Scholars have recently identified resemblances between pragmatist thought and contemporary trends in cognitive science in the area of ‘embodied cognition’ or ‘4E cognition.’ In this article I explore these resemblances in the account of religious belief provided by the classical pragmatist philosopher William James. Although James’s psychology does not always parallel the commitments of embodied cognition, his insights concerning the role of emotion and socio-cultural context in shaping religious belief, as well as the action-oriented nature of such beliefs, resonate with (...) embodied and embedded accounts of religious belief. James’s insights are readily extended in light of contemporary embodied cognition research to highlight the interdependency between religious belief of individuals and the cognitive scaffolding provided by embodied religious practices. (shrink)

Although there might seem to be a natural continuity and interplay between the cognitive sciences and the social sciences, the integration of the two has, on the whole, been fraught with difficulties. In some areas the transition was relatively smooth. For instance, political psychology is now a well-recognized branch both of psychology and of political science. In economics, things have been more difficult, with the entrenched assumption of a perfectly rational homo economicus, but behavioral economics is now well recognized, and (...) one of the founders of the field, Daniel Kahneman, went on to win a Nobel Prize.Social and cognitive sciences have proven more difficult to bridge in anthropology and sociology. Most of the efforts have been pursued—and resisted—in anthropology (although, for sociology, see Clément and Kaufmann 2011). At first, scholars attempted to import the methods of evolutionary biology straight into the study of culture (Dawkins 1976; Lumsden and Wilson 1981). This prom .. (shrink)

It has been hypothesized that illusory agency detection is at the basis of belief in supernatural agents and paranormal beliefs. In the present study a biological motion perception task was used to study illusory agency detection in a group of skeptics and a group of paranormal believers. Participants were required to detect the presence or absence of a human agent in a point-light display. It was found that paranormal believers had a lower perceptual sensitivity than skeptics, which was due to (...) a response bias to ‘yes’ for stimuli in which no agent was present. The relation between paranormal beliefs and illusory agency detection held only for stimuli with low to intermediate ambiguity, but for stimuli with a high number of visual distractors responses of believers and skeptics were at the same level. Furthermore, it was found that illusory agency detection was unrelated to traditional religious belief and belief in witchcraft, whereas paranormal beliefs were strongly related to illusory agency detection. These findings qualify the relation between illusory pattern perception and supernatural and paranormal beliefs and suggest that paranormal beliefs are strongly related to agency detection biases. (shrink)