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  1. The Weirdness of the World.Eric Schwitzgebel - 2024 - Princeton University Press.
    How all philosophical explanations of human consciousness and the fundamental structure of the cosmos are bizarre—and why that’s a good thing Do we live inside a simulated reality or a pocket universe embedded in a larger structure about which we know virtually nothing? Is consciousness a purely physical matter, or might it require something extra, something nonphysical? According to the philosopher Eric Schwitzgebel, it’s hard to say. In The Weirdness of the World, Schwitzgebel argues that the answers to these fundamental (...)
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  • Wonderstruck: How Wonder and Awe Shape the Way We Think.Helen De Cruz - 2024 - Princeton: Princeton University Press.
    What explains people's propensity to ask existential questions that they have little hope of resolving, such as: Why are we here? What, if any, is our purpose? What is the structure of the universe? That humans engage in these endeavors has long puzzled evolutionary theorists, as they go beyond the immediate demands of fending for ourselves, seeking safety, finding food, and reproducing, which occupy the daily lives of other animals. In this book, philosopher Helen De Cruz draws on a wide (...)
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  • Reasons to Punish Autonomous Robots.Zac Cogley - 2023 - The Gradient 14.
    I here consider the reasonableness of punishing future autonomous military robots. I argue that it is an engineering desideratum that these devices be responsive to moral considerations as well as human criticism and blame. Additionally, I argue that someday it will be possible to build such machines. I use these claims to respond to the no subject of punishment objection to deploying autonomous military robots, the worry being that an “accountability gap” could result if the robot committed a war crime. (...)
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  • (1 other version)Creencias conceptuales generales: entre dogmatismo esporádico y patológico. Notas sobre disonancia y autoengaño en construcciones intelectuales distorsionadas (General conceptual beliefs: between sporadic and pathological dogmatism. Notes on dissonance and self-deception in distorted intellectual constructs).Pietro Montanari - 2022 - In Dario Armando Flores Sorias & José Alejandro Fuerte (eds.), Filosofia y espiritualidad. Reflexiones desde la tradición filosofica en diálogo con el presente. Universidad de Guadalajara UDG. pp. 171-203.
    Ideologies, worldviews, or simply personal theories, often acquire a distorted and pathological character, and become a factor of alienation rather than an epistemic resource and an aid for personal existence. This paper attempts to better define the limits and characteristics of this experience, which we call distorted intellectual beliefs, or general conceptual beliefs (GB), while trying to highlight both its sometimes dramatic background and its personal and social consequences, which are no less potentially deleterious. We believe that such experiences should (...)
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  • (1 other version)Creencias conceptuales generales: entre dogmatismo esporádico y patológico. Notas sobre disonancia y autoengaño en construcciones intelectuales distorsionadas (General conceptual beliefs: between sporadic and pathological dogmatism. Notes on dissonance and self-deception in distorted intellectual constructs).Pietro Montanari - 2022 - In Dario Armando Flores Soria & José Alejandro Fuerte (eds.), Filosofia y espiritualidad. Reflexiones desde la tradición filosofica en diálogo con el presente. Universidad de Guadalajara. pp. 171-203.
    Ideologies, worldviews, or simply personal theories, often acquire a distorted and pathological character, and become a factor of alienation rather than an epistemic resource and an aid for personal existence. This paper attempts to better define the limits and characteristics of this experience, which we call distorted intellectual beliefs, or general conceptual beliefs (GB), while trying to highlight both its sometimes dramatic background and its personal and social consequences, which are no less potentially deleterious. We believe that such experiences should (...)
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  • Introduction.Diego E. Machuca - 2023 - In Evolutionary Debunking Arguments: Ethics, Philosophy of Religion, Philosophy of Mathematics, Metaphysics, and Epistemology. New York: Routledge. pp. 1-12.
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  • Wittgenstein and the Cognitive Science of Religion: Interpreting Human Nature and the Mind.Robert Vinten (ed.) - 2023 - London: Bloomsbury Academic.
