Hyung Chan Koo | Sogang University (original) (raw)
Thesis Chapters by Hyung Chan Koo
![Research paper thumbnail of [Abstract] A Study on the Cognitive Foundations of Folk Beliefs: A Focus on Rituals for Rain](https://attachments.academia-assets.com/54278178/thumbnails/1.jpg)
](This is the abstract part of my PhD. dissertation, "A Study on the Cognitive Foundations of Folk ... more This is the abstract part of my PhD. dissertation, "A Study on the Cognitive Foundations of Folk Beliefs: A Focus on Rituals for Rain," originally written in Korean(2017. 2).
The purpose of the dissertation is to provide a systematic explanation of how various cognitive constraints, which affect the natural intuition, inference and memory of the human mind, provide natural foundations for the concepts, practices and transmissions of folk beliefs by using the example of rituals for rain in Korea.
Journal Articles by Hyung Chan Koo
종교와문화, 2023
This study is aimed at investigating whether religious norms or secular norms act as a moderating... more This study is aimed at investigating whether religious norms or secular norms act as a moderating variable for social prejudice from an evolutionary cognitive perspective, with the goal of gaining insights to help understand and overcome social prejudice. The research involved Korean Protestant, Buddhist, and Catholic believers, examining whether their levels of social prejudice were moderated by their religious beliefs. This study also compared prejudice levels when secular norms were activated. A nonparametric analysis of variance (ANOVA) was employed to compare the three groups. The results indicated that neither religious nor secular norms functioned as a moderating variable for social prejudice. Specifically, the priming of these norms did not significantly moderate social prejudice across all three religions, failing to reject the null hypothesis. Furthermore, the priming effects within each group showed very low effect sizes (Cohen's d). These findings are consistent with previous research conducted on East Asian populations and align with recent studies in Korean society, which found that both religious and secular priming did not elicit prosocial behavior. Consequently, the hypothesis regarding the evolution of Western religions, based on the premise of supernatural watchers, may not exhibit a cross-cultural universality. Additionally, the cognitive and adaptive aspects of religion could have evolved separately. More refined comparative religious studies that differentiate these aspects within an evolutionary anthropological framework are needed.
Keywords: social prejudice, secular norms, religious norms, priming, cognitive science of religion, evolutionary anthropology
종교와 문화 Religion and Culture, 2023
This study is aimed at investigating whether religious norms or secular norms act as a moderating... more This study is aimed at investigating whether religious norms or secular norms act as a moderating variable for social prejudice from an evolutionary cognitive perspective, with the goal of gaining insights to help understand and overcome social prejudice. The research involved Korean Protestant, Buddhist, and Catholic believers, examining whether their levels of social prejudice were moderated by their religious beliefs. This study also compared prejudice levels when secular norms were activated. A nonparametric analysis of variance (ANOVA) was employed to compare the three groups. The results indicated that neither religious nor secular norms functioned as a moderating variable for social prejudice. Specifically, the priming of these norms did not significantly moderate social prejudice across all three religions, failing to reject the null hypothesis. Furthermore, the priming effects within each group showed very low effect sizes (Cohen's d). These findings are consistent with previous research conducted on East Asian populations and align with recent studies in Korean society, which found that both religious and secular priming did not elicit prosocial behavior. Consequently, the hypothesis regarding the evolution of Western religions, based on the premise of supernatural watchers, may not exhibit a cross-cultural universality. Additionally, the cognitive and adaptive aspects of religion could have evolved separately. More refined comparative religious studies that differentiate these aspects within an evolutionary anthropological framework are needed.
Keywords: social prejudice, secular norms, religious norms, priming, cognitive science of religion, evolutionary anthropology
종교문화비평 (The Critical Review of Religion and Culture), 2009
The study of religion, obviously, has been more of an anthropological endeavor rather than a theo... more The study of religion, obviously, has been more of an anthropological endeavor rather than a theological one. With the anthropological influence, students of religion may try as well to understand religions through the knowledge about human beings as to understand the latter through the knowledge about the former. Together with the recent advancements in the studies of human cognition, evolution, and culture, the scope of anthropology is now expanding into the field of naturalistic humanities. The study of religion, which is an inquiry into certain aspects of human beings, must accommodate this new stage of anthropology. Dan Sperber’s epidemiology of representations as a naturalistic approach to culture, or as an example of anthropological naturalism may serve as a guide to the application of this new method to the study of religion.
