting that Diamond’s analysis sheds light on often uncontested assumptions about the natures of thought and communication.