Abstract:This book provides a cognitive scientific perspective to beliefs about supernatural agents. First, human intuitions about agents, agency, and counterintuitive concepts are outlined and explained. Second, various kinds of folk beliefs and theological doctrines about souls and spirits are analyzed in the light of the human cognitive architecture, using descriptions of spirit possession and shamanism as materials. Third, scholastic discussions of God’s cognitive capacities as well as folk-psychological God belief… Show more
“…Pyysiainen, in his new book Supernatural Agents: Why we believe in Souls, Gods and Buddhas, 13 also affirms the usefulness of the distinction between the intuitive and the reflective thoughts but focuses on the folk psychology and, in particular on theory of mind, and argues that theology, a clear example of abstract thought, emerges out of our folk knowledge. He thinks that beliefs about superhuman agents are natural emerging, as they do, out of our intuitions especially those about other minds.…”
Section: Intuitive and Reflective Thoughtmentioning
confidence: 98%
“…Such work even has a label and is known as the cognitive science of religion 21. This subdiscipline in cognitive science has been driven by the work of Lawson and McCauley14 who provided the first systematic treatise in the cognitive science of religion, Pascal Boyer,11,22 Barrett,12,23 Pyysiainen,24,25 Eilam et al,26 Slone,27 Atran,28 McCauley and Lawson,18 and Tremlin 29. There is general agreement among these scholars about the essential features of the model, which are as follows: …”
Section: The Emergence Of a Standard Model: Toward A Cognitive Sciencmentioning
While earlier approaches to religious thought and practice searched for 'magic bullet' approaches to explain religious thought and behavior, seeing it as an example of irrationality, illusion, integrative force, symbolism, or false explanations of origins, cognitive scientific approaches have suggested that we see it rather as an aggregate of the products of various cognitive mechanisms. Studies in the cognitive science of religion, informed by experimental work, have converged on a standard model of explaining religious thought and behavior by focussing on the role of minimally counter-intuitive concepts, agent and animacy detection, ritual representations, notions of contagion and contamination avoidance, theory of mind, coalitions, and moral intuitions. WIREs Cogn Sci 2012 doi: 10.1002/wcs.1189 For further resources related to this article, please visit the WIREs website.
“…Pyysiainen, in his new book Supernatural Agents: Why we believe in Souls, Gods and Buddhas, 13 also affirms the usefulness of the distinction between the intuitive and the reflective thoughts but focuses on the folk psychology and, in particular on theory of mind, and argues that theology, a clear example of abstract thought, emerges out of our folk knowledge. He thinks that beliefs about superhuman agents are natural emerging, as they do, out of our intuitions especially those about other minds.…”
Section: Intuitive and Reflective Thoughtmentioning
confidence: 98%
“…Such work even has a label and is known as the cognitive science of religion 21. This subdiscipline in cognitive science has been driven by the work of Lawson and McCauley14 who provided the first systematic treatise in the cognitive science of religion, Pascal Boyer,11,22 Barrett,12,23 Pyysiainen,24,25 Eilam et al,26 Slone,27 Atran,28 McCauley and Lawson,18 and Tremlin 29. There is general agreement among these scholars about the essential features of the model, which are as follows: …”
Section: The Emergence Of a Standard Model: Toward A Cognitive Sciencmentioning
While earlier approaches to religious thought and practice searched for 'magic bullet' approaches to explain religious thought and behavior, seeing it as an example of irrationality, illusion, integrative force, symbolism, or false explanations of origins, cognitive scientific approaches have suggested that we see it rather as an aggregate of the products of various cognitive mechanisms. Studies in the cognitive science of religion, informed by experimental work, have converged on a standard model of explaining religious thought and behavior by focussing on the role of minimally counter-intuitive concepts, agent and animacy detection, ritual representations, notions of contagion and contamination avoidance, theory of mind, coalitions, and moral intuitions. WIREs Cogn Sci 2012 doi: 10.1002/wcs.1189 For further resources related to this article, please visit the WIREs website.
“…For example, lan uages, despite their great diversity, use a limited variety of sounds and phonetic combinations that our minds, eech organs, and senses can produce and process. As CSR emerged in the 1990s, evolutionary psychology played a particularly important role in the work of Stewart Guthrie (1980Guthrie ( , 1993, Pascal Boyer (Boyer 1994(Boyer , 2001(Boyer , 2018Boyer and Liénard, 2006), and I kka Pyysiäinen (2003Pyysiäinen ( , 2004Pyysiäinen ( , 2009, while it also influenced the ritual form theory developed by E. Thomas Lawson and Robert N. McCauley (Lawson and McCauley, 1990;McCauley and Lawson, 2002), and other contributions.…”
Section: Evolutionary Psychology and The Beginnings Of The Cognitive mentioning
This article discusses the use of evolutionary theory in the cognitive science of religion (CSR), with special attention to critical issues and new developments. In the first part of the article, I will discuss the definition of evolution and describe the Modern Synthesis (or neo-Darwinian theory). In the next part, I will consider various evolutionary perspectives in CSR, including evolutionary psychology, sexual selection, gene-culture co-evolution, and cultural evolution. In the final part, I will turn to the problems with the Modern Synthesis and present a new approach based on network theory, with potential applications to the study of biological and cultural systems.
“…Such ‘cognitively optimal’ expressions are the result of phenomena described by cognitive scientists such as agency detection, intent, animacy, image schemata, and more (Atran ; Boyer ; Pyysiäinen , passim ). McCauley and Lawson, in their studies of ritual, argue that the set of these mental processes naturally emerges: With little, if any, explicit instruction, religious ritual participants are able to make judgments about various properties concerning both individual rituals and their ritual systems.…”
Section: Studying Recurrent Motifsmentioning
confidence: 99%
“…Such niches are analogous to attractor positions. Cognitive theorist Ilkka Pyysiäinen () describes a model not unlike Jung's: The architecture of the mind…shapes beliefs, thus creating cross‐culturally recurrent patterns. This implies that not all concepts and beliefs have an equal potential for becoming widespread.…”
At the most basic level, archetypes represented Jung's attempt to explain the phenomenon of recurrent myths and folktale motifs (Jung 1956, 1959, para. 99). But the archetype remains controversial as an explanation of recurrent motifs, as the existence of recurrent motifs does not prove that archetypes exist. Thus, the challenge for contemporary archetype theory is not merely to demonstrate that recurrent motifs exist, since that is not disputed, but to demonstrate that archetypes exist and cause recurrent motifs. The present paper proposes a new model which is unlike others in that it postulates how the archetype creates resonant motifs. This model necessarily clarifies and adapts some of Jung's seminal ideas on archetype in order to provide a working framework grounded in contemporary practice and methodologies. For the first time, a model of archetype is proposed that can be validated on empirical, rather than theoretical grounds. This is achieved by linking the archetype to the hard data of recurrent motifs rather than academic trends in other fields.
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