Religious Belief is not Natural. Why cognitive science of religion does not show that religious belief is rational.

It is widely acknowledged that the new emerging discipline cognitive science of religion has a bearing on how to think about the epistemic status of religious beliefs. Both defenders and opponents of the rationality of religious belief have used cognitive theories of religion to argue for their point. This paper will look at the defender-side of the debate. I will discuss an often used argument in favor of the trustworthiness of religious beliefs, stating that cognitive science of religion shows that religious beliefs are natural and natural beliefs ought to be trusted in the absence of counterevidence. This argument received its most influential defense from Justin Barrett in a number of papers, some in collaboration with Kelly James Clark. I will discuss their version of the argument and argue that it fails because the natural beliefs discovered by cognitive scientists of religion are not the religious beliefs of the major world religions. A survey of the evidence from cognitive science of religion will show that cognitive science does show that other beliefs come natural and that these can thus be deemed trustworthy in the absence of counterevidence. These beliefs are teleological beliefs, afterlife beliefs and animistic theistic beliefs

Why Cognitive Science of Religion Matters for Christian Theology and Philosophy : An Overview

Cognitive science of religion (CSR) raises a number of issues that are of interest to theologians and philosophers of religion. The latter have focused primarily on the epistemological implications of CSR, that is, whether science shows religious belief to be irrational or unjustified. Another broad question is whether CSR is compatible with theism and Christian theology. Theological doctrines, such as Calvin’s views about sensus divinitatis and the noetic effects of sin, play an important part in these conversations. Less attention has been directed to how CSR can function as a source for theological and philosophical inquiry. So far, CSR has been invoked in discussions on the natural knowledge of God, classical theism and divine hiddenness. This article provides an overview of the recent philosophical and theological engagements with CSR

Wild systems theory as a 21st century coherence framework for cognitive science

The present paper examines the historical choice points the led twentieth-century cognitive science to its current commitment to correspondence approaches to reality and truth. Such a “correspondence”-driven approach to reality and truth stands in contrast to coherence-driven approaches, which were prominent in the 1800s and early 1900s. Coherence approaches refused to begin the conversation regarding reality with the assumption that the important thing about it was its independence of observers because the reality-observer split inherent in correspondence-driven views often led to objective-subjective divides, which, within scientific theorizing, tended to render the latter causally unnecessary and in need of ontological justification. The present paper fleshes out the differences between coherence- and correspondence-driven approaches to reality and truth, proposes an explanation of why cognitive science came to favor correspondence approaches, describes problems that have arisen in cognitive science because of its commitment to correspondence theorizing, and proposes an alternative framework (i.e., Wild Systems Theory— WST) that is inspired by a coherence approach to reality and truth, yet is entirely consistent with science

Dynamic Animations of Journal Maps: Indicators of Structural Changes and Interdisciplinary Developments

The dynamic analysis of structural change in the organization of the sciences requires methodologically the integration of multivariate and time-series analysis. Structural change--e.g., interdisciplinary development--is often an objective of government interventions. Recent developments in multi-dimensional scaling (MDS) enable us to distinguish the stress originating in each time-slice from the stress originating from the sequencing of time-slices, and thus to locally optimize the trade-offs between these two sources of variance in the animation. Furthermore, visualization programs like Pajek and Visone allow us to show not only the positions of the nodes, but also their relational attributes like betweenness centrality. Betweenness centrality in the vector space can be considered as an indicator of interdisciplinarity. Using this indicator, the dynamics of the citation impact environments of the journals Cognitive Science, Social Networks, and Nanotechnology are animated and assessed in terms of interdisciplinarity among the disciplines involved

On palimpsests in neural memory: an information theory viewpoint

The finite capacity of neural memory and the reconsolidation phenomenon suggest it is important to be able to update stored information as in a palimpsest, where new information overwrites old information. Moreover, changing information in memory is metabolically costly. In this paper, we suggest that information-theoretic approaches may inform the fundamental limits in constructing such a memory system. In particular, we define malleable coding, that considers not only representation length but also ease of representation update, thereby encouraging some form of recycling to convert an old codeword into a new one. Malleability cost is the difficulty of synchronizing compressed versions, and malleable codes are of particular interest when representing information and modifying the representation are both expensive. We examine the tradeoff between compression efficiency and malleability cost, under a malleability metric defined with respect to a string edit distance. This introduces a metric topology to the compressed domain. We characterize the exact set of achievable rates and malleability as the solution of a subgraph isomorphism problem. This is all done within the optimization approach to biology framework.Accepted manuscrip

Representational Kinds

Many debates in philosophy focus on whether folk or scientific psychological notions pick out cognitive natural kinds. Examples include memory, emotions and concepts. A potentially interesting type of kind is: kinds of mental representations (as opposed, for example, to kinds of psychological faculties). In this chapter we outline a proposal for a theory of representational kinds in cognitive science. We argue that the explanatory role of representational kinds in scientific theories, in conjunction with a mainstream approach to explanation in cognitive science, suggest that representational kinds are multi-level. This is to say that representational kinds’ properties cluster at different levels of explanation and allow for intra- and inter-level projections