What Cognitive Science of Religion Can Learn from John Dewey

contemporary pragmatism 15 (2018) 387-406

brill.com/copr

Hans Van Eyghen vu Amsterdam [email protected]

Abstract

I use three ideas from philosopher John Dewey that are of service for Cognitive Science of Religion (csr). I discuss how Dewey’s ideas on embodied cognition, embedded cognition can be put to work to get a fuller understanding of religious cognition. I also use his ideas to criticize csr’s reliance on the modularity of mind thesis

Keywords cognitive science of religion – modularity of mind – embodied cognition – embedded cognition, John Dewey – religious cognition

Introduction

Cognitive science of religion is a fairly young discipline with the aim of studying the cognitive basis of religious belief. Despite the great variation in theories a number of common features can be distilled and most theories can be situated in the cognitivist and modular paradigm. In this paper, I investigate how cognitive science of religion (csr) can be improved by using insights from philosopher John Dewey. I focus on Dewey because he offered important insights in cognition long before there was cognitive science and because his ideas are widely influential in the recent enactivist movement. The relevance of Dewey’s thought for csr will be discussed under three headers: embodied- ness, embeddedness and anti-modularity. I will first give a brief overview of the most influential theories in csr. Then I will discuss how existing theories in csr can be improved on the first two points and criticized on the third.

204221 388 Van Eyghen

The Cognitive Science of Religion

Cognitive science of religion is a fairly young discipline (from the 1990’s on- wards) with the aim of studying the cognitive basis of religious belief. Over the years a large number of theories have been proposed. Despite the wide variety, a number of common features can be distilled. According to Claire White the idea that human cognition is necessary (but not sufficient) to explain the presence, persistence and prevalence of human ideas and behaviors deemed “religious” is at the heart of csr (White 2017). This sets csr apart from theories that explain religious belief on a strictly cultural basis (e.g. Durkheim 1971) and from theories that explain it as resulting from power structures (e.g. Marx 1970). White also notes that csr theories share the commitment that the human mind is central to understanding religious belief and that the human mind actively processes religious ideas (White 2017). One of the leading csr theorists, Pascal Boyer, wrote that the human mind is not a blank slate, meaning that it is not susceptible to just any (religious) belief. Humans are by contrast rather picky in their beliefs (Boyer 2002). Boyer’s idea is widely ac- cepted in csr. Most theories in the field focus on cognitive biases or cognitive mechanisms that produce or prepare for religious beliefs. Deborah Kelemen found evidence for a bias towards teleological explanations (Kelemen 1999). Paul Bloom argues that a bias towards mind-body dualism could explain religious beliefs (Bloom 2005). Jesse Bering and David Bjorklund did experiments suggesting that afterlife beliefs come natural to young children (Bering and Bjorklund 2004). Others proposed more elaborate theories featuring cognitive mechanisms, which they claim are responsible for religious beliefs. In doing so, they try to sketch a more complete picture of how religious beliefs are produced. No theory claims that there is one designated ‘special’ cognitive mechanism for religious beliefs but most argue that ‘ordinary’ mechanisms that also produce other beliefs lie at its root. Justin Barrett’s theory states that an important factor in the emergence of supernatural beliefs is the ‘hyperactive agency detection device’. As the name suggests, this is the cognitive mechanism responsible for detecting agents. The mechanism is hyperactive because it produces beliefs upon very limited evidence. For example, the sound of rustling leaves or a stick that looks like a snake is enough to conclude that one or more agents are around. According to Barrett, the process, joined by operations of the theory of mind,1 could lead to beliefs about invisible agents and gods (Barrett 2004). Jesse Bering argued that belief in God could result from applying mentalizing tools to meaningful

1 The theory of mind is the mechanism responsible for producing beliefs about other people’s mental states.

contemporary pragmatismDownloaded from 15 Brill.com09/25/2021(2018) 387-406 09:33:53AM via free access

204221 What Cognitive Science of Religion 389 events. People would be inclined to interpret events like natural disasters or beautiful sunsets as intentionally created by an ultimate meaning giver (Ber- ing 2002). Kurt Gray and Daniel Wegner claimed that human moral reasoning always takes a dyadic form. In moral situations, people intuitively look for a moral agent (the doer of good or evil) and a moral patient (the receiver of good or evil). In most situations both are easily found but in some there is no appar- ent moral agent. Examples are natural disasters or good things that happen to people like having a baby. In these situations, people infer to an ultimate moral agent, i.e. God (Gray and Wegner 2010). Lee Kirkpatrick argued that beliefs in supernatural beings arise when the attachment system of humans goes astray. Normally people attach to caregivers and partners but sometimes the system overreaches and attaches to invisible attachment figures like gods or spirits (Kirkpatrick 2005). Other theories explain how religious beliefs are transmitted and what makes religious beliefs successful.2 The most influential theory of this kind is Pascal Boyer’s ‘cognitive optimum’. He argued that minimally counterintuitive con- cept have the best chances of being remembered and being transmitted. In his view, people have intuitive ontological categories like ‘Plant’, ‘Animal’ or ‘Person’. These categories allow for predictions. For example, categorizing something under ‘Plant’ allows the inference that the thing will not be able to move and will grow under the right conditions. Minimally counterintuitive concepts violate some of the expectations that come with their intuitive ontological category. For example, a ghost is usually categorized under ‘Person’ but violates the expectation that persons cannot move through walls. At the same time the majority of expectations is retained and a ghost is expected to perceive things in the same way persons do and to interact with others like persons do. Minimally counterintuitive concepts differ from intuitive (concepts that violate no expectations) and maximally counterintuitive concepts (concepts that violate many expectations). Intuitive concepts, like ‘John Doe’, are not memorable because they are ordinary. Maximally intuitive concepts, like a man who is 30 meter long, has 11,5 arms and only appears every second Tues- day of the month, require too much cognitive effort to remember. Most supernatural concepts are minimally counterintuitive and thus easily transmitted and remembered (Boyer 2002). Thomas Lawson and Robert McCauley propose that religious rituals serve as means for the transmittance of symbolic representations. These symbolic representations can be beliefs about supernatural beings or religious beliefs like ‘All men are sinners’. They need not take the form of written texts. Lawson and McCauley argue that rituals have two characteristics that make them very suitable to transmit symbolic representations,