    Advancing our understanding of one of the most influential 20th-century philosophers, Robert Vinten brings together an international line up of scholars to consider the relevance of Ludwig Wittgenstein's ideas to the cognitive science of religion. Wittgenstein's claims ranged from the rejection of the idea that psychology is a 'young science' in comparison to physics to challenges to scientistic and intellectualist accounts of religion in the work of past anthropologists. Chapters explore whether these remarks about psychology and religion undermine the frameworks (...)
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  • Effing the ineffable: existential mumblings at the limits of language.Wesley J. Wildman - 2018 - Albany: State University of New York Press.
    Ultimacy talk -- Dreaming -- Suffering -- Creating -- Ultimacy systems -- Slipping -- Balancing -- Eclipsing -- Ultimacy manifestations -- Loneliness -- Intensity -- Bliss.
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  • Cults, Conspiracies, and Fantasies of Knowledge.Daniel Munro - 2023 - Episteme (3).
    There’s a certain pleasure in fantasizing about possessing knowledge, especially possessing secret knowledge to which outsiders don’t have access. Such fantasies are typically a source of innocent entertainment. However, under the right conditions, fantasies of knowledge can become epistemically dangerous, because they can generate illusions of genuine knowledge. I argue that this phenomenon helps to explain why some people join and eventually adopt the beliefs of epistemic communities who endorse seemingly bizarre, outlandish claims, such as extreme cults and online conspiracy (...)
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  • Schleiermacher and the Transmission of Sin: A Biocultural Evolutionary Model.Helen De Cruz & Johan De Smedt - 2023 - Theologica 7 (2):1-28.
    Understanding the pervasiveness of sin is central to Christian theology. The question of why humans are so sinful given an omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent God presents a challenge and a puzzle. Here, we investigate Friedrich Schleiermacher’s biocultural evolutionary account of sin. We look at empirical evidence to support it and use the cultural Price equation to provide a naturalistic model of the transmission of sin. This model can help us understand how sin can be ubiquitous and unavoidable, even though it (...)
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  • Cultural attraction theory.Christophe Heintz - 2018 - In Simon Coleman & Hilarry Callan (eds.), The International Encyclopedia of Anthropology.
    Cultural Attraction Theory (CAT), also referred to as cultural epidemiology, is an evolutionary theory of culture. It provides conceptual tools and a theoretical framework for explaining why and how ideas, practices, artifacts and other cultural items spread and persist in a community and its habitat. It states that cultural phenomena result from psychological or ecological factors of attraction.
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  • Natural Thoughts and Unnatural ‘Oughts’: Lessing, Wittgenstein, and Contemporary CSR.Guy Axtell - 2023 - In Robert Vinten (ed.), Wittgenstein and the Cognitive Science of Religion: Interpreting Human Nature and the Mind. London: Bloomsbury Academic.
    Wittgenstein’s “Lectures on Religious Belief” (LRB) provide a source for as yet unexplored connections to religious ideas as treated in Robert N. McCauley’s book Why Religion is Natural and Science is Not (2013), and to other CSR scholars who focus attention on how “cognitively speaking it is religion that is natural and science that is largely unnatural.” Tensions are explored in this paper between our “maturationally natural” religious inclinations to adopt religious ideas and the “unnatural” demands sometimes made upon people, (...)
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  • Kuinka ihmismieli vääristää keskustelua tekoälyn riskeistä ja etiikasta. Kognitiotieteellisiä näkökulmia keskusteluun.Michael Laakasuo, Aku Visala & Jussi Palomäki - 2020 - Ajatus 77 (1):131-168.
    Keskustelu tekoälyn soveltamiseen liittyvistä eettisistä ja poliittisista kysymyksistä käy juuri nyt kuumana. Emme halua tässä puheenvuorossa osallistua keskusteluun tarttumalla johonkin tiettyyn eettiseen ongelmaan. Sen sijaan pyrimme sanomaan jotain itsekeskustelusta ja sen vaikeudesta. Haluamme kiinnittää huomiota siihen, kuinka erilaiset ihmismielen ajattelutaipumukset ja virhepäätelmät voivat huomaamattamme vaikuttaa tapaamme hahmottaa ja ymmärtää tekoälyä ja siihen liittyviä eettisiä kysymyksiä. Kun ymmärrämme paremmin sen, kuinka hankalaa näiden kysymysten hahmottaminen arkisen mielemme kategorioilla oikein on, ja kun tunnistamme tästä syntyvät virhepäätelmät ja ajattelun vääristymät, kykenemme entistä korkeatasoisempaan (...)