종교문화비평 (The Critical Review of Religion and Culture), 2016
This paper is intended to discuss the cognitive mechanisms by which people infer the meaning of a... more This paper is intended to discuss the cognitive mechanisms by which people infer the meaning of a ritual. Investigating historical records on “Tiger Head Sinking (沈虎頭)” as an example case, this study tries to establish the connections between the historiography of religion to the theories and discoveries of the cognitive science of religion. Tiger Head Sinking can literally be defined as a ritualistic practice of sinking the head of a tiger into specific waters, such as rivers, lakes and ponds. Even though Tiger Head Sinking was formally accepted as part of the state rainmaking rituals in the Joseon dynasty, any explicit principles or clear ceremonial guidelines for this ritual do not seem to have existed. Nevertheless, the ritual was widespread in the country and maintained for a long time as a form of rainmaking ritual during the Joseon dynasty. This cultural success of the ritual raises some questions about how the participants and the on-lookers of the rituals have comprehended the meaning of this practices. I am expecting some answers will be met in a series of mental processes which produce the cognitively relevant inferences of an event: 1) the observation of factually obvious information, 2) the focalization, 3) the differential activations of dual-processes, 4) the representation of inferences, 5) the relevance-filtering and 6) the attractor formation. Putting together these processes, this study proposes an explanatory hypothesis on the meaning-inference of ritualized behaviors, which I would call as `Focalization-Driven Evocation.` With this hypothesis, it would be possible to explain how people infer the relevant meanings of a ritual that has no official norms and manuals. Adopting the hypothetic model of the `focalization-driven evocation,` the processes through which the meanings of Tiger Head Sinking are evoked can be summarized as follows: First, through an observation on factually obvious information the primary meaning of Tiger Head Sinking is represented as “an act of the executor who make the head of the tiger sink in the water in order to make it rain.” Second, a focalization on the head of the tiger is occurred. Third, this focalization on the head of the tiger activates either the reflective process which refers to cultural knowledge or the intuitive process which evokes inferences related to the social interaction. Fourth, Tiger Head Sinking can be represented through a reflective process as an “act of coercing the hiding dragon into moving so as to make it rain,” or through the intuitive process as an “act of offering the head of the tiger to the agent of rainfall to appeal for rain.” Fifth, various possible meanings, including these two different kinds of meanings, are sifted continuously through the relevance filtering. Sixth, only a small number of meanings can be survived and form the attractor positions in the end.
종교문화비평 (The Critical Review of Religion and Culture), 2021
In pandemic situations, we often see conflicts between quarantine and religious norms. As a resul... more In pandemic situations, we often see conflicts between quarantine and religious norms. As a result, public opinion is formed to criticize the selfishness and immorality of religious people. Thus, an old question is summoned: “Does religion ever make people more moral?” This article reviews the problems inherent in this question based on an understanding of the evolved mind. Specifically, it outlines some conceptual confusion that arises when discussing the relationship between religion and morality; critically develops the perspectives of prior researches on the evolutionary and cognitive foundations of religion and morality; and proposes a hypothetical explanatory model that includes considerations of the moral foundations theory, the cognitive science of religion theories, and the behavioral immune system to analyze religious morality issues in pandemic situations.
According to the Moral Foundations Theory, moral judgment is caused by five psychological mechanisms based on different evolutionary adaptation problems. The standard model of Cognitive Science of Religion theory maintains that the various phenomena we target into the category ‘religion’ are the byproducts of various adaptations in the evolutionary process of the human species. MFT and CSR’s theory are significant in that they break down and present the evolutionary cognitive foundation of morality and religion into multiple analytical subunits. The behavioral immune system is a form of alerting device that avoids potentially infectious or contaminated objects, and its effects appear as disgust in the domain of emotion and as avoidance in the domain of action. In the Pandemic situation, the behavioral immune system is excessively activated, which makes it easy to strengthen discrimination and exclusion against race, region, origin, religion, and sexual orientation.