2 A belief is successful when it spreads through a large part of the population.

contemporary pragmatism 15 (2018) 387-406 Downloaded from Brill.com09/25/2021 09:33:53AM via free access

204221 390 Van Eyghen the frequency of their performance and their stability. Both insure that rituals are memorable and hence that the symbolic representations they invoke get transmitted (McCauley and Lawson 2002). Another theory explaining why (some) religious beliefs are successful draws on the adaptive usefulness of supernatural beliefs (Norenzayan 2013; Bering and Johnson 2005; Shariff and Norenzayan 2007). Defenders of the theory3 note that human beings rely on cooperation to a far greater extent than other animals do. This offers many benefits but also makes humans vulnerable to free-riders, people who reap the benefits of cooperation but do not make any contributions themselves. Believ- ing in supernatural beings could help fix this problem. According to defenders of this theory, supernatural beings are commonly believed to have full access to people’s intentions and desires and to be concerned about whether people do the right thing. Believing that a being of this sort is watching will thus make people (far) less likely to free-ride. Because of their adaptive use, religious beliefs would be transmitted. Finally, some theories highlight the social functions of religious rituals. Other than theories from the last category they do not discuss how the beliefs themselves get transmitted but what effects these beliefs have on cooperation or the formation of groups. The costly signaling theory (Bulbulia and Sosis 2011) states that religious rituals are means of signaling one’s commitment to social norms. By engaging in costly, hard-to-fake rituals, people would show their commitment to the social norms propagated by religious traditions. Groups that engage in rituals would cooperate better and have a better longev- ity. Harvey Whitehouse argued that (religious) rituals have an important role in shaping societies. Rituals, and especially intense, less frequent rituals, are said to fuse personal identities together and create closely knit communities (Whitehouse and Lanman 2014).

Embodied Belief

The term ‘embodied cognition’ is used in a variety of ways. Robert Wilson and Lucia Foglia define embodied cognition as: “Many features of cognition are embodied in that they are deeply dependent upon characteristics of the physical body of an agent, such that the agent’s beyond-the-brain body plays a

3 The theory comes in two variants. One considers the belief that a powerful being is watching as a biological adaptation (e.g. Bering and Johnson 2005); and the other locates its adaptive use in the domain of cultural evolution (e.g. Norenzayan 2013).

contemporary pragmatismDownloaded from 15 Brill.com09/25/2021(2018) 387-406 09:33:53AM via free access

204221 What Cognitive Science of Religion 391 significant causal role, or a physically constitutive role, in that agent’s cognitive processing.” (Wilson and Foglia 2015: 8) Larry Shapiro writes: “The embodied cognition research programme (…) departs from more traditional cognitive science in the emphasis it places on the role the body plays in an organism’s cognitive processes.” (Shapiro 2007: 338) Though different, all definitions share the idea that (the study of) human cognition should not be limited to the human mind or the human brain. The ‘beyond-the brain- part’, as Wilson and Foglia call it, sets the embodied approach apart from traditional cognitive science. Adherents of embodied cognition claim that without the involvement of the body beliefs would not exhibit the characteristics and properties they do. Beliefs thus essentially have a bodily component. Sian Beilock gives examples how the body beyond-the-brain has an impact on cognition. For example, memory can involve re-experiencing events from the past and in doing so human neural hardware does not make a clear distinction between thought and action (Beilock 2015: 12). Some also suggested that the facial expressions that usually accompany laughter can help patients suffering from depression get happier thoughts (Beilock 2015: 21–40). Beilock discusses how motoric problems can slow down cognitive development (Beilock 2015: 47–80). She also refers to evidence that children find it easier to grasp a story when they are told to act it out (Beilock 2015: 88–89). Beilock points out that workspaces at Google are designed in such a way as to enhance employers’ cognitive abilities (Beilock 2015: 115–30). Another example of the importance of the body beyond-the-brain is the role hand gestures play in delivering a message (Beilock 2015: 139–55). John Dewey anticipated these ideas about embodied cognition. He coined the term ‘body-mind’ to argue against any dualism between body and mind. He writes: “Body-mind simply designates what actually takes place when a living body is implicated in situations of discourse, communication, and participa- tion. In the hyphenated phrase body-mind, “body” designates the continued and conserved, the registered and cumulative operation of factors continuous with the rest of nature, inanimate as well as animate; while “mind” designates the characters and consequences which are differential, indicative of features which emerge when “body” is engaged in a wider, more complex and interde- pendent situation.” (Dewey 1958: 285) Talking about ‘mind’ or ‘body’ in isolation might be acceptable from a pure theoretical perspective but is of little use when discussing concrete practices. In any case, use of separate terms should not blind us from the fact that both are deeply intertwined and even insepa- rable according to Dewey. In a lecture for the New York Academy of Medicine Dewey laments the disastrous effects of the strict division between body and mind (Dewey 1928).

contemporary pragmatism 15 (2018) 387-406 Downloaded from Brill.com09/25/2021 09:33:53AM via free access