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  • Culture and Cognitive Science.Andreas De Block & Daniel Kelly - 2022 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    Human behavior and thought often exhibit a familiar pattern of within group similarity and between group difference. Many of these patterns are attributed to cultural differences. For much of the history of its investigation into behavior and thought, however, cognitive science has been disproportionately focused on uncovering and explaining the more universal features of human minds—or the universal features of minds in general. -/- This entry charts out the ways in which this has changed over recent decades. It sketches the (...)
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  • (4 other versions)گشایش معمای ایدۀ «خداباوری شهودی» و وجود پرشمار خداناباوران: پژوهشی در علوم شناختی دین.نعیمه پورمحمدی & میثم فصیحی رامندی - 2021 - پژوهشنامه فلسفه دین 19 (1):207-226.
    در میان دانشمندان علوم شناختی دین، شماری پس از انجام یا بررسی آزمایش‌ها بر آن‌اند که همۀ انسان‌ها «خداباور شهودی»‌ و «دین‌دار طبیعی» هستند. از دید این متفکران، سه قوه اساسی در درون ما شامل «قوه ذهن‌مندانگاری»، «قوه عاملیت‌باوری» و «قوه غایت‌باوری» در نتیجۀ تکامل جزو ساختار شناختی‌مان قرار گرفته‌ است. این دانشمندان داشتن همین سه قوه و باورهای پیداشده از آنها را دین‌داری طبیعی می‌نامند و بر این اساس همۀ ما انسان‌ها را دین‌داران طبیعی یا خداباوران شهودی یا باورمند (...)
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  • Contemporary Darwinism as a worldview.Jamie Milton Freestone - 2021 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 90 (C):68-76.
    The most public-facing forms of contemporary Darwinism happily promote its worldview ambitions. Popular works, by the likes of Richard Dawkins, deflect associations with eugenics and social Darwinism, but also extend the reach of Darwinism beyond biology into social policy, politics, and ethics. Critics of the enterprise fall into two categories. Advocates of Intelligent Design and secular philosophers (like Mary Midgley and Thomas Nagel) recognise it as a worldview and argue against its implications. Scholars in the rhetoric of science or science (...)
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  • Cognitive Regeneration and the Noetic Effects of Sin: Why Theology and Cognitive Science May not be Compatible.Lari Launonen - 2021 - European Journal for Philosophy of Religion 13 (3).
    Justin Barrett and Kelly James Clark have suggested that cognitive science of religion supports the existence of a god-faculty akin to sensus divinitatis. They propose that God may have given rise to the god-faculty via guided evolution. This suggestion raises two theological worries. First, our natural cognition seems to favor false god-beliefs over true ones. Second, it also makes us prone to tribalism. If God hates idolatry and moral evil, why would he give rise to mind with such biases? A (...)
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  • The cartesian folk theater: People conceptualize consciousness as a spatio-temporally localized process in the human brain.Matthias Forstmann & Pascal Burgmer - 2022 - Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 151 (4):781-803.
    The present research (total N = 2,057) tested whether people’s folk conception of consciousness aligns with the notion of a “Cartesian Theater” (Dennett, 1991). More precisely, we tested the hypotheses that people believe that consciousness happens in a single, confined area (vs. multiple dispersed areas) in the human brain, and that it (partly) happens after the brain finished analyzing all available information. Further, we investigated how these beliefs arerelated to participants’ neuroscientific knowledge as well as their reliance on intuition, and (...)
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  • (1 other version)A Framework for the Emotional Psychology of Group Membership.Taylor Davis & Daniel Kelly - 2021 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology:1-22.
    The vast literature on negative treatment of outgroups and favoritism toward ingroups provides many local insights but is largely fragmented, lacking an overarching framework that might provide a unified overview and guide conceptual integration. As a result, it remains unclear where different local perspectives conflict, how they may reinforce one another, and where they leave gaps in our knowledge of the phenomena. Our aim is to start constructing a framework to help remedy this situation. We first identify a few key (...)