This paper envisioned an explanatory model of religious morality in which the above two theories and the behavioral immune system are considered simultaneously. This work is a developmental succession of McKay and Whitehouse’s research in that it properly subdivides the components of religion and morality into scientific analytic units where empirical research has been accumulated. The study also has theoretical novelty in that it incorporates the behavioral immune system into the model as a cognitive ecological factor of the Pandemic situation.
종교문화연구 (Journal of Religion and Culture), 2019
In this study, I attempt to examine certain aspects of anxiety that emerge with the discourse of ... more In this study, I attempt to examine certain aspects of anxiety that emerge with the discourse of the Fourth Industrial Revolution from a perspective of the Cognitive Science of Religion. Especially, I explore through some speculative thought experiments how anxiety perceived with the development of artificial intelligence technology is related to the cognitive process called "anthropomorphism." People witnessing the amazing advances in AI technology respond to the anxiety of rapid changes in the environment, sometimes through anthropomorphizing and sometimes de-anthropomorphizing AI. This study explores at what point the process of anthropomorphization or de-anthropomorphization of artificial intelligence meets and breaks with the religious imagination of personifying and de-personifying gods. It also examines the implications of this discussion of the anthropomorphic process for understanding contemporary people's anxieties about the development of science and technology.
종교문화연구(Journal of Religion and Culture), 2012
The longstanding philosophical discussions about the human reason and the rationality in anthropo... more The longstanding philosophical discussions about the human reason and the rationality in anthropology have paradoxically revealed the ubiquity of irrationality in the human life. Findings in evolutionary psychology and cognitive science are making it increasingly evident that the human mind has not been evolved for rational thinking in traditional sense. The haphazard evolution of the human mind as a ‘kludge’ can explain why the dichotomy of rationality/irrationality is not a genuine matter in epistemology. Consulting recent studies on the human mind and communication, this paper argues that the actual criterion of epistemological justification is cognitive relevance rather than rationality. In this respect, even the cross-culturally recurrent patterns of ‘irrational’ beliefs in supernatural agents can be naturally generated and distributed by the relevance-driven cognition and communication. Ideas and hypotheses to which this paper consistently refers are mainly those of the cognitive science of religion including the epidemiology of representations, the HADD, and the MCI-concepts.
종교문화비평 (The Critical Review of Religion and Culture), 2019
Evolutionary-cognitive research programmes on religion have been reached to the point of redefini... more Evolutionary-cognitive research programmes on religion have been reached to the point of redefinition of the term, homo religiosus, which is one of the crucial words in the field of the study of religions in the twentieth century: “religiosity” is not a sui generis human nature, but a product or by-product of the evolution processes, and is expressed on the basis of evolved psychological mechanisms and cognitive constraints. The evolutionary-cognitive approach, mainly represented by the cognitive science of religion, has accumulated the various achievements during last 30 years of its own history. Its research questions, core theories, methodologies and eventually the research trends have been changed accordingly. The noticeable changes in this area consist of the following three factors: the significance of empirical study and experiment-based research are emphasized; the theoretical issues on the topic of “evolution” are also highlighted; the research agendas on this perspective are shared by various scholars of diverse fields, not limited only in religious studies. This article scrutinizes the recent research trends in the evolutionary and cognitive approaches to religion and calls for further researches into the evolution of religious minds and social minds, based on the implications of adaptationist–byproduct debates.
