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  1. Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought.Pascal Boyer - 2002 - Basic Books.
    Many of our questions about religion, says renowned anthropologist Pascal Boyer, are no longer mysteries. We are beginning to know how to answer questions such as "Why do people have religion?" Using findings from anthropology, cognitive science, linguistics, and evolutionary biology, Religion Explained shows how this aspect of human consciousness is increasingly admissible to coherent, naturalistic explanation. This brilliant and controversial book gives readers the first scientific explanation for what religious feeling is really about, what it consists of, and where (...)
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  • In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion.Scott Atran - 2002 - New York, US: Oup Usa.
    This ambitious, interdisciplinary book seeks to explain the origins of religion using our knowledge of the evolution of cognition. A cognitive anthropologist and psychologist, Scott Atran argues that religion is a by-product of human evolution just as the cognitive intervention, cultural selection, and historical survival of religion is an accommodation of certain existential and moral elements that have evolved in the human condition.
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  • 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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  • Knowledge of Language: Its Nature, Origin, and Use.Noam Chomsky - 1986 - Prager. Edited by Darragh Byrne & Max Kölbel.
    Attempts to indentify the fundamental concepts of language, argues that the study of language reveals hidden facts about the mind, and looks at the impact of propaganda.
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  • Syntactic Structures.Noam Chomsky - 1957 - Mouton.
    Noam Chomsky's book on syntactic structures is a serious attempts on the part of a linguist to construct within the tradition of scientific theory-construction ...
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  • Explaining Culture: A Naturalistic Approach.Dan Sperber - 1996 - Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
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  • The Intentional Stance.Daniel Clement Dennett - 1981 - MIT Press.
    Through the use of such "folk" concepts as belief, desire, intention, and expectation, Daniel Dennett asserts in this first full scale presentation of...
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  • Thinking, Fast and Slow.Daniel Kahneman - 2011 - New York: New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
    In the international bestseller, Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman, the renowned psychologist and winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, takes us on a groundbreaking tour of the mind and explains the two systems that drive the way we think. System 1 is fast, intuitive, and emotional; System 2 is slower, more deliberative, and more logical. The impact of overconfidence on corporate strategies, the difficulties of predicting what will make us happy in the future, the profound effect of cognitive (...)
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  • Demystifying Religious Belief.Robert Nola - 2018 - In Hans van Eyghen, Rik Peels & Gijsbert van den Brink (eds.), New Developments in the Cognitive Science of Religion - The Rationality of Religious Belief. Dordrecht: Springer. pp. 71-92.
    Robert Nola contrasts naturalistic with supernaturalistic explanations of religious belief. He argues that there are two broad rival explanations for religious belief. The first, the common “folk” or religious explanation, is supernaturalistic in that it invokes a deity as a central casual factor in the etiology of people’s belief in the existence of God. The second is naturalistic in that it eschews any appeal to a deity in the explanation of a person’s belief in God and instead invokes only naturalistic (...)
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  • Agents and Goals in Evolution.Samir Okasha - 2018 - Oxford: Oxford University Press.
    Samir Okasha offers a critical study of agential thinking in biology, where evolved organisms are seen as agents pursuing a goal. He examines the justification for transposing concepts from rational humans to the biological world, and considers whether agential thinking is mere anthropomorphism or plays a more intellectual role in the science.
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  • Faces in the Clouds: A New Theory of Religion.Stewart Guthrie - 1993 - New York and Oxford: Oup Usa.
    Guthrie contends that religion can best be understood as systematic anthropomorphism - the attribution of human characteristics to nonhuman things and events. Religion, he says, consists of seeing the world as human like. He offers a fascinating array of examples to show how this strategy pervades secular life and how it characterizes religious experience.
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  • (3 other versions)Tractatus logico-philosophicus.Ludwig Wittgenstein - 1922 - Filosoficky Casopis 52:336-341.
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  • 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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  • Memory and Mystery: The Cultural Selection of Minimally Counterintuitive Narratives.Ara Norenzayan, Scott Atran, Jason Faulkner & Mark Schaller - 2006 - Cognitive Science 30 (3):531-553.
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  • Religion as an Evolutionary Byproduct: A Critique of the Standard Model.Russell Powell & Steve Clarke - 2012 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 63 (3):457-486.
    The dominant view in the cognitive science of religion (the ‘Standard Model’) is that religious belief and behaviour are not adaptive traits but rather incidental byproducts of the cognitive architecture of mind. Because evidence for the Standard Model is inconclusive, the case for it depends crucially on its alleged methodological superiority to selectionist alternatives. However, we show that the Standard Model has both methodological and evidential disadvantages when compared with selectionist alternatives. We also consider a pluralistic approach, which holds that (...)
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  • The cognitive and evolutionary psychology of religion.Joseph Bulbulia - 2004 - Biology and Philosophy 19 (5):655-686.
    The following reviews recent developments in the cognitive and evolutionary psychology of religion, and argues for an adaptationist stance.
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  • What's HIDD'n in the HADD?Anders Lisdorf - 2007 - Journal of Cognition and Culture 7 (3-4):341-353.
    The consensus in the cognitive science of religion is that some sort of hyperactive agency detection in the human mind is responsible for the origin and spread of beliefs in superhuman agents such as gods, spirits and ancestors among human populations. While it is expressed differently in different authors, they all agree that hyperactive agency detection is a basic function of human cognition. Most well known perhaps is the formulation of this by Justin Barrett as the Hyperactive Agency Detection Device (...)
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  • (3 other versions)Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.Ludwig Wittgenstein - 1956 - Revista Portuguesa de Filosofia 12 (1):109-110.
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