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  • How to make the problem of divine hiddenness worse.Aaron Rizzieri - 2021 - International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 90 (1):3-17.
    I present three versions of the argument from divine hiddenness that are grounded in moral considerations regarding how a just deity would act and auxiliary commitments that theists often have. First, I argue that the problem of hiddenness is made worse if one also holds that many will suffer in the afterlife due to not achieving a proper orientation towards God and the demands of morality in this life. Second, I argue that if any version of the moral argument for (...)
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  • Expressivism about delusion attribution.Sam Wilkinson - 2020 - European Journal of Analytic Philosophy 16 (2):59-77.
    In this paper, I will present and advocate a view about what we are doing when we attribute delusion, namely, say that someone is delusional. It is an “expressivist” view, roughly analogous to expressivism in meta-ethics. Just as meta-ethical expressivism accounts for certain key features of moral discourse, so does this expressivism account for certain key features of delusion attribution. And just as meta-ethical expressivism undermines factualism about moral properties, so does this expressivism, if correct, show that certain attempts to (...)
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  • Violent CRED s toward Out-Groups Increase Trustworthiness: Preliminary Experimental Evidence.Dan Řezníček & Radek Kundt - 2020 - Journal of Cognition and Culture 20 (3-4):262-281.
    In the process of cultural learning, people tend to acquire mental representations and behavior from prestigious individuals over dominant ones, as prestigious individuals generously share their expertise and know-how to gain admiration, whereas dominant ones use violence, manipulation, and intimidation to enforce obedience. However, in the context of intergroup conflict, violent thoughts and behavior that are otherwise associated with dominance can hypothetically become prestigious because parochial altruists, who engage in violence against out-groups, act in the interest of their group members, (...)
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  • Religion: Its Origins, Social Role and Sources of Variation.Richard Startup - 2020 - Open Journal of Philosophy 10 (3):346-367.
    Religion emerged among early humans because both purposive and non-purposive explanations were being employed but understanding was lacking of their precise scope and limits. Given also a context of very limited human power, the resultant foregrounding of agency and purposive explanation expressed itself in religion’s marked tendency towards anthropomorphism and its key role in legitimizing behaviour. The inevitability of death also structures the religious outlook; with ancestors sometimes assigned a role in relation to the living. Subjective elements such as the (...)
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  • Evolutionary debunking arguments, commonsense and scepticism.Sandy C. Boucher - 2020 - Synthese 198 (12):11217-11239.
    Evolutionary debunking arguments seek to infer from the evolutionary origin of human beliefs about a particular domain to the conclusion that those beliefs are unjustified. In this paper I discuss EDAs with respect to our everyday, commonsense beliefs. Those who seriously entertain EDAs for commonsense argue that natural selection does not care about truth, it only cares about fitness, and thus it will equip us with beliefs that are useful rather than true. In recent work Griffiths and Wilkins argue that (...)
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  • (1 other version)Willkommen in der Hölle auf Erden.Michael Richard Starks - 2020 - Las Vegas, NV USA: Reality Press.
    Amerika und die Welt befinden sich im Prozess des Zusammenbruchs durch übermäßiges Bevölkerungswachstum, das meiste davon im letzten Jahrhundert und jetzt alles aufgrund der Menschen in der 3. Welt. Der Verbrauch von Ressourcen und die Hinzufügung von ein oder zwei Milliarden weiteren etwa 2100 wird die industrielle Zivilisation zusammenbrechen und Hunger, Krankheit, Gewalt und Krieg in einem erschütternden Ausmaß herbeiführen. Milliarden werden sterben, und ein Atomkrieg ist so gut wie sicher. In Amerika wird dies durch massive Einwanderung und Reproduktion von (...)
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  • On how religions could accidentally incite lies and violence: folktales as a cultural transmitter.Quan-Hoang Vuong, Manh-Tung Ho, Hong-Kong T. Nguyen, Thu-Trang Vuong, Trung Tran, Khanh-Linh Hoang, Thi-Hanh Vu, Phuong-Hanh Hoang, Minh-Hoang Nguyen, Manh-Toan Ho & Viet-Phuong La - 2020 - Palgrave Communications 6 (1):82.
