The current study examined the impact of religious socialization practices and parents’ concepts on the development of an abstract religious concept in young children, and whether or not children’s socio-cognitive ability moderates the relationship between their religious concept and sources of information about the concept. 215 parent-child dyads from diverse religious backgrounds participated. Children were between the ages of 3.52 and 6.98 years of age. Four main findings emerged from this study. First, children conceptualized God as more humanlike than their (...) parents did. Second, younger children were more likely to have a humanlike conception of God than older children. Third, parents’ concept of God and children’s concept of God had a stronger relationship when the child’s mental-state reasoning was more accurate. Fourth, the frequency of children’s engagement in religious practices was unrelated to children’s concept of God after controlling for child’s age. Taken together, these findings lend support for the view that social cognition is an important factor in young children’s acquisition of cultural information about abstract entities. (shrink)

This paper outlines a first attempt to model the special constraints that arise in language processing in conversation, and to explore the implications such functional considerations may have on language typology and language change. In particular, we focus on processing pressures imposed by conversational turn-taking and their consequences for the cultural evolution of the structural properties of language. We present an agent-based model of cultural evolution where agents take turns at talk in conversation. When the start of planning for the (...) next turn is constrained by the position of the verb, the stable distribution of dominant word orders across languages evolves to match the actual distribution reasonably well. We suggest that the interface of cognition and interaction should be a more central part of the story of language evolution. (shrink)

This paper examines two paths by which F. A. Hayek’s work has influenced the cognitive theory of institutions: cognition and cultural evolution. It argues that there is a relationship between the sensory order and the social order. The explanation of social order begins with the human mind. This is illustrated with ideas relating to understanding culture from a cognitive viewpoint. Human cognition makes cultural evolution an endogenous process. The paper draws on ideas of co-evolution of individuals’ mental (...) models and their actions. Mental models can be modified by feedback from altered perceived reality as a consequence of peoples’ altered actions. A key to understanding cultural evolution is an understanding of how individuals modify their mental models. (shrink)

This paper proposes an initial epistemological course related to the notions of life, cognition, and culture from the fundamental elements of the complexity theory and, specifically, related to the notion of self-eco-organization. With these, we pretend to search isomorphic or transverse properties to all these notions; emphasizing the ideas of complexity, autonomy and dependence. El presente trabajo propone un derrotero epistemológico preliminar en torno a las nociones de vida, cognición y cultura, desde la base de algunos elementos de (...) la teoría de la complejidad y en específico, en torno a la noción de auto-eco-organización. Con ellos, se pretende la búsqueda de isomorfismos o propiedades transversales a todas estas nociones, centrándose en la ideas de complejidad, autonomía y dependencia. (shrink)

In recent decades, a new scientific approach to understand, explain, and predict many features of religion has emerged. The cognitive science of religion has amassed research on the forces that shape the tendency for humans to be religious and on what forms belief takes. It suggests that religion, like language or music, naturally emerges in humans with tractable similarities. This new approach has profound implications for how we understand religion, including why it appears so easily, and why people are willing (...) to fight-and die for it. Yet it is not without its critics, and some fear that scholars are explaining the ineffable mystery of religion away, or by showing that religion is natural proves or disproves the existence of God. An Introduction to the Cognitive Science of Religion offers students and general readers an accessible introduction to the approach, providing an overview of key findings and the debates that shape it. The volume includes a glossary of key terms, and each chapter includes suggestions for further thought and further reading as well as chapter summaries highlighting key points. This book is an indispensable resource for introductory courses on religion and a much-needed option for advanced courses. (shrink)

Formal models of cultural evolution analyze how cognitive processes combine with social interaction to generate the distributions and dynamics of ‘representations.’ Recently, cognitive anthropologists have criticized such models. They make three points: mental representations are non-discrete, cultural transmission is highly inaccurate, and mental representations are not replicated, but rather are ‘reconstructed’ through an inferential process that is strongly affected by cognitive ‘attractors.’ They argue that it follows from these three claims that: 1) models that assume replication or replicators are inappropriate, (...) 2) selective cultural learning cannot account for stable traditions, and 3) selective cultural learning cannot generate cumulative adaptation. Here we use three formal models to show that even if the premises of this critique are correct, the deductions that have been drawn from them are false. In the rst model, we assume continuously varying representations under the in uence of weak selective transmission and strong attractors. We show that if the attractors are suf ciently strong relative to selective forces, the continuous representation model reduces to the standard.. (shrink)

Cognitive Science, Volume 46, Issue 1, January 2022.