204221 392 Van Eyghen

The vast majority of csr theories confines religious cognition to the human brain (explicitly or implicitly) and seems committed to a disembodied view of what religious belief is. A small minority of csr-authors does give an important role to the body. Armin Geertz criticized csr scholars of ignoring the importance of the body beyond-the-brain and thereby ignoring important trends in current cognitive science (Geertz 2015). Lawrence Barsalou, Aron Barbey, Kyle Simmons and Ava Santos argued that embodied knowledge is central to three aspects of religious experiences, namely religious visions, religious beliefs and religious rituals (Barsalou et al. 2005). For religious visions the body beyond- the-brain is argued to play a role in simulation processes. Being exposed to religious art frequently could drive people’s neural systems into simulating the portrayed events themselves. In doing so, humans might situate themselves in those situations personally (with their bodies) (Barsalou et al. 2005: 36–39). For religious beliefs the body beyond-the-brain is said to play a role in the shaping of religious frameworks that are likely to have an effect on daily experience. For example, Barsalou et al. suggest that the experiences of having a human body might explain why people tend to have anthropomorphic concepts of God.4 Humans would find it difficult to be consistent in thinking about disembodied minds (which is what most gods are believed to be) because they lack any such experience (Barsalou et al. 2005: 39–43). According to Barsalou et al. the body beyond-the-brain is central to conveying religious ideas metaphorically and to establishing them in memory. An example of conveying religious ideas metaphorically is going into a state of silence to establish silence or peace in the mind. In rituals connecting a bodily state to a mental state would be of great importance. By suggesting that performing actions help people to better remember, Barsalou et al. echo the examples by Beilock we discussed earlier. In rituals abstract ideas are also made more concrete by associating them with bodily actions (Barsalou et al. 2005: 43–46). Most of the csr-theories I discussed above do not discuss any role for the ‘body beyond the brain’ at all. The theories featuring cognitive mechanisms discussed in section 2 do not consider any role for the body beyond the brain. However, it is not unlikely that the way the human body is constituted influ- ences agency detection. Humans’ being bipedal and having stereoscopic sight, likely constrains human agency detection. Considering the importance of the

4 The literature on anthropomorphism in religious concepts goes back to Stewart Guthrie’s work (Guthrie 1993). Justin Barrett continued this line of research and conducted experiments that showed that humans often (unreflectively) hold unorthodox anthropomorphic beliefs about their gods (e.g. Barrett 1998, 1999).

contemporary pragmatismDownloaded from 15 Brill.com09/25/2021(2018) 387-406 09:33:53AM via free access

204221 What Cognitive Science of Religion 393 body in human attachment relations5 raises questions about how attachment to invisible beings is possible. In the classical attachment theory of John Bowl- by (Bowlby 1969), the human body is the primary locus of attachment relations. Bodily interactions actively shape and constrain attachment relations. This holds both for attachment relations between caregivers and infants and for attachment relations between romantic partners. Theories that explain religious belief by means of attachment have not answered the question how attachment relations with invisible agents (what most people believe supernatural beings to be) which are similar to attachment relations with humans are possible and are maintained. Of the theories explaining how religious beliefs are transmitted and what makes religious beliefs successful, Pascal Boyer’s ‘cognitive optimum’ is the most promising candidate for being enriched by taking into account a role of the body. Boyer is clear about his focus on the mind when he writes: “The explanations for religious beliefs and behaviours is to be found in the way all human minds work.” (Boyer 2002: 3) It is unlikely that Boyer’s intuitive ontological categories like ‘Plant’, ‘Animal’ or ‘Person’ exist in a vacuum in the human head. Boyer briefly addresses the question where the categories come from when he wonders whether they are innate or not.6 He answers that questions about innateness are not very interesting. Thinking about the role of embodiment might shed new light on the emergence of intuitive ontological categories. It is not unlikely that the way people experience their own bodies shapes their ontological categories and the expectations that come along with them. People might use the category ‘Person’ for being who are like themselves, i.e. beings having similar bodily structures and showing similar behavior. The way people experience their own body probably also gives rise to expectations that persons cannot move through physical objects and can use their legs to move. Other categories like ‘Plant’, or ‘Animal’ appear to be defined in comparison to ‘Person’. Animals are perceived as having different bodies and thus expected to move and behave differently.7 Plants are perceived as having a very different physical structure and this might also shape the expectation that plants are

5 The attachment theory mainly addresses attachment relations between caregivers and romantic partners and these are also the relations to which belief in God or gods is compared. 6 Boyer writes: “Does this mean religion is ‘innate’ and ‘in the genes’? I—and most people in- terested in the evolution of the human mind—think that the question is in fact meaningless” (Boyer 2002: 4). 7 There is reason to believe that people are more inclined to consider animals that resemble humans in their bodily structure as persons. It is thus not unlikely that people will be more inclined to treat apes and monkeys as persons than they would reptiles or elephants.

contemporary pragmatism 15 (2018) 387-406 Downloaded from Brill.com09/25/2021 09:33:53AM via free access

204221 394 Van Eyghen more limited than humans or animals. More data on how intuitive ontological categories emerge could mean more data on minimally counterintuitive concepts and hence on religious beliefs. Xygalatas research on extreme rituals shows that rituals usually have an important bodily aspect too(Xygalatas et al. 2013). Yet the body-beyond-the-brain does not play a role in either the costly signaling theory nor Whitehouse’s theory nor Lawson and McCauley’s theory. The body is the means by which people signal their commitments and the intense, less frequent rituals that lead to identity fusion usually involve bodily gestures. Xygalatas’ research also shows that rituals with a stronger bodily aspect will likely have a stronger effect on people. The role of the body thus should not be neglected in further research on these theories.

Embedded Belief

A lot of work by early csr-theorists was motivated by discontentment with older sociological theories of religion.8 As a result many cognitive theories of religion refrain from discussing the importance of culture or a subject’s environment for religious belief and put the emphasis on what presumably are the natural (as opposed to cultural) mechanisms at the root of religious belief. Dewey opposed any form of reductionism whereby one scientific account has the ambition to tell the whole story (Dewey 1958). Religious belief is always a social phenomenon and any theory that discards the importance of culture is defective. In this section, I will investigate how defective current csr is and how this problem could be mended. Embedded cognition is often discussed alongside embodied cognition and holds that cognition is closely tied to environmental factors. For John Dewey, thought should not be considered as separate from the world. He argued that belief and knowledge are practically instrumental in the interaction between organism and environment. In his Essays in Experimental Logic he writes: “[…] thinking [doesn’t] start from the fact that in each human being is a “mind” whose business it is just to “know”—to theorize in the Aristotelian sense; but, rather, that it starts from an effort to get out of some trouble, actual or menac- ing.” (Dewey 1916) Elsewhere he writes: “To describe the action of a part of the nervous system, or of the entire nervous system, or of the entire organism in isolation from the environment included within behavior is like thinking that we can understand a machine, say a loom, if we omit the material, the yarn,