    Folklore has a critical role as a cultural transmitter, all the while being a socially accepted medium for the expressions of culturally contradicting wishes and conducts. In this study of Vietnamese folktales, through the use of Bayesian multilevel modeling and the Markov chain Monte Carlo technique, we offer empirical evidence for how the interplay between religious teachings (Confucianism, Buddhism, and Taoism) and deviant behaviors (lying and violence) could affect a folktale’s outcome. The findings indicate that characters who lie and/or commit (...)
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  • The Memorability of Supernatural Concepts: Effects of Minimal Counterintuitiveness, Moral Valence, and Existential Anxiety on Recall.James R. Beebe & Leigh Duffy - forthcoming - International Journal for the Psychology of Religion.
    Within the cognitive science of religion, some scholars hypothesize (1) that minimally counterintuitive (MCI) concepts enjoy a transmission advantage over both intuitive and highly counterintuitive concepts, (2) that religions concern counterintuitive agents, objects, or events, and (3) that the transmission advantage of MCI concepts makes them more likely to be found in the world’s religions than other kinds of concepts. We hypothesized that the memorability of many MCI supernatural concepts was due in large part to other characteristics they possess, such (...)
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  • Modelling Religious Signalling.Carl Brusse - 2019 - Dissertation, Australian National University
    The origins of human social cooperation confound simple evolutionary explanation. But from Darwin and Durkheim onward, theorists (anthropologists and sociologists especially) have posited a potential link with another curious and distinctively human social trait that cries out for explanation: religion. This dissertation explores one contemporary theory of the co-evolution of religion and human social cooperation: the signalling theory of religion, or religious signalling theory (RST). According to the signalling theory, participation in social religion (and its associated rituals and sanctions) acts (...)
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  • Melting Lizards and Solid Gold Stop Signs: Preferential Recall of Both Counterintuitive and Bizarre Concepts.Makena J. Easker & Allen H. Keniston - 2019 - Journal of Cognition and Culture 19 (3-4):291-304.
    Research has shown that minimally counterintuitive concepts are more memorable than concepts that are simply bizarre. However, this disparity may exist only in studies using cross-cultural samples. To test the impact of bizarreness on culturally homogeneous populations, we read a fictional narrative to 33 college-age students at a Midwestern university. This narrative featured 18 sets of target items – six which were intuitive, six which were counterintuitive, and six which were bizarre. After hearing the story, experimenters administered a written recall (...)
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  • Measuring Counterintuitiveness in Supernatural Agent Dream Imagery.Andreas Nordin & Pär Bjälkebring - 2019 - Frontiers in Psychology 10:465201.
    The present article tests counterintuitiveness theory and methodology in relation to religious dream imagery using data on religious dream content. The endeavor adopts a “fractionated” or “piecemeal” approach where supernatural agent (SA) cognition is held to be a pivotal building block of purportedly religious dreaming. Such supernaturalistic conceptualizations manifests in a cognitive environment of dream simulation processes, threat detection and violation of basic conceptual categorization characterized by counterintuitiveness. By addressing SA cognitions as constituents of allegedly religious dream imagery, additional theorizing (...)
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  • The Meaning of Life, Equality and Eternity.Ingmar Persson & Julian Savulescu - 2019 - The Journal of Ethics 23 (2):223-238.
    We present an analysis of a notion of the meaning of life, according to which our lives have meaning if we spend them intentionally producing what has value for ourselves or others. In this sense our lives can have meaning even if a science-inspired view of the world is correct, and they are only transient phenomena in a vast universe. Our lives are more or less meaningful in this sense due to the difference in value for ourselves and others we (...)
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  • Gods and Talking Animals: the Pan-Cultural Recall Advantage of Supernatural Agent Concepts.Justin P. Gregory, Tyler S. Greenway & Christina Keys - 2019 - Journal of Cognition and Culture 19 (1-2):97-130.
    Supernatural agent concepts are regarded as a defining trait of religion. The interaction of the minimally counterintuitive mnemonic effect and the hypersensitive agency detection device may be employed to explain the universal presence of concepts of gods and deities. Using the measure of free-recall, a broad model of cultural transmission investigated this pan-cultural transmission bias with a large age-representative sample in UK and China. Results were analyzed by four-way mixed ANOVA considering counterintuitiveness, familiarity, ontological category, and delay, and with age (...)