The processes underwriting the acquisition of culture remain unclear. How are shared habits, norms, and expectations learned and maintained with precision and reliability across large-scale sociocultural ensembles? Is there a unifying account of the mechanisms involved in the acquisition of culture? Notions such as “shared expectations,” the “selective patterning of attention and behaviour,” “cultural evolution,” “cultural inheritance,” and “implicit learning” are the main candidates to underpin a unifying account of cognition and the acquisition of culture; however, (...) their interactions require greater specification and clarification. In this article, we integrate these candidates using the variational (free-energy) approach to human cognition and culture in theoretical neuroscience. We describe the construction by humans of social niches that afford epistemic resources called cultural affordances. We argue that human agents learn the shared habits, norms, and expectations of their culture through immersive participation in patterned cultural practices that selectively pattern attention and behaviour. We call this process “thinking through other minds” (TTOM) – in effect, the process of inferring other agents’ expectations about the world and how to behave in social context. We argue that for humans, information from and about other people's expectations constitutes the primary domain of statistical regularities that humans leverage to predict and organize behaviour. The integrative model we offer has implications that can advance theories of cognition, enculturation, adaptation, and psychopathology. Crucially, this formal (variational) treatment seeks to resolve key debates in current cognitive science, such as the distinction between internalist and externalist accounts of theory of mind abilities and the more fundamental distinction between dynamical and representational accounts of enactivism. (shrink)

Engaging recent developments within the bio-cultural study of religion, Shults unveils the evolved cognitive and coalitional mechanisms by which god-conceptions are engendered in minds and nurtured in societies. He discovers and attempts to liberate a radically atheist trajectory that has long been suppressed within the discipline of theology.

The kinds of social interaction necessary for the existence of human cultural practices and institutions and the human ability to change and survive depended on at least four conditions: biological brain evolution, cognition/affective processes, ethnographically-based cultural beliefs and practices, and the kinds of interpersonal relations that motivate or constrain social interaction. Thus human biological and cultural evolution could not have occurred without the interaction of brain processes, cognition/affective mechanisms, language, cultural beliefs, and social organization. No single one of (...) these elements could have emerged without the others. We know little about how the four elements evolved, but can at least speculate about the necessity of each for human development. For example, the kinds of socialization experiences and skills infants acquire gradually to be called competent ‘adults,’ and how adult status begins to fade towards the end of life as adults seek to retain the properties that sustain human life. (shrink)

We support the goal to integrate models of culture and cognition. However, we are not convinced that the free energy principle and Thinking Through Other Minds will be useful in achieving it. There are long traditions of modeling both cultural evolution and cognition. Demonstrating that FEP or TTOM can integrate these models will require a bit more math.

Case studies of diverse scientific fields show how scientists use a range of resources to generate new interpretative models and to establish their plausibility as explanations of a domain. They accomplish this by manipulating imagistic representations in particular ways. I show that scientists in different domains use the same basic transformations. Common features of these transformations indicate that general cognitive strategies of interpretation, simplification, elaboration, and argumentation are at work. Social and historical studies of science emphasize the diversity of local (...) contexts of practice. However, the existence of common strategies shows that this diversity masks an important repertoire of cognitive strategies. Scientists use this repertoire to adapt their representations to meet the cognitive demands of different contexts of practice. This paper considers the implications of this finding for the notion of scientists as cognitive agents in distributed knowledge-producing systems. (shrink)

The development of modern science has depended strongly on specific features of the cultures involved; however, its results are widely and trans-culturally accepted and applied. The science and technology of electricity provides a particularly interesting example. It emerged as a specific product of post-Renaissance Europe, rooted in the Greek philosophical tradition that encourages explanations of nature in theoretical terms. It did not evolve in China presumably because such encouragement was missing. The trans-cultural acceptance of modern science and technology is postulated (...) to be due, in part, to the common biological dispositions underlying human cognition, with generalizable capabilities of abstract, symbolic and strategic thought. These faculties of the human mind are main prerequisites for dynamic cultural development and differentiation. They appear to have evolved up to a stage of hunters and gatherers perhaps some 100 000 years ago. However, the extent of the correspondence between some constructions of the human mind and the order of nature, as revealed by science, is a late insight of the last centuries. Quantum physics and relativity are particularly impressive examples. (shrink)

