E Thomas Lawson
Biographic Data
| ID | 160419 |
|---|---|
| NAME | E Thomas Lawson |
| GIVEN NAMES | E Thomas |
| FAMILY NAME | Lawson |
| SIGNATURE | LAWSON E T |
| AFFILIATIONS | Western Michigan University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-2272-1880 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 39 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 34 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 39 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1973 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Whence and Whither CSR: Expanding the conversation
The cognitive science of religion: Past, present, and possible futures
Missing level of analysis
The Historical Genesis of Cognitive Science of Religion
This chapter focuses on the relationship between comparative religion and the cognitive and evolutionary sciences culminating in the development of the cognitive science of religion. It discusses what problems comparative religion was trying to solve and how the cognitive science of religion addressed those problems thorough theoretical and experimental work. In particular this chapter describes and analyzes the problems that comparative religion…
Religion
Naturalism and Protectionism in the Study of Religions
How should we study religion? Must we be religious ourselves to truly understand it? Do we study religion to advance our knowledge, or should the study of religions help to reintroduce the sacred into our increasingly secularized world?
Philosophical, Neurological, and Sociological Perspectives on Religion
A review essay of three recent publications that focus in different ways on the evolutionary basis of religion. Asma (2018) focuses on the ways in which “religion” energizes the emotional needs of humans. Torrey (2017) pays close attention to the evolutionary stages of brain development that are necessary for the emergence of religious concepts and the attitudes that accompany them. Finally, Turner et al. (2017) develop a complex theory of diffe…
Rethinking Conventional Wisdom: Ecological Effects on Potential Danger Preoccupation Salience
Are Motor Collective Rituals as Rigid as They Seem? A Test Case of a Zulu Wedding Dance
Rituals are common in religion, sports, culture and specific life-stages (childhood, parenthood, etc.), raising the question of why being engaged in such activity, what could be its benefit, and how rigid they are. Here we analyzed 19 episodes of a Zulu Umsindo dance performed by 10 women. This ritual comprised a common act, performed in all dance episodes of all women, personal acts performed consistently by one woman but not by the others, and …
Evoked culture, ritualization and religious rituals
This study presents an attempt to integrate two theories about ritual: the theory that McCauley and Lawson developed in Bringing Ritual to Mind; Psychological Foundations of Cultural Forms and the theory that Boyer and Lienard presented in a target article in Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 'Why ritualized behavior in humans? Precaution systems and action‐parsing in developmental, pathological and cultural rituals' and in another article published…
Minds and Gods: The Cognitive Foundations of Religion
This book provides an introduction to the cognitive science of religion, a new discipline of study that explains the origins and persistence of religious ideas and behavior on the basis of evolved mental structures and functions of the human brain. Belief in gods and the social formation of religion have their genesis in biology — in powerful, often hidden, processes of cognition that all humans share. Arguing that we cannot understand what we th…
Religion As a Human Capacity: A Festschrift in Honor of E. Thomas Lawson
Religion as a human capacity: A festschrift in honor of E. Thomas Lawson
Prepared in honor of E. Thomas Lawson, the essays in Religion as a Human Capacity represent diverse points of view in the study of religion today. Part I, Theoretical Studies, offers a broad range of cognitivist theoretical explorations, while Part II, Studies in Religious Behavior, presents cutting-edge applications of cognitive and other contemporary theories to religious data. This volume celebrates Lawson's critical contributions to cognitive…
Bringing Ritual to Mind: Psychological Foundations of Cultural Forms
Bringing Ritual to Mind explores the cognitive and psychological foundations of religious ritual systems. Participants must recall their rituals well enough to ensure a sense of continuity across performances, and those rituals must motivate them to transmit and re-perform them. Most religious rituals the world over exploit either high performance frequency or extraordinary emotional stimulation (but not both) to enhance their recollection (the a…
Bringing Ritual to Mind: Psychological Foundations of Cultural Forms
Bringing Ritual to Mind explores the cognitive and psychological foundations of religious ritual systems. Participants must recall their rituals well enough to ensure a sense of continuity across performances, and those rituals must motivate them to transmit and re-perform them. Most religious rituals the world over exploit either high performance frequency or extraordinary emotional stimulation (but not both) to enhance their recollection; the a…
Religion in Mind: Cognitive Perspectives on Religious Belief, Ritual, and Experience
