Cognitive aspects of religious ontologies: how brain processes constrain religious concepts

Authors

• Pascal Boyer University of Paris

DOI: https://doi.org/10.30674/scripta.67243

Keywords:

Cognitive science, Brain research, Methodology, Linguistics, Cognitive psychology, Categories, Concepts, Ontology, Cognition and culture

Abstract

A cognitive study of religion shares some of its concerns with traditional approaches in cultural anthropology or the history of religion: It aims to explain why and how humans in most cultural groups develop religious ideas and practices, and why these have recurrentand enduring features. By contrast with other approaches, however, a cognitive approach centres on one particular set of factors that influence the emergence and development of religion. The human mind is a complex set of functional capacities that were shaped by natural selection and evolved, not necessarily to build a coherent or true picture of the world and certainly not to answer metaphysical questions, but to solve a series of specific problems to do with survival and reproduction. A crucial aspect of this natural mental make-up is that humans, more than any other species, can acquire vast amounts of information through communication with other members of the species. A cognitive study takes religion as a set of cultural representations, which are acquired by individual minds, stored and communicated to others. In this paper the author presents some general features of the cognitive study of religious concepts, and then presents in detail a framework that emphasizes the role of universal cognitive constraints on the acquisition and representation of religious ontologies, and presents anthropological and cognitive data that supports the model.