The focus of this paper is a possible Siberian link with the Na-Dene Languages, based on cognitive lexical semantics. Dene-Yeniseian is a proposed language family consisting of the Yeniseian languages of Central Siberia and the Na-Dene languages of North-Western North America. The paper connects semantic universals, Ket and Dene folklore, and also comparative historical linguistic research. In analyzing a group of cognates, the paper’s aim is to discuss the cultural, cognitive and pragmatic reasons that enabled these cognates to survive for (...) several thousand years. Our main point is that factors such as the relative importance of linguistic signs in a language community, lingual conservatism of semantic universals and the distinctiveness of its referents, probable frequency with which these words were used, and their cultural symbolism in relatively similar environments significantly contributed to their survival in ethnic groups belonging to the proposed language family. Our cross-disciplinary study helps us identify the essential place of eco-ethnic material in interpreting cross-continental similarities and emphasizes the integrative role of culture. It will be argued that the eco-ethnic lexicon reflected by the Dene-Yeniseian cognates reveals several thousand years of diachronic cognitive processes. (shrink)

Experience offers a reading experience like no other. A heat-sensitive cover by Olafur Eliasson reveals words, colors, and a drawing when touched by human hands. Endpapers designed by Carsten Holler are printed in ink containing carefully calibrated quantities of the synthesized human pheromones estratetraenol and androstadienone, evoking the suggestibility of human desire. The margins and edges of the book are designed by Tauba Auerbach in complementary colors that create a dynamically shifting effect when the book is shifted or closed. When (...) the book is opened, bookmarks cascade from the center, emerging from spider web prints by Tomas Saraceno. Experience produces experience while bringing the concept itself into relief as an object of contemplation. The sensory experience of the book as a physical object resonates with the intellectual experience of the book as a container of ideas. Experience convenes a conversation with artists, musicians, philosophers, anthropologists, historians, and neuroscientists, each of whom explores aspects of sensorial and cultural realms of experience. The texts include new essays written for this volume and classic texts by such figures as William James and Michel Foucault -- Provided by the publisher. (shrink)

Drawing on non-Darwinian cultural-evolutionary approaches, the paper develops a broad, non-representational perspective on narrative, necessary to account for the narrative “ubiquity” hypothesis. It considers narrativity as a feature of intelligent behaviour and as a formative principle of symbolic representation (“narrative proclivity”). The narrative representation retains a relationship with the “primary” pre-symbolic narrativity of the basic orientational-interpretive (semiotic) behaviour affected by perceptually salient objects and “fits” in natural environments. The paper distinguishes between implicit narrativity (as the basic form of perceptual-cognitive mapping) (...) of intelligent behaviour or non-narrative media, and the “narrative” as a symbolic representation. Human perceptual-attentional routines are enhanced by symbolic representations: due to its attention-monitoring and information-gathering function, narrative serves as a cognitive-exploratory tool facilitating cultural dynamics. The rise of new media and mass communication on the Web has thrown the ability of narrative to shape the public sphere through the ongoing process of negotiated sensemaking and interpretation in a particularly sharp relief. (shrink)

Finality suggests an unchangeable conclusion. It also raises the idea of a goal towards which a reality is directed. This is the sense in which one finds the final cause in Aristotle and other philosophers. Nearly everyone feels helpless before finality. This is because it evokes the spectrum of finitude as it appears to occur in the dead. No one in the prime of life and at the peak of health, wealth, pleasure and hopeful optimism actively desires death. Yet like (...) a shadow, the awareness of a possible sudden end stalks at everyone. It is not the most comfortable feeling. This raises a situation where both the idea and the reality of death must be confronted in order to make sense of life. Has it meaning? Is it destined or free floating? How and when will life end or does it even have an absolute termination at all? Is death life’s last unassailable barrier or just a simple demarcation from other forms of conscious existence in some way? Though often never put into words, failure to engage these questions raises conundrum. Attempts to answer them form and inform cultures, nourish customs, create traditions, inspire inventions, and generally stimulate the human spirit. They keep religions alive, engage thinkers, inspire fidelity to cultural roots and symbols and fire up the spirit of research. It is the position of this paper that confronting human finality is at the service of valorizing human life further. It is like an unseen engine that keeps the vehicle alive. Thus, life approaches death while death serves life. It (death) forbids anyone at the level of the intellect, experience and knowledge from making any absolute positive claims regarding the termination of life. Confronting death psychologically, physically and spiritually requires specific perspectives since each man must face it inevitably in his person and each culture and religion must make sense of it in its own way. That is what this study examines. (shrink)

Contains contributions dealing with religious narrative and cognitive theory written by some of the world's leading scholars in the fields of cognitive science, narratology and comparative religion. This title explores the neurological processes and possible genetic foundations of how language emerged in Homo sapiens.