Religion in Mind is a 2001 text which summarizes and extends the advances in the cognitive study of religion throughout the 1990s. It uses empirical research from psychology and anthropology to illuminate various components of religious belief, ritual, and experience. The book examines cognitive dimensions of religion within a naturalistic view of culture, while respecting the phenomenology of religion and drawing together teachers of religion, p…
Ritual Intuitions: Cognitive Contributions to Judgments of Ritual Efficacy
Lawson and McCauley (1990) have argued that non-cultural regularities in how actions are conceptualized inform and constrain participants' understandings of religious rituals. This theory of ritual competence generates three predictions: 1) People with little or no knowledge of any given ritual system will have intuitions about the potential effectiveness of a ritual given minimal information about the structure of the ritual. 2) The representati…
Towards a Cognitive Science of Religion
L'A. presente une theorie des religions qui veut remplacer les approches sociologique et hermeneutique anterieures par une nouvelle approche explicative. De meme que les linguistes concoivent le langage comme la capacite a parler, l'A. envisage la religion comme une ressource cognitive. Il etudie l'importance de la science cognitive pour l'etude des idees et des pratiques religieuses de l'humanite en s'interessant a trois questions : la science c…
Interactionism and the Non-Obviousness of Scientific Theories: A Response To Michael P. Levine
Who owns 'culture'?1
No one owns the concept 'culture'. Anthropology's long-standing proprietary claim on the concept rests on three sorts of contentions - none of which are convincing. Anthropology's overwhelmingly interpretive approaches to cultural materials have led to a preoccupation with the details of cultural materials at the expense of formulating explanatory theories. This has, among other things, rendered fieldwork experience sufficient for professional cr…
Theory and the new comparativism, old and new
From infancy human beings are by necessity engaged in the act of compar ison This fact is not only a matter of common sense but of sophisticated theoretical work Psychologists engaged in research on cognitive structure and development are increasingly discovering the very complex cognitive resources which human beings possess from the earliest moments of life For example, not only does the very young child have the cognitive equipment which enabl…
The Deer Goddess of Ancient Siberia. A Study in the Ecology of Belief
Rethinking Religion: Connecting Cognition and Culture
Cognitive categories, cultural forms and ritual structures
The recognition that human beings learn more than they are taught, already prefigured quite early in the Platonic literature and much later in Kant's notion of the synthetic a priori, continues to intrigue scholars concerned with cognitive matters, especially those with a stake in the possible impact of the cognitive sciences on culture theory. In fact, much to the dismay of empiricists, it has breathed new life into the rationalist tradition. Po…
Rethinking Religion: Connecting Cognition and Culture
Ritual Intuitions: Cognitive Contributions to Judgments of Ritual Efficacy
Lawson and McCauley (1990) have argued that non-cultural regularities in how actions are conceptualized inform and constrain participants' understandings of religious rituals. This theory of ritual competence generates three predictions: 1) People with little or no knowledge of any given ritual system will have intuitions about the potential effectiveness of a ritual given minimal information about the structure of the ritual. 2) The representati…
Who owns 'culture'?1
No one owns the concept 'culture'. Anthropology's long-standing proprietary claim on the concept rests on three sorts of contentions - none of which are convincing. Anthropology's overwhelmingly interpretive approaches to cultural materials have led to a preoccupation with the details of cultural materials at the expense of formulating explanatory theories. This has, among other things, rendered fieldwork experience sufficient for professional cr…
Are Motor Collective Rituals as Rigid as They Seem? A Test Case of a Zulu Wedding Dance
Rituals are common in religion, sports, culture and specific life-stages (childhood, parenthood, etc.), raising the question of why being engaged in such activity, what could be its benefit, and how rigid they are. Here we analyzed 19 episodes of a Zulu Umsindo dance performed by 10 women. This ritual comprised a common act, performed in all dance episodes of all women, personal acts performed consistently by one woman but not by the others, and …
Functionalism Reconsidered
Evoked culture, ritualization and religious rituals
This study presents an attempt to integrate two theories about ritual: the theory that McCauley and Lawson developed in Bringing Ritual to Mind; Psychological Foundations of Cultural Forms and the theory that Boyer and Lienard presented in a target article in Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 'Why ritualized behavior in humans? Precaution systems and action‐parsing in developmental, pathological and cultural rituals' and in another article published…
Towards a Cognitive Science of Religion
