Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 A cognitive theory of religion
- 2 The supernatural and the uses of the intentional
- 3 Dissemination and the comprehension of mysteries
- 4 Pragmatics and pragmatism
- 5 Authority
- 6 Conceptual innovation and revelatory language
- References
- Index
3 - Dissemination and the comprehension of mysteries
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 January 2011
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 A cognitive theory of religion
- 2 The supernatural and the uses of the intentional
- 3 Dissemination and the comprehension of mysteries
- 4 Pragmatics and pragmatism
- 5 Authority
- 6 Conceptual innovation and revelatory language
- References
- Index
Summary
Concepts of culture
This chapter explores how and why mysterious religious concepts reach cultural levels of distribution. I will develop a version of Sperber's epidemiological approach to this question. As a pre-requisite to that task, we will examine how utterances are actually processed. But dissemination is also affected by the medium of transmission, so I will first have something to say about scriptures, an important instrument in the epidemiology of the world religions.
Preliminaries: two cognitive theories of dissemination
Within the general framework of a cognitive approach to culture, there are two important and competing approaches to cultural dissemination; how thoughts change in populations. The first theory is Darwinian. The evolutionary biologist, Richard Dawkins, (1976: 189–201) proposed the meme. This is the unit of selections in a process of cultural evolution, analogous to the gene in biological evolution. Dennett (1995: 344) provides a large sample of these replicating cultural units of many and diverse types: ‘arch, wheel, wearing clothes, vendetta, right triangle, alphabet, calendar, the Odyssey, calculus, chess, perspective drawing, evolution by natural selection, impressionism’. And he writes, ‘Intuitively we see these as more or less identifiable cultural units … the units are the smallest elements that replicate themselves with reliability and fecundity.’
The second theory is Sperber's (1985, 1994, 1996) theory of the epidemiology of representations, introduced in Chapter 1. These two theories need to be carefully distinguished, pace Dennett (1995: 358) who, wrongly I think, claims that they are virtually indistinguishable.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Language and ReligionA Journey into the Human Mind, pp. 109 - 162Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2010