8 For example, see (Boyer 2002: 5–17) for a criticism of cultural explanations of religious belief.

contemporary pragmatismDownloaded from 15 Brill.com09/25/2021(2018) 387-406 09:33:53AM via free access

204221 What Cognitive Science of Religion 395 upon which it works and the transformation of the material into cloth wrought in the operation.” (Dewey 1987: 35–36) The quotes make clear that Dewey departs from the traditional theoretical conception of cognition where a subject grasps truths about the world in itself. In his view knowledge is embedded in an organism’s engagement with the world it lives in and the practical setting plays a constitutive role in belief formation. A related point Dewey pushes is the idea of thought as genetic. In Experience and Nature Dewey opposes the preoccupation of philosophers with beliefs. He writes: “Many modern thinkers, influenced by the notion that knowledge is the only mode of experience that grasps things, assuming the ubiquity of cognition, and noting that immediacy or qualitative existence has no place in authentic science, have asserted that qualities are always and only states of consciousness. It is a reasonable belief that there would be no such thing as ‘consciousness’ if events did not have a phase of brute and unconditioned ‘isness’, of being just what they irreducibly are.” (Dewey 1958: 86) The ‘phase of brute and unconditioned isness’ refers to states that come prior to consciously held beliefs and contribute to their emergence. For Dewey, these states are often states associated with interaction with the environment. Most literature in csr considers religious cognition as ‘cold cognition’ and rarely addresses the practical setting in which religious beliefs are formed. One csr-scholar who lamented the lack of interest in cultural constraints in csr is Armin Geertz. He claims that a lot of csr-scholars assume a monolithic idea of religious thinking and behavior, failing to depart from their own particular religious background or the American context.9 Geertz agrees with Dewey that cognitive science should be more mindful of the cultural interactions in which cognition is embedded and claims csr could learn from this approach (Geertz 2015). Will Gervais, Aijana Willard, Ara Norenzayan and Joseph Henrich claim that elements of culture are required to explain people’s religious beliefs. They claim that such an explanation should (at least) include a conformist bias,10 a prestige based learning bias11 and a deception avoidance bias12 (Gervais et al.

9 Geertz also refers to Joseph Henrich, Steven Heine and Ara Norenzayan paper ‘The weirdest people in the world’, where they accuse psychology and cognitive science of focusing too much on people who are western, educated, industrialized, rich and live in demo- cratic societies. These people form a small minority of the world’s population and therefore the scope of much psychological and cognitive research is limited of scope (Henrich, Heine, and Norenzayan 2010). 10 i.e. a bias to believe what most people in one’s group believe. 11 i.e. a bias to believe what one learns from people with high standing in one’s group. 12 i.e. a bias to only believe (or believe easier) what one sees confirmed by actions. Ger- vais et al. give the example of eating mushrooms. One will be more likely to believe that

contemporary pragmatism 15 (2018) 387-406 Downloaded from Brill.com09/25/2021 09:33:53AM via free access

204221 396 Van Eyghen

2011). Joseph Henrich elaborated on this last bias and argued for the importance of ‘credibility enhancing displays’. These are costly actions that accompany beliefs that make this belief more credible and thus easier to transmit (Henrich 2009). Three theories do assign some importance to the practical setting. Theorists that connect religious beliefs to cooperation and detection of free-riders claim that religious beliefs arise in a practical social realm. The two theories on religious rituals also address the practical setting in which religious rituals are performed. However, in these cases the role of practical issues could be bigger and this would likely help the theories. For most people, cooperation and the choice whether to free-ride or not is obviously a practical matter. If the theory is correct, decisions about these practical matters are made more difficult (or more easy) because of supernatural being that are believed to monitor one’s thoughts and behavior. Anthropological studies also show that people merely assume that supernatural beings are watching them at every move but that they actively engage with these beings through offerings, prayers and rituals. A deeper look at the practical components will thus likely lead to a richer, more nuanced theory. An obvious area of research that could benefit from being more mindful of context and practical setting is atheism. The theories I discussed in section 1 argue that religious belief comes naturally. As a consequence they need to explain the occurrence of atheism. Some csr-scholars proposed explanations for the occurrence of atheism. Justin Barrett suggests that atheism requires practice and being accustomed (Barrett 2004: chapter 8 see also below). Jesse Bering suggests that atheism is only skin deep and that religious belief are often tacitly held (Bering 2012). Armin Geertz and Guðmundur Ingi Markusson argued that cultural ecology can help explain atheism (Geertz and Markússon 2010). They write: “[T]he fact that human cognition is always situated within a natural habitat of cultural systems, we find that atheism is no less natural than religiosity is.” (Geertz and Markússon 2010: 163) Some csr scholars have discussed settings that could give rise to a higher prevalence of atheism,13 but more research remains to be done.

mushrooms are edible when one sees someone eating them than when one merely hears someone claiming that mushrooms are edible. 13 For example, Will Gervais and Norenzayan concluded from experiments that analytic thinking could foster atheism (Gervais and Norenzayan 2012). Elsewhere Norenzayan suggested that states with strong institutions could foster a climate where atheism can flourish (Norenzayan 2013).

contemporary pragmatismDownloaded from 15 Brill.com09/25/2021(2018) 387-406 09:33:53AM via free access

