46 found
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  1.  20
    Why Religion is Natural and Science is Not.Robert N. McCauley - 2011 - Oxford University Press.
    Introduction 3 Chapter One: Natural Cognition 11 Chapter Two: Maturational Naturalness 31 Chapter Three: Unnatural Science 83 Chapter Four: Natural Religion 145 Chapter Five: Surprising Consequences 223.
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  2. Bringing Ritual to Mind: Psychological Foundations of Cultural Forms.Robert N. McCauley - 2002 - Cambridge University Press.
    Bringing Ritual to Mind explores the cognitive and psychological foundations of religious ritual systems. Participants must recall their rituals well enough to ensure a sense of continuity across performances, and those rituals must motivate them to transmit and re-perform them. Most religious rituals the world over exploit either high performance frequency or extraordinary emotional stimulation to enhance their recollection. But why do some rituals exploit the first of these variables while others exploit the second? McCauley and Lawson advance the ritual (...)
     
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  3. The naturalness of religion and the unnaturalness of science.Robert N. McCauley - unknown
    Aristotle's observation that all human beings by nature desire to know aptly captures the spirit of "intellectualist" research in psychology and anthropology. Intellectualists in these fields agree that humans' have fundamental explanatory interests (which reflect their rationality) and that the idioms in which their explanations are couched can differ considerably across places and times (both historical and developmental). Intellectualists in developmental psychology (e.g., Gopnik and Meltzoff, 1997) maintain that young children's conceptual structures, like those of scientists, are theories and that (...)
     
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  4. Explanatory Pluralism and The Heuristic Identity Theory.Robert N. McCauley & William Bechtel - 2001 - Theory & Psychology 11 (6):736–760.
    Explanatory pluralism holds that the sorts of comprehensive theoretical and ontological economies, which microreductionists and New Wave reductionists envision and which antireductionists fear, offer misleading views of both scientific practice and scientific progress. Both advocates and foes of employing reductionist strategies at the interface of psychology and neuroscience have overplayed the alleged economies that interlevel connections (including identities) justify while overlooking their fundamental role in promoting scientific research. A brief review of research on visual processing provides support for the explanatory (...)
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  5. Susceptibility to the Muller-lyer illusion, theory-neutral observation, and the diachronic penetrability of the visual input system.Robert N. McCauley & Joseph Henrich - 2006 - Philosophical Psychology 19 (1):79-101.
    Jerry Fodor has consistently cited the persistence of illusions--especially the M.
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  6.  26
    Associative Engines: Connectionism, Concepts and Representational Change.Robert N. McCauley - 1995 - Philosophical Quarterly 45 (179):241-243.
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  7. Heuristic identity theory (or back to the future): The mind-body problem against the background of research strategies in cognitive neuroscience.William P. Bechtel & Robert N. McCauley - 1999 - In Martin Hahn & S. C. Stoness (eds.), Proceedings of the 21st Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society. Lawrence Erlbaum. pp. 67-72.
    Functionalists in philosophy of mind traditionally raise two major arguments against the type identity theory: (1) psychological states are _multiply realizable_ so that there are no one-to-one mappings of psychological states onto neural states and (2) the most that evidence could ever establish is the _correlation_ of psychological and neural states, not their identity. We defend a variant on the traditional type identity theory which we call _heuristic identity theory_ (HIT) against both of these objections. Drawing its inspiration from scientific (...)
     
