Edward Slingerland | University of British Columbia (original) (raw)

Papers by Edward Slingerland

The Journal of Asian Studies, Feb 1, 2018

This article presents preliminary findings from a multi-year, multi-disciplinary text analysis pr... more This article presents preliminary findings from a multi-year, multi-disciplinary text analysis project using an ancient and medieval Chinese corpus of over five million characters in works that date from the earliest received texts to the Song dynasty. It describes “distant reading” methods in the humanities and the authors’ corpus; introduces topic-modeling procedures; answers questions about the authors’ data; discusses complementary relationships between machine learning and human expertise; explains topics represented inAnalects, Mencius,andXunzithat set each of those texts apart from the other two; and explains topics that intersect all three texts. The authors’ results confirm many scholarly opinions derived from close-reading methods, suggest a reappraisal ofXunzi’s shared semantic content withAnalects,and yield several actionable research questions for traditional scholarship. The aim of this article is to initiate a new conversation about implications of machine learning for the study of Asian texts.

Arts, Faculty ofAsian Studies, Department ofUnreviewedFacult

Oxford University Press eBooks, Dec 21, 2011

... 1999. The threefold cord: Mind, body, and world. NewYork: Columbia University Press. Richert,... more ... 1999. The threefold cord: Mind, body, and world. NewYork: Columbia University Press. Richert,Rebekah A., and Paul L. Harris. 2008. ... Page 105. 87 Mind-Body Dualism and the Two Cultures Simpson, Tom, Peter Carruthers, Stephen Laurence, and Stephen Stich. 2005. ...

In this article, the authors introduce the general rationale behind the evolutionary cognitive sc... more In this article, the authors introduce the general rationale behind the evolutionary cognitive science of religion, answer some sensible humanistic objections to it and defend the promise of a 'consilient' approach to advance the academic study of religion.

Journal of cognitive historiography, Mar 29, 2018

Text-heavy and unstructured data constitute the primary source materials for many historical reco... more Text-heavy and unstructured data constitute the primary source materials for many historical reconstructions. In history and the history of religion, text analysis has typically been conducted by systematically selecting a small sample of texts and subjecting it to highly detailed reading and mental synthesis. But two interrelated technological developments have rendered a new data-intensive paradigm-one that can usefully supplement qualitative analysis-possible in the study of historical textual traditions. First, the availability of significant computing power has made it possible to run algorithms for automated text analysis on most personal computers. Second, the rapid increase in full text digital databases relevant to the study of religion has considerably reduced costs related to data acquisition and digitization. However, a limited understanding of the scope, advantages, and limitations of data-intensive methods have created real obstacles to the implementation of this paradigm in historical research. This is unfortunate, because history offers a rich and uncharted field for data-intensive knowledge discovery, and historians already have the much sought after and necessary domain expertise. In this article we seek to remove obstacles to the data intensive paradigm by presenting its methods and models for handling textheavy data.

Religion, brain and behavior, Mar 30, 2020

A major source of attention paid to high gods in the fields of cultural evolution and cognitive s... more A major source of attention paid to high gods in the fields of cultural evolution and cognitive science is the social effects of belief in high gods. Belief in high gods is both hypothesized to catalyze a cognitive punishment-avoidance mechanism at the level of individual minds, and a group cultural evolutionary mechanism that amplifies in-group cooperation. Recent research into non-Western contexts not only indicates a multiplicity of supernatural influences on the individual-level and group-level mechanisms but raises questions about theoretical presuppositions about how a supernatural agent is classified as a high god or as something else. Our exploratory study operationalizes the question "Does historical China have high gods?" through the assessment of semantic associations between each of several supernatural agent categories (alleged high gods, low gods, ancestors, sage kings, and emperors) and each of several social functional content categories (punishment, reward, morality, monitoring, and religion). Analyzing collocations in a corpus of 5.7 m Chinese characters, representing all of the most influential historical Chinese-language texts, our preliminary results suggest social functions of supernatural agents in historical China were widely distributed across many species of supernatural agent thereby complicating a claim that high gods constitute a special category in relation to these social functions.

Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Jul 9, 2012

Philosophy East and West, 2011

Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Mar 27, 2008

Journal of cognitive historiography, Jan 23, 2014

As a classicist religious studies scholar and someone involved in the growing cognitive science o... more As a classicist religious studies scholar and someone involved in the growing cognitive science of religion movement, I find the essays in this inaugural issue of the Journal of Cognitive Historiography exciting, despite the fact that I know little about the Graeco-Roman world. In my contribution I have been asked to make a few concluding comments, and because I do not have a special area of interest I will focus primarily on some general theoretical and methodological issues raised by the essays in this issue of the journal.

Numen, 2012

Religious studies assumes that religions are naturally occurring phenomena, yet what has scholars... more Religious studies assumes that religions are naturally occurring phenomena, yet what has scholarship uncovered about this fascinating dimension of the human condition? The manifold reports that classical scholars of religion have gathered extend knowledge, but such knowledge differs from that of scientific scholarship. Classical religious studies scholarship is expansive, but it is not cumulative and progressive. Bucking the expansionist trend, however, there are a small but growing number of researchers who approach religion using the methods and models of the life sciences. We use the biologist's distinction between "proximate" and "ultimate" explanations to review a sample of such research. While initial results in the biology of religion are promising, current limitations suggest the need for greater collaboration with classically trained scholars of religion. It might appear that scientists of religion and scholars of religion are strange bedfellows; however, progress in the scholarly study of religions rests on the extent to which members of each camp find a common intellectual fate.

Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Mar 31, 2017

This article focuses on the debate about mind-body concepts in early China in order to demonstrat... more This article focuses on the debate about mind-body concepts in early China in order to demonstrate the usefulness of large-scale, automated textual analysis techniques for scholars of religion. As previous scholarship has argued, traditional, "close" textual reading, as well as more recent, human-coder-based analyses, of early Chinese texts have called into question the "strong" holist position, or the claim that the early Chinese made no qualitative distinction between mind and body. In a series of follow-up studies, we show how three different machine-based techniques-word collocation, hierarchical clustering and topic modeling analysis-provide convergent evidence that the authors of early Chinese texts viewed the mind-body relationship as unique or problematic. We conclude with reflections on the advantages of adding "distant reading" techniques to the methodological arsenal of scholars of religion, as a supplement and aid to traditional, close reading.

Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Mar 1, 2004

Journal of Religious Ethics, 2001

In support of the thesis that virtue ethics allows for a more comprehensive and consistent interp... more In support of the thesis that virtue ethics allows for a more comprehensive and consistent interpretation of the Analects than other possible models, the author uses a structural outline of a virtue ethic (derived from Alasdair MacIntyre's account of the Aristotelian tradition) to organize a discussion of the text. The resulting interpretation focuses attention on the religious aspects of Confucianism and accounts for aspects of the text that are otherwise difficult to explain. In addition, the author argues that the structural similarities between the Aristotelian and Confucian conceptions of self-cultivation indicate a dimension of commensurability between the two traditions, despite very real variations in specific content. Finally, the author suggests how crosscultural commensurability, in general, can be understood on a theoretical level.

Humans rely on social interaction to achieve many important goals. These interactions rely in tur... more Humans rely on social interaction to achieve many important goals. These interactions rely in turn on people's capacity to understand others' mental states: their thoughts and feelings. Do different cultures understand minds in different ways, or do widely shared principles describe how different cultures understand mental states? Extensive data suggest that the mind organizes mental state concepts using the 3d Mind Model, composed of the psychological dimensions: rationality (vs. emotionality), social impact (states which affect others more vs. less), and valence (positive vs. negative states). However, this evidence comes primarily from Englishspeaking individuals in the United States. Here we investigated mental state representation in 57 contemporary countries, using 163 million English language tweets; in 17 languages, using billions of words of text from internet webpages; and across more than 2000 years of history, using curated texts from four historical societies. We quantified mental state meaning by analyzing the text produced by each culture using word embeddings. We then tested whether the 3d Mind Model could explain which mental states were similar in meaning within each culture. We found that the 3d Mind Model significantly explained mental state meaning in every country, language, and historical society that we examined. These results suggest that rationality, social impact, and valence form a generalizable conceptual backbone for mental state representation.