종교문화비평 (The Critical Review of Religion and Culture), 2018
This study aims to promote an advanced explanation and understanding of “religions in culture” wi... more This study aims to promote an advanced explanation and understanding of “religions in culture” with examining the activities of Korean Protestant Christianity related to the contemporary “hate” issues. The Protestant communities in Korea have taken somewhat diverse stances on the hate issues, and in recent years, they have been paying particular attention to homosexuality issues. The hatred issues that are recurrent and proliferated in Korean society as a whole and in the Protestant circles, calls for the study of evolutionary and cognitive causes, as well as social structural and religiousdoctrinal factors. The evolutionary-cognitive approaches propose that the intuitive emotions, inferences, and biases that the evolved human mind represents may take precedence over the explicit references to teaching of the bible. With the achievements of the current years of evolutionary and cognitive sciences, more sophisticated questions and answers can be produced about the hate issues of the Protestant Church in Korea.
종교문화연구 (Journal of Religion and Culture), 2017
This article is a general discussion about necessity of multifaceted approaches to hate-religion ... more This article is a general discussion about necessity of multifaceted approaches to hate-religion symbiosis in the contemporary society of Korea. It includes two interrelated considerations. First, the symbiosis is not an intra-religion problem, but a general social issue which all the members of the society should consider. Therefore, a proper study requires examinations on the contexts and controversial points of the current issues at a society level in general. Second, it is also necessary to analyze various aspects of the issues, such as their practical forms, social-structural conditions, and emotional-cognitive factors.
Papers by Hyung Chan Koo
Jong'gyo munhwa bi'pyeong, Mar 31, 2018
This study aims to promote an advanced explanation and understanding of “religions in culture” wi... more This study aims to promote an advanced explanation and understanding of “religions in culture” with examining the activities of Korean Protestant Christianity related to the contemporary “hate” issues. The Protestant communities in Korea have taken somewhat diverse stances on the hate issues, and in recent years, they have been paying particular attention to homosexuality issues. The hatred issues that are recurrent and proliferated in Korean society as a whole and in the Protestant circles, calls for the study of evolutionary and cognitive causes, as well as social structural and religiousdoctrinal factors. The evolutionary-cognitive approaches propose that the intuitive emotions, inferences, and biases that the evolved human mind represents may take precedence over the explicit references to teaching of the bible. With the achievements of the current years of evolutionary and cognitive sciences, more sophisticated questions and answers can be produced about the hate issues of the Protestant Church in Korea.
Journal of Religion and Culture, 2012
The longstanding philosophical discussions about the human reason and the rationality in anthropo... more The longstanding philosophical discussions about the human reason and the rationality in anthropology have paradoxically revealed the ubiquity of irrationality in the human life. Findings in evolutionary psychology and cognitive science are making it increasingly evident that the human mind has not been evolved for rational thinking in traditional sense. The haphazard evolution of the human mind as a ‘kludge’ can explain why the dichotomy of rationality/irrationality is not a genuine matter in epistemology. Consulting recent studies on the human mind and communication, this paper argues that the actual criterion of epistemological justification is cognitive relevance rather than rationality. In this respect, even the cross-culturally recurrent patterns of ‘irrational’ beliefs in supernatural agents can be naturally generated and distributed by the relevance-driven cognition and communication. Ideas and hypotheses to which this paper consistently refers are mainly those of the cognitive science of religion including the epidemiology of representations, the HADD, and the MCI-concepts.
The Critical Review of Religion and Culture, 2018
This study aims to promote an advanced explanation and understanding of “religions in culture” wi... more This study aims to promote an advanced explanation and understanding of “religions in culture” with examining the activities of Korean Protestant Christianity related to the contemporary “hate” issues. The Protestant communities in Korea have taken somewhat diverse stances on the hate issues, and in recent years, they have been paying particular attention to homosexuality issues. The hatred issues that are recurrent and proliferated in Korean society as a whole and in the Protestant circles, calls for the study of evolutionary and cognitive causes, as well as social structural and religiousdoctrinal factors. The evolutionary-cognitive approaches propose that the intuitive emotions, inferences, and biases that the evolved human mind represents may take precedence over the explicit references to teaching of the bible. With the achievements of the current years of evolutionary and cognitive sciences, more sophisticated questions and answers can be produced about the hate issues of the Protestant Church in Korea.