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  8. Intertheoretic relations and the future of psychology.Robert N. McCauley - 1986 - Philosophy of Science 53 (June):179-99.
    In the course of defending both a unified model of intertheoretic relations in science and scientific realism, Paul Churchland has attempted to reinvigorate eliminative materialism. Churchland's eliminativism operates on three claims: (1) that some intertheoretic contexts involve incommensurable theories, (2) that such contexts invariably require the elimination of one theory or the other, and (3) that the relation of psychology and neuroscience is just such a context. I argue that a more detailed account of intertheoretic relations, which distinguishes between the (...)
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  9. Explanatory pluralism and the coevolution of theories in science.Robert N. McCauley - 1996 - In Robert McCauley (ed.), The Churchlands and their critics. Cambridge: Blackwell. pp. 17--47.
  10.  72
    Recent trends in the cognitive science of religion: Neuroscience, religious experience, and the confluence of cognitive and evolutionary research.Robert N. McCauley - 2020 - Zygon 55 (1):97-124.
    Cognitive science of religion (CSR) has increased influence in religious studies, the resistance of religious protectionists notwithstanding. CSR's most provocative work stresses the role of implicit cognition in explaining religious thought and conduct. Exhibiting explanatory pluralism, CSR seeks integrative accounts across the social, psychological, and brain sciences. CSR reflects prominent trends in the cognitive sciences generally. First, CSR is giving greater attention to the new tools and findings of cognitive neuroscience. Second, CSR researchers have done carefully designed, nonlaboratory studies of (...)
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  11. Time is of the essence: Explanatory pluralism and accommodating theories about long-term processes.Robert N. McCauley - 2009 - Philosophical Psychology 22 (5):611-635.
    Unified, all-purpose, philosophical models of reduction in science lack resources for capturing varieties of cross-scientific relations that have proven critical to understanding some scientific achievements. Not only do those models obscure the distinction between successional and cross-scientific relations, their preoccupations with the structures of both theories and things provide no means for accommodating the contributions to various sciences of theories and research about long-term diachronic processes involving large-scale, distributed systems. Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection is the parade case. (...)
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  12. Cognitive Science and the Naturalness of Religion.Robert N. McCauley & Emma Cohen - 2010 - Philosophy Compass 5 (9):779-792.
    Cognitive approaches to religious phenomena have attracted considerable interdisciplinary attention since their emergence a couple of decades ago. Proponents offer explanatory accounts of the content and transmission of religious thought and behavior in terms of underlying cognition. A central claim is that the cross‐cultural recurrence and historical persistence of religion is attributable to the cognitive naturalness of religious ideas, i.e., attributable to the readiness, the ease, and the speed with which human minds acquire and process popular religious representations. In this (...)
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  13.  20
    Hearing Voices and Other Matters of the Mind: What Mental Abnormalities Can Teach Us About Religions.Robert N. McCauley & George Graham - 2020 - Oup Usa.
    Hearing Voices and Other Unusual Experiences examines the long-recognized and striking similarities between features of mental disorders and features of religions. Robert McCauley and George Graham emphasize underlying cognitive continuities between familiar features of religiosity, of mental disorders, and of everyday thinking and action. They contend that much religious thought and behavior can be explained in terms of the cultural activation of humans' natural cognitive systems, which address matters that are essential to human survival: hazard precautions, agency detection, language processing, (...)
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  14. Epistemology in an age of cognitive science.Robert N. McCauley - 1988 - Philosophical Psychology 1 (2):143-152.
    Abstract Like the logical empiricists many contemporary philosophers wish to bring the determinateness of scientific judgment to epistemology. Recent efforts to naturalise epistemology (such as those of the Churchlands) seem to jeopardise the position of epistemology as a normative discipline. Putnam argues that attempts to naturalise epistemology are self?refuting. My goal is not to defeat the project for the naturalisation of epistemology, but rather to help clarify what it does and does not amount to. I maintain that attempts to completely (...)
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  15. Cognition, Religious Ritual, and Archaeology.Robert N. McCauley - unknown
    The emergence of cognitive science over the past thirty years has stimulated new approaches to traditional problems and materials in well-established disciplines. Those approaches have generated new insights and reinvigorated aspirations for theories in the sciences of the socio-cultural (about the structures and uses of symbols and the cognitive processes underlying them) that are both more systematic and more accountable empirically than the recently available alternatives. Without rejecting interpretive proposals, projects in both the cognitive science of religion and in cognitive (...)
     