204221 What Cognitive Science of Religion 397

Some csr-scholars argued that a problem for Pascal Boyer’s theory can be solved by taking into account the embeddedness of religious beliefs. This problem is the ‘Mickey Mouse Problem’. Justin Barrett notes that many concepts that are not properly categorized as God concepts or religious concepts meet Boyer’s criteria of being minimally counterintuitive. Examples are Santa Claus, Mickey Mouse and the Tooth Fairy (Barrett 2008). Will Gervais and Jo- seph Henrich raised a related problem that they call the ‘Zeus problem’. They note that some concepts like those of ancient Greek gods fit Boyer’s criteria and were indeed once considered God concepts but they are no longer a target of widespread belief and worship. They suggest that a solution can be found if the role of context is taken into account more (Gervais and Henrich 2010). For Boyer, the difference lies in the fact that God concepts are believed to have access and care about strategic information14 whereas other counterintuitive concepts are not (Boyer 2000). Boyer’s proposal does, however, not work for Santa Claus. According to Robert McCauley and Emma Cohen these problems show that there is no natural partition between religious concepts and non- religious concepts (McCauley and Cohen 2010). Gervais et al. agree but suggest that a partition can be made on cultural grounds (Gervais et al. 2011). Interac- tion or engagement can aid in laying bare the partition. Clearly people interact differently with God concepts than with other minimally counterintuitive concepts. It is also clear that interaction can change over time as ‘the Zeus problem’ shows. The main difference is that God concepts are worshipped and other minimally counterintuitive concepts are not. a solution to the Mickey Mouse Problem (and the Zeus problem) will thus require a closer look at how people worship and what this act involves. Since worshipping is deeply shaped by culture, research into how people worship will need to take culture more seriously. The costly signaling theory could be expanded to consider religious rituals as ways of interacting with supernatural beings rather than exclusively focusing on rituals as ways of signaling honesty. Whereas the latter considers rituals as a way of interaction between humans, the former considers rituals as means of interacting with what people believe to be supernatural beings. Here too, expanding the theory will likely lead to a richer, more complete theory. The main idea of the theory, namely thinking of religious rituals as honestly signaling allegiance to the norms propagated by supernatural beings, can be kept in place. Taking a more embedded approach, however, changes the focus on the supernatural beings, people believe they interact with whereas current

14 Strategic information is information about whether people will follow social norms or are reliable. This information is crucial for detecting free-riders.

contemporary pragmatism 15 (2018) 387-406 Downloaded from Brill.com09/25/2021 09:33:53AM via free access

204221 398 Van Eyghen costly signaling theory focuses on the effect of signaling on fellow human beings. Focusing on the relation with the alleged supernatural beings will be able to account better for the complexities and oddities in rituals and thus yield a broader understanding. More than any of the other theories in csr, Whitehouse’s theory has taken into account the context in which rituals shape societies. Whitehouse looked at the effect of intense conflict on the sense of identity in Libyan revolutionaries during the 2011 conflict. He reported high levels of identity fusion (visceral, family-like bonds between people) in frontline combatants (Whitehouse et al. 2014). Whitehouse notes that rituals can have a similar effect but he is clear that for this a group needs to be in important respects similar to the Libyan revolutionaries. Most importantly, the group needs to be small and the rituals need to be traumatic just like the intense conflict was for the Libyan revolutionaries. Here more research into the role of the practical setting of rituals can move the theory forward. Bering and Gray and Wegner’s theory address meaning and morality and can therefore clearly benefit from a deeper look at the practical environment. Meaningful experiences are usually triggered by exceptional events and what events count as exceptional obviously depends on the setting an organism lives in. Meaning might also be shaped by the environment someone lives in. For societies where the forest is important (for hunting or foraging) meaningful events will more likely have something to do with the forest than for people who wander the desert. Common-sense morality is always a practical affair and it is likely that a belief in an ultimate moral agent will be embedded in a practical setting of trying to appease this ultimate moral agent or anger at him. Again, more research could yield a more complete theory.

Anti-modularity

Many csr-theorists subscribe to some form of the modularity of mind thesis. This thesis comes in a variety of (quite divergent) forms.15 The original modularity thesis was proposed by Jerry Fodor (Fodor 1983). He argued that input systems, like color perception or visual shape analysis, are characterized by 9 features.16 The most important features are ‘domain specificity’, ‘limited central accessibility’ and ‘information encapsulation’. Domain specificity means that a

15 For an overview see (Robbins 2009). 16 These features are: ‘Domain specificity’, ‘Mandatory operation’, ‘Limited central accessibility’, ‘Fast processing’, ‘Informational encapsulation’, ‘Shallow outputs’, ‘Fixed neural

contemporary pragmatismDownloaded from 15 Brill.com09/25/2021(2018) 387-406 09:33:53AM via free access

204221 What Cognitive Science of Religion 399 system has a restricted subject matter. For example, color perception only addresses recognition of colors and visual shape analysis only the recognition of shapes. Encapsulation means that one system cannot access information produced by another mechanism. Finally, limited central accessibility means that information produced by a system cannot (or cannot easily) be accessed by consciousness. Limited central accessibility implies that the produced information cannot (or not easily) be changed by conscious intervention and that the subject cannot (or not easily) report how the information was produced.17 Fodor’s modularity thesis is sometimes called modest modularity. It stands in contrast to massive modularity where modularity is extended to central cognitive systems involved in belief fixation and practical reasoning.18 Important defenders of this variant of modularity, called ‘massive modularity’, are Dan Sperber (Sperber 2001), Jerome Barkow, John Tooby and Lea Cosmides (Bar- kow, Cosmides, and Tooby 1992) and Peter Carruthers (Carruthers 2006). Ac- cording to massive modularity the human mind is believed to have specialized mechanisms for managing distinct tasks like mate selection, tool use, recognizing emotions or recognizing facial expressions (McCauley 2011). Massive modularity does not have a clearly defined set of characteristics and some of Fodor’s characteristics are denied or deemed less important. Peter Carruthers, one of the main defenders of massive modularity writes that many of Fodor’s features will have to be denied before a plausible massive modularity thesis is defensible. He claims that only ‘domain specificity’, ‘mandatory operation’, ‘Characteristic and specific breakdown patterns’, ‘fixed neural architecture’ and ‘limited central inaccessibility’ can be pertained (Carruthers 2006).19

architecture’, ‘Characteristic and specific breakdown patterns’ and ‘Characteristic ontoge- netic pace and sequencing’. 17 Robbins writes: “A system is inaccessible in this sense if the intermediate-level representations that it computes prior to producing its output are inaccessible to consciousness, and hence unavailable for explicit report. In effect, centrally inaccessible systems are those whose internal processing is opaque to introspection.” (Robbins 2009). 18 Fodor denied that central cognitive systems operate in the same modular way input systems do (see Fodor 2001). 19 Carruthers writes: “[T]he properties of having proprietary transducers, shallow outputs, fast processing, significant innateness or innate channeling, and encapsulation will very likely have to be struck out. That leaves us with the idea that modules might be isolable function‐specific processing systems, all or almost all of which are domain specific (in the content sense), whose operations aren’t subject to the will, which are associated with specific neural structures (albeit sometimes spatially dispersed ones), and whose internal operations may be inaccessible to the remainder of cognition.” (Carruthers 2006: 12).