The Critical Review of Religion and Culture, 2019
Studies in Religion(The Journal of the Korean Association for the History of Religions)
This is the abstract part of my PhD. dissertation, "A Study on the Cognitive Foundations of Folk ... more This is the abstract part of my PhD. dissertation, "A Study on the Cognitive Foundations of Folk Beliefs: A Focus on Rituals for Rain," originally written in Korean(2017. 2).
The purpose of the dissertation is to provide a systematic explanation of how various cognitive constraints, which affect the natural intuition, inference and memory of the human mind, provide natural foundations for the concepts, practices and transmissions of folk beliefs by using the example of rituals for rain in Korea.
종교와문화, 2023
This study is aimed at investigating whether religious norms or secular norms act as a moderating... more This study is aimed at investigating whether religious norms or secular norms act as a moderating variable for social prejudice from an evolutionary cognitive perspective, with the goal of gaining insights to help understand and overcome social prejudice. The research involved Korean Protestant, Buddhist, and Catholic believers, examining whether their levels of social prejudice were moderated by their religious beliefs. This study also compared prejudice levels when secular norms were activated. A nonparametric analysis of variance (ANOVA) was employed to compare the three groups. The results indicated that neither religious nor secular norms functioned as a moderating variable for social prejudice. Specifically, the priming of these norms did not significantly moderate social prejudice across all three religions, failing to reject the null hypothesis. Furthermore, the priming effects within each group showed very low effect sizes (Cohen's d). These findings are consistent with previous research conducted on East Asian populations and align with recent studies in Korean society, which found that both religious and secular priming did not elicit prosocial behavior. Consequently, the hypothesis regarding the evolution of Western religions, based on the premise of supernatural watchers, may not exhibit a cross-cultural universality. Additionally, the cognitive and adaptive aspects of religion could have evolved separately. More refined comparative religious studies that differentiate these aspects within an evolutionary anthropological framework are needed.
Keywords: social prejudice, secular norms, religious norms, priming, cognitive science of religion, evolutionary anthropology
종교와 문화 Religion and Culture, 2023
This study is aimed at investigating whether religious norms or secular norms act as a moderating... more This study is aimed at investigating whether religious norms or secular norms act as a moderating variable for social prejudice from an evolutionary cognitive perspective, with the goal of gaining insights to help understand and overcome social prejudice. The research involved Korean Protestant, Buddhist, and Catholic believers, examining whether their levels of social prejudice were moderated by their religious beliefs. This study also compared prejudice levels when secular norms were activated. A nonparametric analysis of variance (ANOVA) was employed to compare the three groups. The results indicated that neither religious nor secular norms functioned as a moderating variable for social prejudice. Specifically, the priming of these norms did not significantly moderate social prejudice across all three religions, failing to reject the null hypothesis. Furthermore, the priming effects within each group showed very low effect sizes (Cohen's d). These findings are consistent with previous research conducted on East Asian populations and align with recent studies in Korean society, which found that both religious and secular priming did not elicit prosocial behavior. Consequently, the hypothesis regarding the evolution of Western religions, based on the premise of supernatural watchers, may not exhibit a cross-cultural universality. Additionally, the cognitive and adaptive aspects of religion could have evolved separately. More refined comparative religious studies that differentiate these aspects within an evolutionary anthropological framework are needed.
Keywords: social prejudice, secular norms, religious norms, priming, cognitive science of religion, evolutionary anthropology
종교문화비평 (The Critical Review of Religion and Culture), 2009
The study of religion, obviously, has been more of an anthropological endeavor rather than a theo... more The study of religion, obviously, has been more of an anthropological endeavor rather than a theological one. With the anthropological influence, students of religion may try as well to understand religions through the knowledge about human beings as to understand the latter through the knowledge about the former. Together with the recent advancements in the studies of human cognition, evolution, and culture, the scope of anthropology is now expanding into the field of naturalistic humanities. The study of religion, which is an inquiry into certain aspects of human beings, must accommodate this new stage of anthropology. Dan Sperber’s epidemiology of representations as a naturalistic approach to culture, or as an example of anthropological naturalism may serve as a guide to the application of this new method to the study of religion.