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  16.  53
    Hypothetical identities and ontological economizing: Comments on Causey's program for the unity of science.Robert N. McCauley - 1981 - Philosophy of Science 48 (2):218-227.
  17.  8
    Philosophical foundations of the cognitive science of religion: a head start.Robert N. McCauley - 2017 - New York: Bloomsbury Academic.
    Explanatory pluralism and the cognitive science of religion: or why scholars in religious studies should stop worrying about reductionism -- Interpretation and explanation: problems and promise in the study of religion -- Crisis of conscience, riddle of identity: making space for a cognitive approach to religious phenomena -- Who owns culture? -- Overcoming barriers to a cognitive psychology of religion -- Years in: landmark empirical findings in the cognitive science of religion.
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  18.  22
    Twenty-five years in: Landmark empirical findings in the cognitive science of religion.Robert N. McCauley - 2018 - Filosofia Unisinos 19 (3).
    Religious studies’ collective advocacy on behalf of diversity and inclusion stands in poignant contrast to its persisting exclusionary ethos (within most quarters of the field) concerning questions of method. A legacy of prohibitions in religious studies about who can study religions and about how they must proceed when doing so has tended to curb innovation. Born of protectionism or special pleading or outright religious impulses, such prohibitions have skewed the field in favor of the idiosyncratic over the recurrent, of the (...)
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  19.  59
    Explanatory modesty.Robert N. McCauley - 2014 - Zygon 49 (3):728-740.
    Although I certainly have differences with some of my commentators, I am grateful for the time, effort, and attention that each has devoted to my book, Why Religion Is Natural and Science Is Not. They have helpfully pointed out features of my positions that need clarification and elaboration. I am also grateful to the editor of Zygon, Willem Drees, for this opportunity to undertake that task here.
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  20. Is Religion a Rube Goldberg Device? Or Oh, What a Difference a Theory Makes!Robert N. McCauley - unknown
    Prudence, if not sheer logical necessity, dictates that when discussing something, it helps to have some idea of what you are talking about. This is why even the most experienced scholars periodically discuss their terms. Those discussions rarely, if ever, settle anything more than discussants= (sometimes differing) words for a few readily recognizable regions in the relevant..
     
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  21. Why the Blind Can′t Lead the Blind: Dennett on the Blind Spot, Blindsight, and Sensory Qualia.Robert N. McCauley - 1993 - Consciousness and Cognition 2 (2):155-64.
    In Consciousness Explained Dan Dennett proposes a deflationary treatment of sensory qualia. He seeks to establish a continuity among both the neural and the conscious phenomena connected with the blind spot and with the perception of repetitive patterns on the one hand and the neutral and conscious phenomena connected with blindsight on the other. He aims to analyze the conscious phenomena associated with each in terms of what the brain ignores. Dennett offers a thought experiment about a blindsight patient who (...)
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  22. Levels of explanation and cognitive architectures.Robert N. McCauley - 1998 - In George Graham & William Bechtel (eds.), A Companion to Cognitive Science. Blackwell. pp. 611–624.
    Some controversies in cognitive science, such as arguments about whether classical or distributed connectionist architectures best model the human cognitive system, reenact long‐standing debates in the philosophy of science. For millennia, philosophers have pondered whether mentality can submit to scientific explanation generally and to physical explanation particularly. Recently, positive answers have gained popularity. The question remains, though, as to the analytical level at which mentality is best explained. Is there a level of analysis that is peculiarly appropriate to the explanation (...)
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  23. The impact of successful scientific theorizing on conceptualizing religion.Robert N. McCauley - unknown
    Empirically successful scientific theories are intellectual hurricanes. They flood lowlands set aside for worries about definitions. They carry away philosophical reflections that are less dense than the accumulated scientific findings that give these storms their strength, and they fundamentally reshape the conceptual landscape. The history of scholarship reveals that once an empirically corroborated scientific theory explains and predicts phenomena in some domain noticeably better than the available alternatives (whether those alternatives are scientific theories or not), among experts at least, the (...)
     
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  24. The cognitive representation of religious ritual form: A theory of participants' competence with their religious ritual systems.E. Thomas Lawson & Robert N. McCauley - unknown
    Theorizing about religious ritual systems from a cognitive viewpoint involves (1) modeling cognitive processes and their products and (2) demonstrating their influence on religious behavior. Particularly important for such an approach to the study of religious ritual is the modeling of participants' representations of ritual form. In pursuit of that goal, we presented in Rethinking Religion a theory of religious ritual form that involved two commitments. The theory’s first commitment is that the cognitive apparatus for the representation of action in (...)
     
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  25. How Science and Religion Are More Like Theology and Commonsense Explanations Than They Are Like Each Other: A Cognitive Account.Robert N. McCauley - unknown
    No one has explored the implications of cognitive theories and findings about religion for understanding its history with any more enthusiasm or insight than Luther Martin. Although my focus here is not historical, I assume that I will be employing cognitive tools in ways that he finds congenial. In the paper’s first section, I will make some general comments about standard comparisons of science and religion and criticize one strategy for making peace between them. In the second section of the (...)
     
