When someone says she believes that God exists, is she expressing the same kind of mental state as when she says she thinks that a lake bigger than Lake Michigan exists⎯i.e., does she refer to the same kind of cognitive attitude in both cases? Using evidence from linguistic corpora (Study 1) and behavioral experiments (Studies 2-4), the current work provides evidence that individuals typically use the word “believe” more in conjunction with statements about religious credences and “think” more in conjunction with factual statements, pointing to two different understandings of claims made with these two terms. These patterns do not appear to reflect low-level differences based on the amount of consensus surrounding a particular claim, the extent to which the truth of a particular claim is known to the participant, or linguistic differences between religious and factual statements. We discuss implications of these findings for religious cognition (e.g., as supporting the theory that religious credences are qualitatively distinct from factual beliefs) as well as cognitive processes more broadly. Finally, we relate the present findings to prior theoretical work on differences between factual belief and religious credence.

中文翻译：

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认为与相信的意思相同吗？对宗教认知的语言洞察。

当有人说她相信上帝存在时，她是否表达了与她说她认为存在比密歇根湖更大的湖泊时相同的心理状态⎯ie，她在两种情况下所指的认知态度是否相同？使用来自语言语料库（研究 1）和行为实验（研究 2-4）的证据，目前的工作提供的证据表明，个人通常更多地将“相信”一词与有关宗教信仰的陈述结合使用，而将“思考”更多地与事实结合使用声明，指出对这两个术语的声明有两种不同的理解。这些模式似乎并未反映基于围绕特定主张的共识数量、参与者对特定主张的真实性的了解程度的低级差异，或宗教陈述和事实陈述之间的语言差异。我们讨论了这些发现对宗教认知的影响（例如，支持宗教信仰在质量上与事实信仰不同的理论）以及更广泛的认知过程。最后，我们将目前的发现与先前关于事实信仰和宗教信仰之间差异的理论工作联系起来。