contemporary pragmatism 15 (2018) 387-406 Downloaded from Brill.com09/25/2021 09:33:53AM via free access

204221 400 Van Eyghen

The massive modularity thesis stands at odds with Dewey’s ideas. Mark Johnson notes that Dewey “never hypostatizes cognitive functions into discrete faculties and never turns dynamic cognitive processes into fixed structures.” (Johnson 2010: 124) According to Dewey, cognition appears as unified. Johnson writes: “Dewey argues that experience does not come to us as discrete stimuli and responses; rather, it comes to us as unities organized relative to our ongo- ing engagement with our environment.” (Johnson 2010: 124) Peter Carruthers agrees that massive modularity flies in the face of the view that conscious experience is somehow unified but proposes a way how massive modularity can be wedded to a unified consciousness. He calls it moderately massive modularity and it features a unifying role for one particular system, the natural language module. It would serve to integrate the outputs of the various modular systems and subserve conscious belief-formation and decision-making (Car- ruthers 2003). He writes: “[T]he language module looks likely to be one of the down-stream consumer systems capable of receiving inputs from each of the central modules, in such a way that it can transform the outputs of those modules into spoken (or signed) language.” (Carruthers 2003: 84) Carruthers’ view does not seem satisfying from a Deweyan perspective because experience still comes to us as more or less discrete stimuli. As Robert McCauley notes, the massive modularity thesis has shown very popular among evolutionary psychologists (McCauley 2011: 52). They see cognitive systems as resulting from adaptive pressures that evolved more or less independently from each other. Because of their different evolutionary history the systems work in different ways. McCauley writes: “Special-purpose modules come equipped with hypotheses (presumably, by way of natural selection) that make sense of the stimuli in each of those modules” (McCauley 2011: 44–45) Since many csr-theorists rank themselves among the evolutionary psychologists (implicitly or explicitly), their theories show a commitment20 to (some form of) massive modularity. I will give some examples. Before laying out his hadd-theory, Justin Barrett makes a distinction between non-reflective and reflective beliefs.21 Reflective beliefs are arrived at through conscious, deliberate contemplation or explicit instruction and non- reflective beliefs come automatically and seem to arise instantaneously. The

20 The csr-theorists I discuss do not argue why the mechanisms they discuss have the features of massively modular systems. Therefore, I will not discuss the arguments for thinking that the human mind is massively modular. For an overview of these arguments and their counterarguments see (Robbins 2009: section 3) and (Carruthers 2003: section 4). 21 Barrett refers to Dan Sperber who makes a similar distinction but uses the terms ‘intuitive beliefs’ and ‘reflective beliefs’ (Barrett 2004: 17 n. 1).

contemporary pragmatismDownloaded from 15 Brill.com09/25/2021(2018) 387-406 09:33:53AM via free access

204221 What Cognitive Science of Religion 401 beliefs produced by the hyperactive agency detection device are of the latter kind (Barrett 2004). The system appears to be modular. First, hadd is specific for a limited domain, namely the detection of agents. Second, its operation is mandatory. Barrett writes: “[B]elieving in God is a natural, almost inevitable consequence of the types of minds we have living in the sort of world we in- habit (…).” (Barrett 2004: 108) Barrett acknowledges that people can be atheists without constantly having to override non-reflective beliefs but adds that this takes being accustomed and being well practiced at such thought (Barrett 2004: 108–09).22 Third, Barrett suggests that impairments in the theory of mind (like autism) could explain why hadd does not always produce its non-reflective beliefs (Barrett 2004: 89). Though his discussion on this point is limited, it does suggest that hadd has characteristic and specific breakdown patterns’. Barrett does not discuss whether hadd has a fixed neural architecture. Finally, limited central accessibility is clearly there in Barrett’s theory. He writes: “I also do not mean to imply that the process through which we arrive at reflective beliefs is a transparent process and easily inspected. Though the consequence is ‘reflective’ belief, the tabulation of nonreflective beliefs and the evaluation of this tabulation may remain largely unavailable to conscious consideration.” (Barrett 2004: 16 emphasis added) Kelemen’s theory also fits well with massive modularity. The teleological bias is limited to the domain of reasoning about why something is the way it is. She suggests that the bias does not go away in adult- hood but goes dormant and can easily resurface. This resembles Barrett’s claim that overriding the bias takes practice and being accustomed. Kelemen does not discuss breakdown patterns but she does argue that the teleological bias’s workings always remains there and cannot be influenced (Kelemen 1999). Gary and Wegner’s moral dyad works in the moral domain (more precisely in the identification of moral agents and moral patients). They suggest its mandatory operation when they write: “We suggest that the dyadic structure of morality compels the human mind to infer the presence of an agent when confronted with an isolated patient (i.e., someone who seems beset by good or evil).” (Gray and Wegner 2010: 8 emphasis added) They do not discuss breakdown patterns or neural architecture but Gray and Wegner’s discussion of ‘curious phenomena’ suggests that they believe that the operations of the moral dyad are not easily accessible. They write: “The notion that the moral dyad—agent and patient—forms the template for both morality and religion explains some curious and unexpected phenomena. It accounts for why people will hold animals

22 Barrett even discusses some strategies atheists can take for getting accustomed and well- practiced (Barrett 2004: 112–15).

contemporary pragmatism 15 (2018) 387-406 Downloaded from Brill.com09/25/2021 09:33:53AM via free access

