Epidemiology of Representations Research Papers (original) (raw)

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.

This dissertation explores the use of catchphrase in communication, mainly within the framework of Relevance Theory developed by Sperber and Wilson (1995). I argue that some of the catchphrases, and the variant “snowclones”, can present their meaning at the level of explicature, while some of them may not have an explicitly communicated proposition, and what is communicated goes to the implicature level. More importantly, apart from the basic levels of explicature and implicature, the use of catchphrase always indicates the appearance of allusional content, which is crucial for the hearer to fully construct the mental representations of the speaker.

- by Chris M Xia
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- Relevance Theory, Epidemiology of Representations, Catchphrase, Echoic use

This chapter describes how recent work across the social and cognitive sciences
can address the question of how religious systems come to fail. First, the chapter discusses whether or not it makes scientific sense to talk about “religious systems” before outlining how the success or failure of such systems can be evaluated. A distinction is then drawn between the ‘mental-representational’ and ‘social’ failure of religious systems. After this, we examine the contributions of CSR to explaining the differential success of religious systems over time, such that some come to fail while others succeed. We then outline the relevance of CSR for explaining how and where religious systems lose influence altogether and various forms of non-religion emerge, a process that has traditionally been called “secularization.” The chapter closes with a case study outlining the applicability of the cognitive and evolutionary study of religion to the decline of Catholic belief, practice, and identification, as well as the rise in anti-Catholic Church social action, in early 21st Century Ireland.

- by Hugh Turpin and +1
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- Cultural Evolution, Secularization, Cognitive Science of Religion, Non-Religion

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.

In this paper, I take aim at the typical anthropological routine of criticizing universalist assumptions in social theory by contrasting them with non-Western emic models. I do so by following up on one recent instance of this practice, which has been heralded as a testament to what anthropology can still offer to critical social theory: Mahmood’s work on the Islamic piety movement in Egypt, and her claim that the normative subject of liberal feminist theory needs to be denaturalized, because the women involved in the piety movement hold a self-model that is incommensurable with secular-liberal assumptions about action being structured by innate desires for autonomy and freedom. By analyzing ethnographic data on Egyptian Muslim women through the lens of a combination of non-determinist cognitive theories, I show that in order to understand the lives of pious women much can be gained from keeping psychological predispositions for autonomy in mind. Simultaneously, this paper can be read as an attempt to bring cognitive material on attachment, education and epidemiology of representations into conversation with one another, and discover emerging fault lines and potentialities for mutual reinforcement.

- by Christian Laheij
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- Education, Autonomy, Attachment Theory, Islamic revival and reform movements