Arbib offers a comprehensive, elegant formulation of brain/language evolution; with significant implications for social as well as biological sciences. Important psychological antecedents and later correlates are presupposed; their conceptual enrichment through protosign and protospeech is abbreviated in favor of practical communication. What culture “is” and whether protosign and protospeech involve a protoculture are not considered. Arbib also avoids dealing with the question of evolution of mind, consciousness, and self.

Arbib offers a comprehensive, elegant formulation of brain/language evolution; with significant implications for social as well as biological sciences. Important psychological antecedents and later correlates are presupposed; their conceptual enrichment through protosign and protospeech is abbreviated in favor of practical communication. What culture and whether protosign and protospeech involve a protoculture are not considered. Arbib also avoids dealing with the question of evolution of mind, consciousness, and self.

There is a correlation between positions taken on some scientific questions and political leaning. One way to explain this correlation is the cultural cognition hypothesis (CCH): people's political leanings are causing them to process evidence to maintain fixed answers to the questions, rather than to seek the truth. Another way is the different background belief hypothesis (DBBH): people of different political leanings have different background beliefs which rationalize different positions on these scientific questions. In this article, I argue for (...) two things. I argue that two attempts by proponents of the CCH to discredit the DBBH fail. And I argue that this matters, because while the CCH makes epistemic paternalistic interventions seem called for (as some philosophers have argued compellingly), the DBBH does not. The DBBH makes it much easier to stay closer to an ideal of deliberative democracy. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that semiotic cognition is a distinctive form of cognition, which must have evolved out of earlier forms of non-semiotic cognition. Semiotic cognition depends on the use of signs. Signs are understood in terms of a specific organization, or structure, of the cognitive process. Semiotic cognition is a unique form of cognition. Once this form of cognition was available to humans, the semiotic provided the ground structure for an evolutionary (...) development that was no longer strictly Darwinian, but followed its own — semiotic — logic. In the increasingly abstract ways in which the ubiquitous difference is dealt with, we discover this logic of cultural evolution, which determines the course of long term cultural change. (shrink)

The target article “Thinking Through Other Minds” (TTOM) offered an account of the distinctively human capacity to acquire cultural knowledge, norms, and practices. To this end, we leveraged recent ideas from theoretical neurobiology to understand the human mind in social and cultural contexts. Our aim was bothsynthetic– building an integrative model adequate to account for key features of cultural learning and adaptation; andprescriptive– showing how the tools developed to explain brain dynamics can be applied to the emergence of social and (...) cultural ecologies of mind. In this reply to commentators, we address key issues, including: (1) refining the concept of culture to show how TTOM and the free-energy principle (FEP) can capture essential elements of human adaptation and functioning; (2) addressing cognition as an embodied, enactive, affective process involving cultural affordances; (3) clarifying the significance of the FEP formalism related to entropy minimization, Bayesian inference, Markov blankets, and enactivist views; (4) developing empirical tests and applications of the TTOM model; (5) incorporating cultural diversity and context at the level of intra-cultural variation, individual differences, and the transition to digital niches; and (6) considering some implications for psychiatry. The commentators’ critiques and suggestions point to useful refinements and applications of the model. In ongoing collaborations, we are exploring how to augment the theory with affective valence, take into account individual differences and historicity, and apply the model to specific domains including epistemic bias. (shrink)