204221 402 Van Eyghen criminally responsible, for example, why people are willing to inflict pain on the saints, and why belief in God may frequently thrive on suffering.” (Gray and Wegner 2010: 8) Jesse Bering explicitly doubted whether massive modularity holds for his theory. He claimed that domain specificity does not hold for his existential theory of mind. He writes: “The trouble(…) is that (…) these authors [defenders of massive modularity] have not taken into account the fact that supernatural agent concepts deal in a domain different from the one in which they envi- sion their “domainspecific”module of theory of mind to operate. The notion of domain specificity crumbles, and the very idea that theory of mind is modular suffers a serious blow, when one considers that intentional explanations can be evoked by entirely different classes of input: behavior and experience.” (Ber- ing 2002: 16) Concerning csr-theories, the case for why the mechanisms underlying religious belief should be thought of as modular looks somewhat underdeter- mined. One could even claim that the case for why the mechanisms are domain specific seems question begging. For example, Justin Barrett concludes from looking at cases of agency detection that the mechanism underlying religious beliefs only operates in the domain of agency detection. Also the claim for mandatory operation seems hastily. The claim requires more empirical confirmation. It also seems plausible that the cognitive mechanisms require the right environment to produce religious beliefs (see previous section). The specific breakdown patterns and fixed neural architecture are less discussed by csr-theorists. Bering’ remarks show how a research program where the cognitive mechanisms underlying religious belief are considered as more flexible and maybe more as more accesible by conscious intervention is possible. Bering rightly notes that csr commitment to the claim that there is no designated mechanism for religious beliefs but that they are produced by mechanisms involved in non-religious cognition as well flies in the face of domain specificity. Whether central accessibility holds can be doubted as well. Whether agency detection can be altered by conscious intervention remains to be tested. Some evidence, however, already suggests this direction. Michiel Van Elk concluded from experiments that religious believers and paranormal believers were more prone to see face-like patterns in pictures than did non-religious people (Van Elk 2013). The experiments do not exclude that religious or paranormal belief merely reinforces the beliefs produced by agency detection and does not alter its operations. An experiment conducted by Wieteke Nieuwboer, Hein Van Schie and Daniel Wigboldus gives stronger reason to suspect that

contemporary pragmatismDownloaded from 15 Brill.com09/25/2021(2018) 387-406 09:33:53AM via free access

204221 What Cognitive Science of Religion 403 agency detection can be influenced. They primed subjects with God concepts and subjects were more likely to ascribe agency to natural phenomena (Nieuwboer, Van Schie, and Wigboldus 2014). These example feature a particular sort of conscious intervention; namely one where the subject’s cognition is influenced by the context where she lives in or where the influence is indirect. This is, however, conscious intervention nonetheless.

Conclusion

In this paper I have attempted to show that csr can benefit from Deweyan ideas about embodiment and embeddedness of cognition and that insights from Dewey can be used to criticize csr’s close connection to massive modularity. Taking embodiment into account can result in richer, more complete theories. I have discussed how embodiment can be relevant for Justin Barrett’s hadd and raises questions for the attachment theory of religion. Pascal Boyer’s cognitive optimum theory can potentially by enriched as embodiment might shed more light on how intuitive ontological categories emerge. Embodiment already is hinted at by the theories that focus on religious rituals but the body- beyond-the-brain could also play a more important role there. More research is needed to assess the role of embodiment. Theories that connect religious belief to social cooperation, the costly signaling theory and Harvey Whitehouse’s theory on how religious rituals have an effect on social groups already take into account the cultural embeddedness of religious beliefs. Again the role of embeddedness could be bigger and this could benefit the theories. Especially considering religious rituals as ways of interacting with supernatural beings could move the theories forward. Here more research is needed as well. Dewey’s ideas about the unity of experience can be used to criticize massive modularity and csr’s reliance on it. A non-modular view can potentially be a fruitful research program for csr.

Acknowledgments

I thank Matthew Crippen, Rene van Woudenberg, Rik Peels, Gijsbert van den Brink, Lieke Asma and Naomi Kloosterboer for helpful comments on earlier drafts. I also thank two anonymous reviewers for their very useful comments.

contemporary pragmatism 15 (2018) 387-406 Downloaded from Brill.com09/25/2021 09:33:53AM via free access

204221 404 Van Eyghen

Bibliography

Barkow, Jerome, Leda Cosmides, and John Tooby. 1992. The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture (Oxford University Press: Oxford). Barrett, Justin L. 1998. ‘Cognitive Constraints on Hindu Concepts of the Divine’, Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 37: 608–19. Barrett, Justin L. 1999. ‘Theological Correctness: Cognitive Constraint and the Study of Religion’, Method & Theory in the Study of Religion, 11: 325–39. Barrett, Justin L. 2004. Why Would Anyone Believe in God? (Altamira Press: Walnut Creek). Barrett, Justin L. 2008. ‘Why Santa Claus is Not a God’, Journal of Cognition and Culture, 8: 149–61. Barsalou, Lawrence W, Aron K Barbey, W Kyle Simmons, and Ava Santos. 2005. ‘Em- bodiment in Religious Knowledge’, Journal of Cognition and Culture, 5: 14–57. Beilock, Sian. 2015. How the Body Knows its Mind (Atria books: New York). Bering, Jesse. 2002. ‘The Existential Theory of Mind’, Review of General Psychology, 6: 3–24. Bering, Jesse. 2012. The Belief Instinct: The Psychology of Souls, Destiny, and the Meaning of Life (Nicholas Brealey Publishing: London). Bering, J., and D.D.P. Johnson. 2005. ‘“O Lord…You Perceive my Thoughts from Afar”: Recursiveness and the Evolution of Supernatural Agency’, Journal of Cognition and Culture, 5: 118–43. Bering, Jesse, and David F. Bjorklund. 2004. ‘The Natural Emergence of Reasoning About the Afterlife as a Developmental Regularity’, Developmental Psychology, 40: 217–34. Bloom, Paul. 2005. ‘Is God an Accident?’, The Atlantic Monthly, December. Boyer, Pascal. 2000. ‘Functional Origins of Religious Concepts: Ontological and Strate- gic Selection in Evolved Minds’, The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 6: 195–214. Boyer, Pascal. 2002. Religion Explained: The Human Instincts That Fashion Gods, Spirits and Ancestors (Vintage: London). Bulbulia, Joseph, and Richard Sosis. 2011. ‘Signalling Theory and the Evolution of Reli- gious Cooperation’, Religion, 41: 363–88. Carruthers, Peter. 2003. ‘Moderately Massive Modularity’, Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement, 53: 67–89. Carruthers, Peter. 2006. The Architecture of the Mind (Oxford University Press). Cochran, Molly. 2010. The Cambridge Companion to Dewey (Cambridge University Press: New York). Dewey, John. 1916. Essays in Experimental Logic (Dover Publications: New York (NY)).