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  26. Problem solving in science and the competence approach to theorizing in linguistics.Robert N. Mccauley - 1986 - Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 16 (3):299–312.
    The goals ofthis paper are to identify (in Section II) some general features of problem solving strategies in science, to discuss (in Section III) how Chomsky has employed two particularly popular discovery strategies in science, and to show (in Section IV) how these strategies inform Chomskyan linguistics. In Section IV I will discuss (1) how their employment in linguistics manifests features of scientific problem solving outlined in Section Il and (2) how an analysis in terms of those features suggests a (...)
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  27. Philosophical naturalism and the cognitive approach to ritual'.Robert N. McCauley - 2002 - In Kevin Schilbrack (ed.), Thinking through rituals: philosophical perspectives. New York: Routledge. pp. 148--171.
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  28. (1 other version)Who owns 'culture'?Robert N. McCauley & E. Thomas Lawson - unknown
    No one owns 'culture' [i]: anyone with a viable theoretical proposal can contend for the right to determine that concept's fate. Not everyone agrees with this view. Throughout its century long struggle for academic respectability, anthropology has regularly insisted on its unique role as the proprietor of 'culture.' Its variety of approaches and feuding factions notwithstanding, it is this proprietary claim that unifies anthropology to an extent sometimes unrecognized even by its own (post modernist) practitioners. The history of anthropology has (...)
     
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  29. The not so happy story of the marriage of linguistics and psychology or why linguistics has discouraged psychology's recent advances.Robert N. McCauley - 1987 - Synthese 72 (3):341 - 353.
  30. (1 other version)The role of cognitive explanations in psychology.Robert N. McCauley - 1987 - Behaviorism 15 (1):27-40.
  31.  24
    Darwinian Bases of Religious Meaning: Interactionism, General Interpretive Theories, and 6E Cognitive Science.Robert N. McCauley - 2023 - Journal of Cognition and Culture 23 (1-2):1-28.
    Interactionism holds that explanatory and interpretive projects are mutually enriching. If so, then the evolutionary and cognitive science of religions’ explanatory theories should aid interpretive projects concerning religious meaning. Although interpretive accounts typically focus on the local and the particular, interpreters over the past century have construed Freud and Marx as offering general interpretive theories. So, precedent for general interpretive theorizing exists. 4E cognitive science, which champions how cognition is embedded in natural and cultural settings, extended into external structures, enacted (...)
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  32.  15
    Rethinking Religion: Connecting cognition & Culture.E. Thomas Lawson & Robert N. McCauley - 1990 - Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
    This book is an ambitious attempt to develop a cognitive approach to religion. Focusing particularly on ritual action, it borrows analytical methods from linguistics and other cognitive sciences. The authors, a philosopher of science and a scholar of comparative religion, provide a lucid critical review of established approaches to the study of religion, and make a strong plea for the combination of interpretation and explanation. Often represented as competitive approaches, they are rather, complementary, equally vital to the study of symbolic (...)
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  33.  14
    Cognitive and Evolutionary Approaches to Religion.Robert N. Mccauley - 2015 - In Kelly James Clark (ed.), The Blackwell Companion to Naturalism. Hoboken: Wiley-Blackwell. pp. 462–480.
    The cognitive science of religion (CSR) was born from dissatisfaction with traditional interpretative accounts of religious symbolism and with the doctrine of the primacy of texts. The theories, methods, and findings of the cognitive sciences provide means for escaping the interpretative circling the former entails and for addressing the myriad nontextual religious phenomena for which the latter is ill‐suited. Whatever else each affirms, all of the pioneering theorists in CSR agree that religions involve cultural arrangements that engage ordinary cognitive systems, (...)
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  34.  26
    Acceptability, analogy, and the acceptability of analogies.Robert N. McCauley - 1989 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 12 (3):482-483.
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  35.  23
    Are gods and good governments culturally and psychologically interchangeable?Robert N. McCauley - 2016 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 39.
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  36.  40
    Defending normative naturalism: A reply to Ellen Klein.Robert N. McCauley - 1992 - Philosophical Psychology 5 (3):299 – 305.
    Rejecting Klein's claims that normative epistemology and naturalism are mutually exclusive, I defend the normative naturalism of my "Epistemology in an Age of Cognitive Science". When insisting that epistemic standards simultaneously external to, superior to, and independent of those of science do not exist, I hold neither that science exhausts standards of rationality nor that relevant extra-scientific considerations do not exist. Cognitive science may transform how we pose some normative questions in epistemology. Concurring with Klein that the burden of evidence (...)
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  37. Interactionism and the non obviousness of scientific theories.Robert N. McCauley & E. Thomas Lawson - unknown
    Levine's discussion of Rethinking Religion (1990) and "Crisis of Conscience, Riddle of Identity" (1993) includes some rash charges, some useful comments, and some profound misunderstandings. The latter, especially, reveal areas where we need to clarify and further defend our claims. In the second section we shall discuss the epistemological and methodological issues that Levine raises. Then we shall turn in the third section to theoretical and substantive matters. In fact, Levine remains almost completely silent on substantive matters (except to say (...)
     