I present a detailed ethnographic study of magic and divination of the Nuosu people in southwest China and offer a cognitive account of the surprising prevalence of these objectively ineffective practices in a society that has ample access to modern technology and mainstream Han culture. I argue that in the belief system of the Nuosu, ghosts, divination, and magical healing rituals form a closely interconnected web that gives sense and meaning to otherwise puzzling practices, and such a belief system (...) is importantly supported and reinforced by individual’s everyday experiences. Contemporary Nuosu people overwhelmingly treat these practices as instruments for achieving specific ends and often entertain considerable uncertainty regarding their efficacy, which may be overestimated for a number of reasons, including the following: (1) the intuitive plausibility of divination for ghost identification and exorcist rituals is enhanced by the belief in the existence of ghosts as a result of abductive reasoning, (2) negative instances (divinatory or healing ritual failures) are underreported, and (3) people’s misperception of the probability of uncertain events’ occurrence often prevents them from realizing that the efficacies of magical/divinatory practices do not outperform chance. I conclude with some comments on the generalizability of the psychological and social mechanisms discussed. (shrink)

Introduction to the special issue in Pragmatics & Cognition focused on creativity, cognition, and material culture. With contributions from Maurice Bloch, Chris Gosden, Tim Ingold, John Kirsh, Carl Knappett & Sander van der Leeuw, Lambros Malafouris, Frédéric Vallée-Tourangeau, Kevin Warwick, and Tom Wynn and Frederick L. Coolidge.

Purpose: Demonstrate that cognitive and social approaches towards understanding do not at all oppose but rather they complement each other. Constructivist concepts of understanding paved the way to conceive of understanding as a cognitive-social "mechanism" which mutually regulates processes of social structuration and, at the same time, cognitive constructions and processing. Findings: Constructivist approaches bridge the gap between the cognitive and the social faces of understanding. They demonstrate how comprehension and cultivation, cognition and cultural reproduction are mutually linked to (...) each other by the cognitive-social "mechanism" of understanding. As a consequence, the unavoidable immunisation against communicative demands from others jeopardizes the achievements of our communicative culture. Practical implications: Communicators are even more responsible for success or failure of communication than recipients. Moreover, as educators they are responsible for both cultural reproduction and the reinforcement of creativity and innovation. This double bind can only be managed with strong and resistant personal relations. All construction of meaning and all interpretation should be conceived of as a pro-construction, a hypothetical provisional reading made for the tough going of public or scholarly discourse. Original value: Concept of understanding integrating philosophical, psychological and sociological approaches within a constructivist theory of communication and reception. (shrink)

What follows is a discussion of three sets of experimental results that deal with various aspects of universal biological understanding among American and Maya children and adults. The first set of experiments shows that by the age of four-to-five years urban American and Yukatek Maya children employ a concept of innate species potential, or underlying essence, as an inferential framework for understanding the affiliation of an organism to a biological species, and for projecting known and unknown biological properties to organisms (...) in the face of uncertainty. The second set of experiments shows that the youngest Maya children do not have an anthropocentric understanding of the biological world. Children do not initially need to reason about non-human living kinds by analogy to human kinds. The third set of results show that the same taxonomic rank is cognitively preferred for biological induction in two diverse populations: people raised in the Mid-western USA and Itza' Maya of the Lowland Meso-american rainforest. This is the generic species  the level of oak and robin. These findings cannot be explained by domain-general models of similarity because such models cannot account for why both cultures prefer species-like groups in making inferences about the biological world, although Americans have relatively little actual knowledge or experience at this level. The implication from these experiments is that folk biology may well represent an evolutionary design: universal taxonomic structures, centred on essence-based generic species, are arguably routine products of our ‘habits of mind,' which may be in part naturally selected to grasp relevant and recurrent ‘habits of the world.' The science of biology is built upon these domain-specific cognitive universals: folk biology sets initial cognitive constraints on the development of any possible macro-biological theory, including the initial development of evolutionary theory. Nevertheless, the conditions of relevance under which science operates diverge from those pertinent to folk biology. For natural science, the motivating idea is to understand nature as it is ‘in itself,' independently of the human observer. From this standpoint, the species-concept, like taxonomy and teleology, may arguably be allowed to survive in science as a regulative principle that enables the mind to readily establish stable contact with the surrounding environment, rather than as an epistemic concept that guides the search for truth. (shrink)