종교문화비평 (The Critical Review of Religion and Culture), 2016
This paper is intended to discuss the cognitive mechanisms by which people infer the meaning of a... more This paper is intended to discuss the cognitive mechanisms by which people infer the meaning of a ritual. Investigating historical records on “Tiger Head Sinking (沈虎頭)” as an example case, this study tries to establish the connections between the historiography of religion to the theories and discoveries of the cognitive science of religion. Tiger Head Sinking can literally be defined as a ritualistic practice of sinking the head of a tiger into specific waters, such as rivers, lakes and ponds. Even though Tiger Head Sinking was formally accepted as part of the state rainmaking rituals in the Joseon dynasty, any explicit principles or clear ceremonial guidelines for this ritual do not seem to have existed. Nevertheless, the ritual was widespread in the country and maintained for a long time as a form of rainmaking ritual during the Joseon dynasty. This cultural success of the ritual raises some questions about how the participants and the on-lookers of the rituals have comprehended the meaning of this practices. I am expecting some answers will be met in a series of mental processes which produce the cognitively relevant inferences of an event: 1) the observation of factually obvious information, 2) the focalization, 3) the differential activations of dual-processes, 4) the representation of inferences, 5) the relevance-filtering and 6) the attractor formation. Putting together these processes, this study proposes an explanatory hypothesis on the meaning-inference of ritualized behaviors, which I would call as `Focalization-Driven Evocation.` With this hypothesis, it would be possible to explain how people infer the relevant meanings of a ritual that has no official norms and manuals. Adopting the hypothetic model of the `focalization-driven evocation,` the processes through which the meanings of Tiger Head Sinking are evoked can be summarized as follows: First, through an observation on factually obvious information the primary meaning of Tiger Head Sinking is represented as “an act of the executor who make the head of the tiger sink in the water in order to make it rain.” Second, a focalization on the head of the tiger is occurred. Third, this focalization on the head of the tiger activates either the reflective process which refers to cultural knowledge or the intuitive process which evokes inferences related to the social interaction. Fourth, Tiger Head Sinking can be represented through a reflective process as an “act of coercing the hiding dragon into moving so as to make it rain,” or through the intuitive process as an “act of offering the head of the tiger to the agent of rainfall to appeal for rain.” Fifth, various possible meanings, including these two different kinds of meanings, are sifted continuously through the relevance filtering. Sixth, only a small number of meanings can be survived and form the attractor positions in the end.
종교문화비평 (The Critical Review of Religion and Culture), 2021
In pandemic situations, we often see conflicts between quarantine and religious norms. As a resul... more In pandemic situations, we often see conflicts between quarantine and religious norms. As a result, public opinion is formed to criticize the selfishness and immorality of religious people. Thus, an old question is summoned: “Does religion ever make people more moral?” This article reviews the problems inherent in this question based on an understanding of the evolved mind. Specifically, it outlines some conceptual confusion that arises when discussing the relationship between religion and morality; critically develops the perspectives of prior researches on the evolutionary and cognitive foundations of religion and morality; and proposes a hypothetical explanatory model that includes considerations of the moral foundations theory, the cognitive science of religion theories, and the behavioral immune system to analyze religious morality issues in pandemic situations.
According to the Moral Foundations Theory, moral judgment is caused by five psychological mechanisms based on different evolutionary adaptation problems. The standard model of Cognitive Science of Religion theory maintains that the various phenomena we target into the category ‘religion’ are the byproducts of various adaptations in the evolutionary process of the human species. MFT and CSR’s theory are significant in that they break down and present the evolutionary cognitive foundation of morality and religion into multiple analytical subunits. The behavioral immune system is a form of alerting device that avoids potentially infectious or contaminated objects, and its effects appear as disgust in the domain of emotion and as avoidance in the domain of action. In the Pandemic situation, the behavioral immune system is excessively activated, which makes it easy to strengthen discrimination and exclusion against race, region, origin, religion, and sexual orientation.