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  38.  33
    Inference and temporal coding in episodic memory.Robert N. McCauley - 1984 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 7 (2):246.
  39.  41
    Maturationally Natural Cognition, Radically Counter-Intuitive Science, and the Theory-Ladenness of Perception.Robert N. McCauley - 2015 - Journal for General Philosophy of Science / Zeitschrift für Allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie 46 (1):183-199.
    Theory-ladenness of perception and cognition is pervasive and variable. Emerging maturationally natural perception and cognition, which are on-line, fast, automatic, unconscious, and, by virtue of their selectivity, theoretical in import, if not in form, define normal development. They contrast with off-line, slow, deliberate, conscious perceptual and cognitive judgments that reflective theories, including scientific ones, inform. Although culture tunes MN systems, their emergence and operation do not rely on culturally distinctive inputs. The sciences advance radically counter-intuitive representations that depart drastically from (...)
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  40.  22
    (1 other version)Psychology in mid-stream: A reply to Bechtel.Robert N. Mccauley - 1989 - Behaviorism 17 (1):75-77.
  41.  26
    (1 other version)Truth, Epistemic Ideals and the Psychology of Categorization.Robert N. McCauley - 1986 - PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association 1986:198 - 207.
    Recent theoretical work on the psychology of categorization emphasizes the role cognitive constructs play in perception and categorization. This approach supports Putnam's rejection of metaphysical realism. However, the experimental findings concerning basic level categories, in particular, suggest that robust stabilitites among our systems of empirical concepts persist in the face of considerable theoretical diversity and change. These stabilities undermine Putnam's strongest negative conclusions concerning the correspondence theory of truth (once it is uncoupled from metaphysical realism). The centrality of a correspondence (...)
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  42.  39
    The Moral Status of Apartheid: Can the Presence of Foreign Corporations in South Africa Be Morally Justified?Robert N. McCauley - 1985 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 15 (4):565 - 579.
    Since the international community has offered their nearly unanimous condemnation of the system of apartheid in the Republic of South Africa, the topic of this essay might seem moot. However, the involvement and cooperation with the South African government of numerous governments, businesses, and other institutions suggest that those condemnations do not constitute the final word - certainly not politically, nor, perhaps, morally.
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  43.  23
    Models of knowing and their relations to our understanding of liberal education.Robert N. Mccauley - 1992 - Metaphilosophy 23 (3):288-309.
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  44.  27
    Theory of Mind, Religiosity, and Autistic Spectrum Disorder: a Review of Empirical Evidence Bearing on Three Hypotheses. [REVIEW]Robert N. McCauley, George Graham & A. C. Reid - 2019 - Journal of Cognition and Culture 19 (5):411-431.
    The cognitive science of religions’ By-Product Theory contends that much religious thought and behavior can be explained in terms of the cultural activation of maturationally natural cognitive systems. Those systems address fundamental problems of human survival, encompassing such capacities as hazard precautions, agency detection, language processing, and theory of mind. Across cultures they typically arise effortlessly and unconsciously during early childhood. They are not taught and appear independent of general intelligence. Theory of mind undergirds an instantaneous and automatic intuitive understanding (...)
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  45.  42
    Brainwork: A review of Paul Churchland's a neurocomputational perspective. [REVIEW]Robert N. McCauley - 1993 - Philosophical Psychology 6 (1):81 – 96.
    Taking inspiration from developments in neurocomputational modeling, Paul Church-land develops his positions in the philosophy of mind and the philosophy of science. Concerning the former, Churchland relaxes his eliminativism at various points and seems to endorse a traditional identity account of sensory qualia. Although he remains unsympathetic to folk psychology, he no longer seeks the elimination of normative epistemology, but rather its transformation to a philosophical enterprise informed by current developments in the relevant sciences. Churchland supplies suggestive discussions of the (...)
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  46.  4
    On the Contrary. [REVIEW]Robert N. McCauley - 2000 - Journal of Philosophy 97 (5):297-301.
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