The purpose is to explore new cultivation modes of college students’ national cognition and cultural acceptance. Deep learning technology and Educational Psychology theory are introduced, and the influence of art journal reading on college students’ national cognition and cultural acceptance is analyzed under Educational Psychology. Firstly, the background of Educational Psychology, national cognition and cultural acceptance, and learning system are discussed following a literature review. The DL technology is introduced to construct the journal reading guidance system. The (...) system can provide users with art journals and record the user habits like reading duration and preferences. Secondly, hypotheses are proposed, and a questionnaire survey is designed, with 12 specific indicators to investigate and collect research data. Finally, the collected data are analyzed. The results show that women’s cognition of Chinese traditional culture, Chinese excellent revolutionary culture, and Chinese national identity is higher than that of men. By comparison, men’s cognition of Chinese advanced socialist culture is higher than women’s. After using the journal reading guidance system, the cognition of female college students on traditional Chinese culture is improved by 16.3%. Before and after reading art journals, the overall national cognition and cultural acceptance of Minority students are higher than that of Han students. The overall cognition of Literature and History students is higher than that of Science and Engineering students in traditional Chinese culture and China’s excellent revolutionary culture and lower in advanced Chinese socialist culture and Chinese national identity. The overall cognition of college students’ party members to the advanced socialist culture is higher than league members. As students read more art journals through the guidance system, their overall national cognition and cultural acceptance have increased. Therefore, reading art journals can promote college students’ national cognition and cultural acceptance. A national cognition and cultural acceptance promotion system that conforms to the current situation of college students is constructed. The finding provides a reference for developing complex emotion recognition technology in human-computer interaction. (shrink)

Empathy is widely touted as a springboard for social change. Within the academy, ‘identification’ is often used to promote the social value of literary and cultural studies. But to what degree have scholars, in seeking to defend the value of literary and cultural studies, conceived the act of reading in problematic ways? ‘An Ethics of Reading’ argues that adopting a Lacanian paradigm of self (reader) and text (other) to discuss the act of textual interpretation reduces a complex event involving multiple (...) actors to a simple dualism, while ineluctably consigning any act of interpretation to simple projection. Turning instead to psychoanalyst Jean Laplanche’s concept of the enigmatic signifier, this article rethinks the relation between reader and cultural text – reconceiving the act of interpretation by situating it within a dynamic of transference, as opposed to projection. When conceived via this Laplanchian framework, reading becomes not only an effective path to cognition and knowledge, but a radical means of subjective transformation. (shrink)

This special issue, which includes papers first presented at two workshops on ‘Memory, Mind, and Media’ in Sydney on November 29–30 and December 2–3, 2004, showcases some of the best interdisciplinary work in philosophy and psychology by memory researchers in Australasia (and by one expatriate Australian, Robert Wilson of the University of Alberta). The papers address memory in many contexts: in dance and under hypnosis, in social groups and with siblings, in early childhood and in the laboratory. Memory is taken (...) as a test case for evaluating the optimistic vision of a new kind of cognitive science defended by Andy Clark. Clark (2001:154) argues: Much of what matters about human intelligence is hidden not in the brain, nor in the technology, but in the complex and iterated interactions and collaborations between the two ... The study of these interaction spaces is not easy, and depends both on new multidisciplinary alliances and new forms of modelling and analysis. The pay-off, however, could be spectacular: nothing less than a new kind of cognitive scientific collaboration involving neuroscience, physiology, and social, cultural, and technological studies in about equal measure. So the central motivation is to investigate critically how well the case of memory would fit the extended mind’ thesis put forward by Clark and Chalmers (Clark and Chalmers 1998; Clark 1997, 2006)—according to which mental states and processes can spread across the.. (shrink)

One of the best ways to pursue and go beyond the programme of Writing Culture (Clifford and Marcus 1986), I suggest, takes as its point of departure the cognitive anthropology of anthropology. Situating Writing Culture with regard to this field of research can contribute to its further development. It is, after all, sensible to start the anthropological study of anthropology with an analysis of its own cultural productions: ethnographic texts. The analyst can then identify the relevant properties of (...) such cultural products and track down their causes. These causes include especially the cognitive processes of working ethnographers. Starting with textual analysis, I will argue that some of the rhetorical conventions that are viewed critically by contributors to Writing Culture, rather than being misleading, actually serve to inform the reader about the cognitive genesis of the ethnography. The information conveyed when complying with these conventions enables readers to evaluate the reliability of ethnographic accounts and anthropological analyses. Following the textual analysis, I specify some of the cognitive processes at work in the production of ethnographies. These include, for example, a reflexive and critical cognition that is distributed among the community of anthropologists and also 'mind-reading' – a cognitive process, much studied by cognitive psychologists, that enables ethnographers to make sense of the behaviour of indigenous people by attributing mental states to them (beliefs, intentions, desires, feelings). (shrink)

