Belief and Prediction: Wittgenstein’s Philosophy of Religion in Dialogue with Predictive Processing

The present article aims to offer a new perspective on later Wittgenstein’s notion of belief by comparing the ideas in two well-known works of his, namely, On Certainty (OC) and Philosophical Investigations (PI), with ideas from a widely recognized theory of brain function within the field of neuroscience known as predictive processing (PP). The purpose of this comparison is to demonstrate how Wittgenstein’s notion of belief transcends the conventional cognitive/non-cognitive dichotomy when examined alongside the PP framework—a model that, by integrating action with perception, already obscures the sharp boundary between these two categories. Employing a comparative philosophical approach, this study brings together insights from PP theory and Wittgenstein’s ideas on belief, exploring how PP could support and, in certain respects, shed light on Wittgenstein’s ideas about religion. One central point of the present analysis is to challenge the claim that Wittgenstein’s philosophy of religion isolates religious discourse as uniquely evidence-resistant and/or evidence-repellent. By reading Wittgenstein’s ideas on world image and form of life through the lens of PP—with a special focus on the notion of self-evidencing—it is shown that the notion of belief, whether religious or not, in both Wittgenstein’s later philosophy and PP, is as much about being as it is about believing.