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  • The Emotional Mind: the affective roots of culture and cognition.Stephen Asma & Rami Gabriel - 2019 - Harvard University Press.
    Tracing the leading role of emotions in the evolution of the mind, a philosopher and a psychologist pair up to reveal how thought and culture owe less to our faculty for reason than to our capacity to feel. Many accounts of the human mind concentrate on the brain’s computational power. Yet, in evolutionary terms, rational cognition emerged only the day before yesterday. For nearly 200 million years before humans developed a capacity to reason, the emotional centers of the brain were (...)
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  • On the dispensability of grounding: Ground-breaking work on metaphysical explanation.James Norton - 2017 - Dissertation, The University of Sydney
    Primitive, unanalysable grounding relations are considered by many to be indispensable constituents of the metaphysician’s toolkit. Yet, as a primitive ontological posit, grounding must earn its keep by explaining features of the world not explained by other tools already at our disposal. Those who defend grounding contend that grounding is required to play two interconnected roles: accounting for widespread intuitions regarding what is ontologically prior to what, and forming the backbone of a theory of metaphysical explanation, in much the same (...)
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  • Evolutionary theory on the move: New perspectives on evolution in the cognitive science of religion.István Czachesz - 2018 - Filosofia Unisinos 19 (3).
    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 (...)
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  • 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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  • The Acquisition of Religious Belief and the Attribution of Delusion.José Eduardo Porcher - 2018 - Filosofia Unisinos 19 (3).
    My aim in this paper is to consider the question ‘Why is belief in God not a delusion?’. In the first half of the paper, I distinguish two kinds of religious belief: institutional and personal religious belief. I then review how cognitive science accounts for cultural processes in the acquisition and transmission of institutional religious beliefs. In the second half of the paper, I present the clinical definition of delusion and underline the fact that it exempts cultural beliefs from clinical (...)
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  • Debunking and fully apt belief.Joshua C. Thurow - 2018 - Filosofia Unisinos 19 (3).
    One of the contentious philosophical issues surrounding the cognitive science of religion (CSR) is whether well-confirmed CSR theories would debunk religious beliefs. These debates have been contentious in part because of criticisms of epistemic principles used in debunking arguments. In this paper I use Ernest Sosa’s respected theory of knowledge as fully apt belief—which avoids objections that have been leveled against sensitivity and safety principles often used in debunking arguments—to construct a plausible debunking argument for religious belief on the assumption (...)
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  • Does "Think" Mean the Same Thing as "Believe"? Linguistic Insights Into Religious Cognition.Larisa Heiphetz, Casey Landers & Neil Van Leeuwen - 2021 - Psychology of Religion and Spirituality 13 (3):287-297.
    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 (...)
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  • Is God an Adaptation?: Robert Wright’s, The Evolution of God, Little Brown, 2009.Hugo Viciana & Pierrick Bourrat - 2011 - Philosophia 39 (2):397-408.
    In this critical notice to Robert Wright’s The Evolution of God, we focus on the question of whether Wright’s God is one which can be said to be an adaptation in a well defined sense. Thus we evaluate the likelihood of different models of adaptive evolution of cultural ideas in their different levels of selection. Our result is an emphasis on the plurality of mechanisms that may lead to adaptation. By way of conclusion we assess epistemologically some of Wright’s more (...)
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  • Methodological Consilience of Evolutionary Ethics and Cognitive Science of Religion.Juraj Franek - 2016 - Journal of Cognition and Culture 16 (1-2):144-170.
    For the larger part of modern western intellectual history, it has been assumed that the study of morality and religion requires special methodology, insulated from, and in some important aspects incongruent with, the scientific method commonly used in the realm of natural sciences. Furthermore, even if it would be granted that moral and religious behavior is amendable to scientific analysis, the prospects of using evolutionary theory in particular to do the heavy lifting in explanation of these phenomena have been bleak, (...)
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  • Are Atheists Implicit Theists?Cortney Hitzeman & Colin Wastell - 2017 - Journal of Cognition and Culture 17 (1-2):27-50.