LeRon Shults and Palgrave MacMillan are happy to announce the arrival of Postpartum Theology!Shults has changed his guiding metaphors during the short interval between the publication of Iconoclastic Theology: Gilles Deleuze and the Secretion of Atheism and Theology After the Birth of God. While Iconoclastic Theology emphasized the iconoclastic potential of theology with the help of Deleuze’s well-struck hammer blows, Theology After the Birth of God adopts natal imagery. The gods, Shults argues, were conceived in the human mind, born into (...) the world as a result of human cognitive errors, and continue to be borne in diverse cultures. Prophets who have announced the death of God have little impacted our continued... (shrink)

We make character trait attributions to predict and explain others’ behaviour. How should we understand character trait attribution in context across the domains of philosophy, folk psychology, developmental psychology, and evolutionary psychology? For example, how does trait attribution relate to our ability to attribute mental states to others, to ‘mindread’? This thesis uses philosophical methods and empirical data to argue for character trait attribution as a practice dependent upon our ability to mindread, which develops as a product of natural selection (...) acting on culture instead of genes. This analysis carves out trait attribution’s distinct place within an emerging complex and mature scholarship on pluralistic social cognition. (shrink)

Atran & Norenzayan's (A&N's) analysis fits with other perspectives on evoked culture: Cultural beliefs might emerge simply from the fact that people share a common cognitive architecture. But no perspective on culture can be complete without incorporating the unstoppable role of communication. The evolutionary landscape of culture will be most completely mapped by theories that describe specifically how communication translates evolved cognitive canals into cultural beliefs.

In this paper I argue that semiotic cognition is a distinctive form of cognition, which must have evolved out of earlier forms of non-semiotic cognition. Semiotic cognition depends on the use of signs. Signs are understood in terms of a specific organization, or structure, of the cognitive process. Semiotic cognition is a unique form of cognition. Once this form of cognition was available to humans, the semiotic provided the ground structure for an evolutionary (...) development that was no longer strictly Darwinian, but followed its own — semiotic — logic. In the increasingly abstract ways in which the ubiquitous difference is dealt with, we discover this logic of cultural evolution, which determines the course of long term cultural change. (shrink)

Cognition and Temporality argues that both verbal grammar and figural grammar have their cognitive basis in twelve characteristic forms of judgment, distributed among individuals in human populations throughout history. These twelve logical forms are context-free and language-free foundations in our attentional awareness, and shape all verbal and figural statements. Moreover, these types of historical judgment are psychogenetic inheritances in a population, and each serves a distinct problem-solving function in the human species. Through analysis of verbal and figural statements, the (...) author contends, the researcher can find evidence of these forms of judgment, and in turn analyze how the event to which those statements attend is formally constructed by that judgment. This construction guides how the event is assessed, approached, and engaged in the process of problem-solving. Artists and aestheticians in the early twentieth century--including Wassily Kandinsky, Stephen C. Pepper, and Andrew Paul Ushenko--have all posited an inherited attentional perspective in individuals, manifested in the logical correspondence between their distinctive verbal and figural grammars. Cognition and Temporality elaborates these claims, arguing that while the styles of well-known artists and writers are conditioned by the public styles of a particular time period, variations in personal style manifest one's inherited form of judgment, and the characteristic grammars that express that form. Through rigorous visual and stylistic analysis, the author demonstrates the expression of these forms among notable writers and artists across history. The result is a wide-ranging and provocative contribution to phenomenology, aesthetic philosophy, and cultural history. (shrink)

Controlled elicitation of linguistic and psycholinguistic experimental data facilitate strong inferences about phonological, syntactic, semantic and pragmatic structures and functions, yet neglect the ecological validity of responses. Ecological validity in this paper refers to whether data gathered under controlled conditions are commensurate with routine problem solving and language use in natural settings. All methods produce "white room" effects that compromise data gathering and analysis. Unexamined folk knowledge and experiences also guide the investigator s interpretation of data from field research, laboratories, (...) testing sessions, and target sentences. Story recall data from children in a combined second-third grade classroom and their narrative responses to cartoons without sound are used to illustrate ecological validity issues. The child's spontaneous, imaginative narratives about the story and cartoons resemble adult folk theory, and their semantic content reveal sociocultural knowledge essential for understanding subjects ' reasoning and information processing skills. (shrink)