Religion Explained? The Cognitive Science of Religion After Twenty-Five Years by Martin, Luther H. -- Read -- Imperial Library of Trantor

Index

Half Title Series Information Title Page Contents Illustrations Contributors Introduction: Religion Explained? The Cognitive Science of Religion after Twenty-Five Years Part One Retrospectives

1 The Cognitive Science of Religion and the Growth of Knowledge 2 Twenty-Five Years In: Landmark Empirical Findings in the Cognitive Science of Religion*

Explanatory pluralism Avoiding the quandaries of interpretive exclusivism The development of CSR as a scientific enterprise with new experimental findings generating theories from the bottom-up Three effects

Theological incorrectness Promiscuous teleology Dead agents’ minds

Minimally counterintuitive religious representations New directions

Evolutionary theorizing Cognitive neuroscience Religious experience

Afterword

3 Twenty-Five Years of CSR: A Personal Retrospective

A little more than twenty-five years ago The early nineties Ritual and causal opacity Ritual as social glue Quantifying ritual

From fusion to fanaticism

Summing up Acknowledgments

4 The Beautiful Butterfly: On the History of and Prospects for the Cognitive Science of Religion

Where did we come from? What is cognition? What have we achieved so far? Then what happened? Meeting psychology and doing experiments (good and bad things about it) Experimental psychology studies: Standard paradigms Religion-by-proxy studies Authentic religion studies

A guide for CSR scholars and adversaries

What’s next? Multidisciplinary integration Conclusion

Part Two State of the Art

5 Religion Explained? Some Variants of Cognitive Theory

Introduction Current theory A cognitive theory revisited Summary and conclusion

6 Cognitive Attractors in the Evolution and Diffusion of Religious Representations

The standard cognitive model: Religious representations No such thing as Religion The next frontier: Attractors and diffusion An example: Life-history and moralizing doctrines Different attractors and strategies

7 The Long Way from Cognitive Science to History: To Shorten the Distance and Fill in the Blanks*

Introduction History, cognition, and culture History as a cognitive enterprise Conclusion

8 The Indispensability of Cognitive Science for a Genuine History of Religion

History of religion as vertical anthropology Why resuscitate terms like “magic” and “ritual efficaciousness”? Accounting for magic from a cognitive science perspective The indispensability of cognitive science for a history of religion worth its name

Part Three CSR 2.0

9 Exiting the Motel of the Mysteries? How Historiographical Floccinaucinihilipilification Is Affecting CSR 2.0

Introduction What is CSR 2.0? The misunderstanding of presentism Unbiased hypothesis-driven research? The past, mathematically speaking If it’s not dressed in a lab coat, it’s not science. Or, is it? Conclusion: My map is (not quite exactly) your territory Acknowledgments

10 Minimal Counterintuitiveness Revisited, Again: The Role of Emotional Valence in Memory for Conceptual Incongruity

Introduction Emotion and conceptual incongruities

Subjects Stimuli Procedure Results

Immediate recall Delayed recognition

Summary

Incorporating culture into future research Acknowledgments Appendix

11 Constraints on Theory-Building in the Cognitive Science of Religion with Reflections on the Influence of Physics Envy and the Principle of Sufficient Reason

Introduction Physics envy Cohen’s book review (a cautionary tale) The social sciences: Some considerations Parsimony and sufficient reason Big Gods Canaries in coal mines

12 The Effects of Relative Stable Feedback Loops: Cognitive Science and Historical Explanations

Deep history in human cognition: Macro-history The cognitive science of everyday behavior: Micro-history The emergence of fairly stable feedback loops: Meso-history Where do we go from here?

Part Four Looking Forward

13 The Road Not Taken: Possible Paths for the Cognitive Science of Religion

Introduction Assessing the cognitive science of religion

The marriage of religious studies and cognitive science Fundamental principles of the cognitive science of religion Comparing human behavioral ecology and the cognitive science of religion Comparing evolutionary psychology and the cognitive science of religion

Future directions and friendly advice Conclusion Acknowledgments

14 Looking Back to Look Forward: From Shannon and Turing to Lawson and McCauley to ...?

Introduction The Beginning CSR’s prehistory Cybernetics of language Learning from our past Concerning definitions Concerning methodological and theoretical assumptions Concerning interpretation/explanation The third option The next twenty-five years of CSR

15 A Neo-Victorian Cognitive Science of Religion

Rediscovering the wheel Anniversaries of cognitive anthropology Academic resistance A nomadic field Neo-Victorians

Conclusion On Keeping Cognitive Science of Religion Cognitive and Cultural

Some core commitments

Explanation of cultural expression commonly regarded as “religious” Avoiding definitional quagmires Methodological naturalism Interdisciplinarity Focus on cognition

Cognition and culture drifting apart

Notes References Index Copyright Page

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