This paper envisioned an explanatory model of religious morality in which the above two theories and the behavioral immune system are considered simultaneously. This work is a developmental succession of McKay and Whitehouse’s research in that it properly subdivides the components of religion and morality into scientific analytic units where empirical research has been accumulated. The study also has theoretical novelty in that it incorporates the behavioral immune system into the model as a cognitive ecological factor of the Pandemic situation.
종교문화연구 (Journal of Religion and Culture), 2019
In this study, I attempt to examine certain aspects of anxiety that emerge with the discourse of ... more In this study, I attempt to examine certain aspects of anxiety that emerge with the discourse of the Fourth Industrial Revolution from a perspective of the Cognitive Science of Religion. Especially, I explore through some speculative thought experiments how anxiety perceived with the development of artificial intelligence technology is related to the cognitive process called "anthropomorphism." People witnessing the amazing advances in AI technology respond to the anxiety of rapid changes in the environment, sometimes through anthropomorphizing and sometimes de-anthropomorphizing AI. This study explores at what point the process of anthropomorphization or de-anthropomorphization of artificial intelligence meets and breaks with the religious imagination of personifying and de-personifying gods. It also examines the implications of this discussion of the anthropomorphic process for understanding contemporary people's anxieties about the development of science and technology.
종교문화연구(Journal of Religion and Culture), 2012
The longstanding philosophical discussions about the human reason and the rationality in anthropo... more The longstanding philosophical discussions about the human reason and the rationality in anthropology have paradoxically revealed the ubiquity of irrationality in the human life. Findings in evolutionary psychology and cognitive science are making it increasingly evident that the human mind has not been evolved for rational thinking in traditional sense. The haphazard evolution of the human mind as a ‘kludge’ can explain why the dichotomy of rationality/irrationality is not a genuine matter in epistemology. Consulting recent studies on the human mind and communication, this paper argues that the actual criterion of epistemological justification is cognitive relevance rather than rationality. In this respect, even the cross-culturally recurrent patterns of ‘irrational’ beliefs in supernatural agents can be naturally generated and distributed by the relevance-driven cognition and communication. Ideas and hypotheses to which this paper consistently refers are mainly those of the cognitive science of religion including the epidemiology of representations, the HADD, and the MCI-concepts.
종교문화비평 (The Critical Review of Religion and Culture), 2019
Evolutionary-cognitive research programmes on religion have been reached to the point of redefini... more Evolutionary-cognitive research programmes on religion have been reached to the point of redefinition of the term, homo religiosus, which is one of the crucial words in the field of the study of religions in the twentieth century: “religiosity” is not a sui generis human nature, but a product or by-product of the evolution processes, and is expressed on the basis of evolved psychological mechanisms and cognitive constraints. The evolutionary-cognitive approach, mainly represented by the cognitive science of religion, has accumulated the various achievements during last 30 years of its own history. Its research questions, core theories, methodologies and eventually the research trends have been changed accordingly. The noticeable changes in this area consist of the following three factors: the significance of empirical study and experiment-based research are emphasized; the theoretical issues on the topic of “evolution” are also highlighted; the research agendas on this perspective are shared by various scholars of diverse fields, not limited only in religious studies. This article scrutinizes the recent research trends in the evolutionary and cognitive approaches to religion and calls for further researches into the evolution of religious minds and social minds, based on the implications of adaptationist–byproduct debates.
종교문화비평 (The Critical Review of Religion and Culture), 2018
This study aims to promote an advanced explanation and understanding of “religions in culture” wi... more This study aims to promote an advanced explanation and understanding of “religions in culture” with examining the activities of Korean Protestant Christianity related to the contemporary “hate” issues. The Protestant communities in Korea have taken somewhat diverse stances on the hate issues, and in recent years, they have been paying particular attention to homosexuality issues. The hatred issues that are recurrent and proliferated in Korean society as a whole and in the Protestant circles, calls for the study of evolutionary and cognitive causes, as well as social structural and religiousdoctrinal factors. The evolutionary-cognitive approaches propose that the intuitive emotions, inferences, and biases that the evolved human mind represents may take precedence over the explicit references to teaching of the bible. With the achievements of the current years of evolutionary and cognitive sciences, more sophisticated questions and answers can be produced about the hate issues of the Protestant Church in Korea.
