Toward an Embodied Cognitive Science of Religion: A Roundtable Discussion

A forthcoming issue of Religion, Brain, and Behavior presents a target article and eleven commentaries exploring the potential contributions, and possible limitations, of integrating a 4E model of cognition (embodied, embedded, enacted, extended) into CSR. The target article argues that the ‘standard model’ of CSR is in need of revision. Key concepts developed in the seminal work in CSR and employed in much of contemporary research in the field, are grounded in a model of cognition that is subject to mounting criticism (i.e. cognitivism/computationalism). The most significant of these critiques, and the most promising alternatives, come from 4E approaches. The article focuses on enactive cognition and argues that reconstructing CSR along the lines of enactivism will put CSR on firmer scientific grounding and may resolve long standing debates within the field. Within the enactive approach, cognition, or the mind, is not built for the purpose of making representations that correspond to a real world, rather cognition is built for action. More precisely, cognition is part of a process involving an organism’s activity in an environment and cannot be neatly distinguished from that activity without distortion. The place of religion in such an account has yet to be fully worked out, and this represents an exciting promise of this approach. What would a cognitive science of religion look like that had taken this approach from the start? One important question the panel will take up is whether and to what extent a shift from the metaphor of the mind as a computing machine to one grounded in continuity between mind and life represents a paradigm shift in the study of religious cognition. Beginning with an in-depth critique of a key component of the cognitivist/computationalist model– representationalism– the paper argues that a non-representational enactive cognitive model fits better with the evolutionary commitments of CSR. It also compares the relative merits of enactivism and predictive processing, concluding that despite its many advantages, predictive processing is still committed to a representational model of cognition and thus suffers from some of the drawbacks of that model. To make its case, the article presents a detailed case study in an enactive revisioning of CSR: reconstructing agency detection. This foundational concept has come under scrutiny due to lack of empirical support, raising concerns that it may need to be abandoned. The article argues that the experimental results proposed to undermine agency-detection actually stem from the problematic cognitivist assumptions implicit in the methodology of the relevant studies. Rather than abandon agency-detection, enactivism enables a recasting of the concept as ‘embodied agency-attunement.’ This revised version of agency detection, it is argued, is more consistent with an evolutionary understanding of cognition, and is supported by recent neuroscientific evidence of the multifaceted role of the amygdala. Not only does an enactivist model of cognition create a better fit between CSR models of religion and cognitive evolution, it also highlights the essential contribution of cultural studies to the cognitive study of religion (as well as the contribution of cognitive science to any cultural study). Enactivism entails embodiment and embeddedness in its model of cognition (and is also compatible with extended cognition). It emphasizes the constitutive role of the environment in cognitive processes. The physical and social environment in which agents are embedded is more than just the space within which cognition takes place or the source of its content. There is a dynamic coupling between a cognitive agent and its environment, leading to a continuous co-specification of the two. Therefore, any account of cognition or culture requires addressing this dynamic entanglement. The article presents T.M. Luhrmann’s comparative phenomenology approach to god-beliefs as an exercise in an enactive/embedded cognitive study of religion. Despite the impressive work that CSR has done over the past 30 years, the field has been constrained by being, perhaps unintentionally, wed to computational models of the mind. 4E approaches, and especially enactive cognition, bring cognitive science into meaningful partnership with cultural, historical, and phenomenological studies of religion. This offers a path toward reintegrating these disciplines with psychology and biology and thus to developing a more comprehensive cognitive study of religion. This roundtable panel will bring together two scholars who employ 4E cognition in their study of religion (and who contributed to the RBB symposium), with two scholars who take a more cultural studies approach (but who have also addressed cognitive models of religion in their work) into conversation with the author. However, while a presentation on the target article will serve as a jumping off point for the panel, the larger goal is to discuss the potential contributions, as well as the potential limitations, of integrating 4E cognition into the study of religion.