    The Cognitive Science of Religion commonly advances the view that religious beliefs emerge naturally via specific cognitive biases without cultural influence. From this perspective comes the claim that self-proclaimed atheists harbour traces of supernatural thinking. By exploring the potential influence of the cultural learning mechanism Credibility Enhancing Displays, which affirms beliefs, current disparities between studies involved in priming the implicit theism of atheists, might be reconciled. Eighty-eight university students were randomly assigned to either a religious or control prime condition. A (...)
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  • Rethinking Complexity and Culture: Cognitive Science as Explanatory Framework for Cultural Phenomena.Justin E. Lane - 2015 - Journal of Cognition and Culture 15 (5):435-441.
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  • Playing for God’s Team: The Influence of Belief in the Supernatural on Perceptions of Religious, Spiritual, and Natural Cues.Virginia A. Periss & David F. Bjorklund - 2016 - Journal of Cognition and Culture 16 (3-4):215-244.
    Adherence to religious belief may serve to promote group cohesion and cooperation by decreasing the costs associated with social exchange. Consistent with this, organized religious ideologies, unlike secular or spiritual based ideologies, have been argued to facilitate cooperation among individuals living in large-scale societies. In the current study, we examined whether hypothetical adults’ explanations of natural events focused on religious ideologies were more effective at eliciting positive-affect compared to spiritual or natural explanations. Results revealed that religious cues were more effective (...)
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  • The Complexity of Popular Religiosity: A Cognitive and Symbolic Approach.Carles Salazar - 2016 - Journal of Cognition and Culture 16 (3-4):199-214.
    Popular religiosity manifests itself alongside a heterogeneous continuum of beliefs, behaviours, modes of thinking and modes of living that flows between two poles: the experiential pole and the normative pole. A central theme in this paper will be that all forms of religiosity originate in a combination of innate predispositions and cultural upbringing; hence human religious experience needs to be approached by combining both cognitive and symbolic approaches. To this effect, this paper attempts to make use of an ethnographic research (...)
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  • Is Religion Essential? Beliefs about Religious Categories.Michal Segev, Yoav S. Bergman & Gil Diesendruck - 2012 - Journal of Cognition and Culture 12 (3-4):323-337.
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  • The Zeus Problem: Why Representational Content Biases Cannot Explain Faith in Gods.Will M. Gervais & Joseph Henrich - 2010 - Journal of Cognition and Culture 10 (3-4):383-389.
    In a recent article, Barrett argued that a collection of five representational content features can explain both why people believe in God and why people do not believe in Santa Claus or Mickey Mouse. In this model ‐ and within the cognitive science of religion as a whole ‐ it is argued that representational content biases are central to belief. In the present paper, we challenge the notion that representational content biases can explain the epidemiology of belief. Instead, we propose (...)
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  • Religious Concepts are Probably Epiphenomena: A Reply to Pyysiäinen, Boyer, and Barrett.Jesse Bering - 2003 - Journal of Cognition and Culture 3 (3):244-254.
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  • Intuitive and Explicit in Religious Thought.Ilkka Pyysiäinen - 2004 - Journal of Cognition and Culture 4 (1):123-150.
    It has been argued within the new cognitive science of religion that people's actual religious concepts and inferences differ from their explicitly held religious concepts and beliefs; the latter are too complex to be used in fast online reasoning. Natural intuitions thus tend to overwrite theological doctrine and to drive behavior. The cognitive science of religion has focused on this intuitive aspect of religion, ignoring theological thought. Here I try to outline a theoretical model on the basis of which it (...)
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  • (1 other version)Rationality: Constraints and Contexts.Timothy Joseph Lane & Tzu-Wei Hung (eds.) - 2016 - London, U.K.: Elsevier Academic Press.
    "Rationality: Contexts and Constraints" is an interdisciplinary reappraisal of the nature of rationality. In method, it is pluralistic, drawing upon the analytic approaches of philosophy, linguistics, neuroscience, and more. These methods guide exploration of the intersection between traditional scholarship and cutting-edge philosophical or scientific research. In this way, the book contributes to development of a suitably revised, comprehensive understanding of rationality, one that befits the 21st century, one that is adequately informed by recent investigations of science, pathology, non-human thought, emotion, (...)
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