contemporary pragmatismDownloaded from 15 Brill.com09/25/2021(2018) 387-406 09:33:53AM via free access

204221 What Cognitive Science of Religion 405

Dewey, John. 1928. ‘Body and Mind’ in, The Collected Works of John Dewey: Later Works Volume 3: 1927–192 (Southern Illinois University Press: Carbondale, IL). Dewey, John. 1958. Experience and Nature (Dover Publications: New York). Dewey, John. 1987. The Later Works: 1925–1953 (Southern Illinois University Press). Durkheim, Emile. 1971. The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (The Free Press: New York). Fodor, Jerry A. 2001. The Mind Doesn’t Work That Way: The Scope and Limits of Computa- tional Psychology (MIT press: Cambridge, MA). Fodor, Jerry Alan. 1983. The Modularity of mind : an essay on faculty psychology (Cambridge: MIT press). Geertz, Armin W. 2015. ‘Too Much Mind and not Enough Brain, Body and Culture’, Cul- ture and Research, 4. Geertz, Armin W, and Guðmundur Ingi Markússon. 2010. ‘Religion is Natural, Atheism is Not: On Why Everybody is Both Right and Wrong’, Religion, 40: 152–65. Gervais, Will, and Joseph Henrich. 2010. ‘The Zeus Problem: Why Representational Content Biases Cannot Explain Faith in Gods’, Journal of Cognition and Culture, 10: 383–89. Gervais, Will, Willard; Aijana K., Ara Norenzayan, and Joseph Henrich. 2011. ‘The Cul- tural Transmission of Faith: Why innate intuitions are necessary, but insufficient, to explain religious belief’, Religion, 41: 389–410. Gervais, Will, and A. Norenzayan. 2012. ‘Analytic Thinking Promotes Religious Disbe- lief’, Science, 336. Gray, K., and D.M. Wegner. 2010. ‘Blaming God for Our Pain: Human Suffering and the Divine Mind’, Personality and Social Psychology Review, 14: 7–16. Guthrie, Stewart Elliott. 1993. Faces In the Clouds: A New Theory of Religion (Oxford University Press: New York (N.Y.), Oxford). Henrich, Joseph. 2009. ‘The Evolution of Costly Displays, Cooperation and Religion: Credibility Enhancing Displays and their Implications for Cultural Evolution’, Evolu- tion and Human Behavior, 30: 244–60. Henrich, Joseph, Steven J. Heine, and Ara Norenzayan. 2010. ‘The Weirdest People in the World’, Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 33: 61–83. Johnson, Mark. 2010. ‘Cognitive Science and Dewey’s Theory of Mind, Thought, and Language.’ in Molly Cochran (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Dewey (Cambridge University Press: New York). Kelemen, Deborah. 1999. ‘The Scope of Teleological Thinking in Preschool Children’, Cognition, 70: 241–72. Kirkpatrick, Lee A. 2005. Attachment, Evolution, and the Psychology of Religion (Guil- ford Press: New York, London). Marx, Karl. 1970. Critique of Hegel’s ‘Philosophy of right’ (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge).

contemporary pragmatism 15 (2018) 387-406 Downloaded from Brill.com09/25/2021 09:33:53AM via free access

204221 406 Van Eyghen

McCauley, Robert N. 2011. Why Religion is Natural and Science is Not (Oxford University Press: New York). McCauley, Robert N., and Emma Cohen. 2010. ‘Cognitive Science and the Naturalness of Religion’, Philosophy Compass, 5: 779–92. McCauley, Robert N., and E Thomas Lawson. 2002. Bringing Ritual to Mind: Psychologi- cal Foundations of Cultural Forms (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge). Nieuwboer, Wieteke, Hein T. Van Schie, and Daniël Wigboldus. 2014. ‘Priming with Re- ligion and Supernatural Agency Enhances the Perception of Intentionality in Natu- ral Phenomena’, Journal for the Cognitive Science of Religion, 2. Norenzayan, Ara. 2013. Big Gods: How Religion Transformed Cooperation and Conflict (Princeton University Press: Princeton New Jersey). Robbins, Philip. 2009. ‘Modularity of Mind’, Accessed 06/04/2016. http://plato.stanford .edu/entries/modularity-mind/. Shapiro, Larry. 2007. ‘The Embodied Cognition Research Programme’, Philosophy Com- pass, 2: 338–46. Shariff, A.F., and A. Norenzayan. 2007. ‘God Is Watching You: Priming God Concepts Increases Prosocial Behavior In an Anonymous Economic Game’, Psychological Sci- ence, 18: 803–09. Sperber, Dan. 2001. ‘In Defense of Massive Modularity’, Language, Brain and Cognitive Development: Essays in Honor of Jacques Mehler: 47–58. Van Elk, Michiel. 2013. ‘Paranormal Believers Are More Prone to Illusory Agency Detec- tion Than Skeptics’, Consciousness and Cognition, 22: 1041–46. White, Claire. 2017. ‘What the Cognitive Science of Religion is (and is Not).’ in Aaron W. Hughes (ed.), Theory in a Time of Excess—The Case of the Academic Study of Religion (Equinox Publishing: London). Whitehouse, Harvey, and Jonathan A. Lanman. 2014. ‘The Ties That Bind Us’, Current Anthropology, 55: 674–95. Wilson, Robert A., and Lucia Foglia. 2015. ‘Embodied Cognition’, Accessed 09/03/2016. \url{http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2016/entries/embodied-cognition/}.

contemporary pragmatismDownloaded from 15 Brill.com09/25/2021(2018) 387-406 09:33:53AM via free access

204221