Book contents
- The Cognitive Science of Belief
- The Cognitive Science of Belief
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures and Tables
- Contributors
- Chapter 1 Introduction
- Part I Understanding Belief
- Part II Domains of Beliefs
- Religion and Morality
- Chapter 11 Religious Beliefs
- Chapter 12 Essentialist Views of Criminal Behavior Predict Increased Punitiveness
- Economics and Politics
- Science and Race
- Part III Variation in Beliefs
- Index
- References
Chapter 11 - Religious Beliefs
from Religion and Morality
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 November 2022
By
Book contents
- The Cognitive Science of Belief
- The Cognitive Science of Belief
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures and Tables
- Contributors
- Chapter 1 Introduction
- Part I Understanding Belief
- Part II Domains of Beliefs
- Religion and Morality
- Chapter 11 Religious Beliefs
- Chapter 12 Essentialist Views of Criminal Behavior Predict Increased Punitiveness
- Economics and Politics
- Science and Race
- Part III Variation in Beliefs
- Index
- References
Summary
Accounts of religious beliefs are often based on the assumption that these constitute a special domain, with cognitive processes of acquisition and communication that would be different from other domains of belief. Against this, I argue that religious beliefs are only a special class of meta-represented or reflective beliefs. The contents of religious beliefs are not unified, either, as there is a stark contrast between the beliefs conveyed by doctrinal, organized religious traditions and those found in small-scale, pragmatic traditions aimed at palliating misfortune. These conceptual clarifications make it possible to provide a better account of the transmission of religious beliefs and their effects, including their use as coalitional signals.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Cognitive Science of BeliefA Multidisciplinary Approach, pp. 235 - 253Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2022
References
Barrett, J. L. (2000) Exploring the natural foundations of religion. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 4(1), 29–34.Google Scholar
Barrett, J. L. & Keil, F. C. (1996) Conceptualizing a nonnatural entity: Anthropomorphism in God concepts. Cognitive Psychology, 31, 219–247.Google Scholar
Barth, F. (1975) Ritual and knowledge among the Baktaman of New Guinea. Universitetsforlaget, Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Baumard, N. & Boyer, P. (2013) Explaining moral religions. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 17, 272–280. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2013.04.003Google Scholar
Bellah, R. N. (2011) Religion in human evolution: from the Paleolithic to the axial age. Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Bloch, M. (2008) Why religion is nothing special but is central. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, Series B Biological Sciences, 363(1499), 2055–2061.Google Scholar
Boyer, P. (1994) Cognitive constraints on cultural representations: natural ontologies and religious ideas. In Hirschfeld, L. A., & Gelman, S. (Eds.). Mapping the mind: domain-specificity in culture and cognition (pp. 391–411). Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Boyer, P. (2001) Religion explained. evolutionary origins of religious thought. Basic Books.Google Scholar
Boyer, P. & Bergstrom, B. (2011) Threat-detection in child development: an evolutionary perspective. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 35(4), 1034–1041.Google Scholar
Child, A. B. & Child, I. L. (1993) Religion and magic in the life of traditional peoples. Prentice Hall.Google Scholar
Fessler, D. M. T., Pisor, A. C., & Navarrete, C. D. (2014) Negatively-biased credulity and the cultural evolution of beliefs. PLoS One, 9(4), e95167.Google Scholar
Gambetta, D. (2011) codes of the underworld: how criminals communicate. Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Goody, J. (1986) The logic of writing and the organization of society. Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Guthrie, S. E. (1993) Faces in the clouds. a new theory of religion. Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Harcourt, Alexander H. & de Waal, Frans (Eds.) (1992) Coalitions and alliances in humans and other animals. Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Kuran, T. (1998) Ethnic Norms and Their Transformation through Reputational Cascades. Journal of Legal Studies, 27(S2), 623–659.Google Scholar
Kurzban, R. & Neuberg, S. (2005) Managing ingroup and outgroup relationships. In Buss, D. M. (Ed.) The handbook of evolutionary psychology (pp. 653–675). John Wiley and Sons.Google Scholar
Lawson, E. T. & McCauley, R. N. (1990). Rethinking religion: connecting cognition and culture. Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Leslie, A. M., Friedman, O., & German, T. P. (2004) Core mechanisms in “theory of mind.” Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 8(12), 528–533.Google Scholar
Maynard Smith, J. (1982) Evolution and the Theory of Games. Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Medina, L. F. (2007) A Unified Theory of Collective Action and Social Change. University of Michigan Press.Google Scholar
Mercier, H., & Sperber, D. (2009) Intuitive and reflective inferences. In Evans, J. S. B. T. & Frankish, K. (Eds.). Two minds. dual processes and beyond (pp. 149–170). Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Neuberg, S. L., Kenrick, D. T., and Schaller, M. (2010) Evolutionary Social Psychology. In Fiske, S. T., Gilbert, D. T., & Lindzey, G. (Eds.). Handbook of social psychology, vol. 2. 5th ed. (pp. 761–796). John Wiley and Sons.Google Scholar
Pietraszewski, D. (2013) What is group psychology? Adaptations for mapping shared intentional stances. In Banaji, M. R., Gelman, S. A., Banaji, M. R., & Gelman, S. A. (Eds.). Navigating the social world: what infants, children, and other species can teach us (pp. 253–257). Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pietraszewski, D., Curry, O. S., Petersen, M. B., Cosmides, L., and Tooby, J. (2016) Constituents of Political Cognition: Race, Party Politics, and the Alliance Detection System. Cognition, 140, 24–39. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2015.03.007Google Scholar
Pyysiainen, I. (2001) How religion works. towards a new cognitive science of religion. Brill.Google Scholar
Recanati, F. (2000) The iconicity of metarepresentations. In Sperber, D. (Ed.). Metarepresentations. A multidisciplinary perspective (pp. 311–360) Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Spiro, M. & D’Andrade, R. G. (1958) A Cross-cultural study of some supernatural beliefs. American Anthropologist, 60(3), 456–466.Google Scholar
Stich, S. (1983) From folk-psychology to cognitive science: the case against belief. MIT Press.Google Scholar
Tooby, J. & Cosmides, L. (2010) Groups in mind: the coalitional roots of war and morality. In Høgh- Olesen, H. (Ed.). Human morality and sociality: evolutionary and comparative perspectives (pp. 191–234). Palgrave MacMillan.Google Scholar
van Leeuwen, N. (2014) Religious credence is not factual belief. Cognition, 133(3), 698–715.Google Scholar
Woody, E. & Szechtman, H. (2011) Adaptation to potential threat: the evolution, neurobiology, and psychopathology. Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews, 35(4), 1019–1033.Google Scholar