종교문화연구 (Journal of Religion and Culture), 2017
This article is a general discussion about necessity of multifaceted approaches to hate-religion ... more This article is a general discussion about necessity of multifaceted approaches to hate-religion symbiosis in the contemporary society of Korea. It includes two interrelated considerations. First, the symbiosis is not an intra-religion problem, but a general social issue which all the members of the society should consider. Therefore, a proper study requires examinations on the contexts and controversial points of the current issues at a society level in general. Second, it is also necessary to analyze various aspects of the issues, such as their practical forms, social-structural conditions, and emotional-cognitive factors.
Jong'gyo munhwa bi'pyeong, Mar 31, 2018
This study aims to promote an advanced explanation and understanding of “religions in culture” wi... more This study aims to promote an advanced explanation and understanding of “religions in culture” with examining the activities of Korean Protestant Christianity related to the contemporary “hate” issues. The Protestant communities in Korea have taken somewhat diverse stances on the hate issues, and in recent years, they have been paying particular attention to homosexuality issues. The hatred issues that are recurrent and proliferated in Korean society as a whole and in the Protestant circles, calls for the study of evolutionary and cognitive causes, as well as social structural and religiousdoctrinal factors. The evolutionary-cognitive approaches propose that the intuitive emotions, inferences, and biases that the evolved human mind represents may take precedence over the explicit references to teaching of the bible. With the achievements of the current years of evolutionary and cognitive sciences, more sophisticated questions and answers can be produced about the hate issues of the Protestant Church in Korea.
Journal of Religion and Culture, 2012
The longstanding philosophical discussions about the human reason and the rationality in anthropo... more The longstanding philosophical discussions about the human reason and the rationality in anthropology have paradoxically revealed the ubiquity of irrationality in the human life. Findings in evolutionary psychology and cognitive science are making it increasingly evident that the human mind has not been evolved for rational thinking in traditional sense. The haphazard evolution of the human mind as a ‘kludge’ can explain why the dichotomy of rationality/irrationality is not a genuine matter in epistemology. Consulting recent studies on the human mind and communication, this paper argues that the actual criterion of epistemological justification is cognitive relevance rather than rationality. In this respect, even the cross-culturally recurrent patterns of ‘irrational’ beliefs in supernatural agents can be naturally generated and distributed by the relevance-driven cognition and communication. Ideas and hypotheses to which this paper consistently refers are mainly those of the cognitive science of religion including the epidemiology of representations, the HADD, and the MCI-concepts.
The Critical Review of Religion and Culture, 2018
This study aims to promote an advanced explanation and understanding of “religions in culture” wi... more This study aims to promote an advanced explanation and understanding of “religions in culture” with examining the activities of Korean Protestant Christianity related to the contemporary “hate” issues. The Protestant communities in Korea have taken somewhat diverse stances on the hate issues, and in recent years, they have been paying particular attention to homosexuality issues. The hatred issues that are recurrent and proliferated in Korean society as a whole and in the Protestant circles, calls for the study of evolutionary and cognitive causes, as well as social structural and religiousdoctrinal factors. The evolutionary-cognitive approaches propose that the intuitive emotions, inferences, and biases that the evolved human mind represents may take precedence over the explicit references to teaching of the bible. With the achievements of the current years of evolutionary and cognitive sciences, more sophisticated questions and answers can be produced about the hate issues of the Protestant Church in Korea.
The Critical Review of Religion and Culture, 2019
Studies in Religion(The Journal of the Korean Association for the History of Religions)
The Critical Review of Religion and Culture, 2021