L'A. presente une theorie des religions qui veut remplacer les approches sociologique et hermeneutique anterieures par une nouvelle approche explicative. De meme que les linguistes concoivent le langage comme la capacite a parler, l'A. envisage la religion comme une ressource cognitive. Il etudie l'importance de la science cognitive pour l'etude des idees et des pratiques religieuses de l'humanite en s'interessant a trois questions : la science c…
Interactionism and the Non-Obviousness of Scientific Theories: A Response To Michael P. Levine
Theory and the new comparativism, old and new
From infancy human beings are by necessity engaged in the act of compar ison This fact is not only a matter of common sense but of sophisticated theoretical work Psychologists engaged in research on cognitive structure and development are increasingly discovering the very complex cognitive resources which human beings possess from the earliest moments of life For example, not only does the very young child have the cognitive equipment which enabl…
Crisis of Conscience, Riddle of Identity: Making Space for a Cognitive Approach to Religious Phenomena
E. Thomas Lawson, Robert N. McCauley; Crisis of Conscience, Riddle of Identity: Making Space for a Cognitive Approach to Religious Phenomena, Journal of th
Academic Study of Religion
Journal Article ACADEMIC STUDY OF RELIGION Get access The Study of Religion in Colleges and Universities. Edited by PAUL RAMSEY and JOHN F. WILSON. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970. ix+353 pages. $10. E.THOMAS LAWSON E.THOMAS LAWSON Western Michigan University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Volume XLI, Issue 2, June 1973, Pages 298–302, https://doi.o…
Ritual as language
Methodology: Academic Study of Religion
METHODOLOGY: ACADEMIC STUDY OF RELIGION Get access Methodological Issues in Religious Studies. Edited by ROBERT D. BAIRD. Chico, CA: New Horizon Press, 1975. vi+129 pages. $4.50. L.C. No. 75-44170. E. THOMAS LAWSON E. THOMAS LAWSON Western Michigan University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Volume XLV, Issue 3, September 1977, Pages 400-b–401, https://doi.org/10…
The Explanation of Myth and Myth as Explanation
The purpose of this paper is to evaluate critically aspects of the new intellectualist tradition insofar as this tradition treats of myth as a kind of explanation. In the first section I describe four versions of myth as explanation (Horton, Winch, Lukes and Jarvie). All four versions take myths at their face value and then, by various means, attempt to show how such explanations are to be understood. Concepts such as idiom, context, situation, p…
Book Notices
Journal Article Book Notices Get access Beyond the Primitive: the Religions of Nonliterate Peoples. By Sam D Gill Prentice-Hall, 1982. 120pages. $7.95. E. Thomas Lawson E. Thomas Lawson Western Michigan University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Volume LI, Issue 3, September 1983, Pages 531-a–531, https://doi.org/10.1093/jaarel/LI.3.531-a Published: 01 September…
Functionalism Reconsidered
The Three Sarahs: Documents of Antebellum Black College Women
Journal Article The Three Sarahs: Documents of Antebellum Black College Women. By Ellen NicKenzie Lawson and Marlene D. Merrill. (Lewiston, N.Y.: Mellen, 1984. xxiii + 335 pp. Illustrations and notes. $59.95.) Get access Lois A. Boyd Lois A. Boyd Trinity University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 73, Issue 1, June 1986, Pages 201–202, https://doi.org/10.2307/1903659 Publ…
Explaining religion: A symposium
The Study of Religion in Its Social-Scientific Context: A Perspective On the 1989 Warsaw Conference On Methodology
Dispatches From the Methodological Wars
Religious Transformations and Socio-Political Change
Impasse and Resolution: A Critique of the Study of Religion. Hans Penner
Rethinking Religion: Connecting Cognition and Culture
Cognitive categories, cultural forms and ritual structures
The recognition that human beings learn more than they are taught, already prefigured quite early in the Platonic literature and much later in Kant's notion of the synthetic a priori, continues to intrigue scholars concerned with cognitive matters, especially those with a stake in the possible impact of the cognitive sciences on culture theory. In fact, much to the dismay of empiricists, it has breathed new life into the rationalist tradition. Po…
Rethinking Religion: Connecting Cognition and Culture
Crisis of Conscience, Riddle of Identity: Making Space for a Cognitive Approach to Religious Phenomena
E. Thomas Lawson, Robert N. McCauley; Crisis of Conscience, Riddle of Identity: Making Space for a Cognitive Approach to Religious Phenomena, Journal of th
The Essence of Phenomenology and Its Meaning for the Scientific Study of Religion. Thomas Ryba
The Deer Goddess of Ancient Siberia. A Study in the Ecology of Belief
Who owns 'culture'?1
No one owns the concept 'culture'. Anthropology's long-standing proprietary claim on the concept rests on three sorts of contentions - none of which are convincing. Anthropology's overwhelmingly interpretive approaches to cultural materials have led to a preoccupation with the details of cultural materials at the expense of formulating explanatory theories. This has, among other things, rendered fieldwork experience sufficient for professional cr…
Theory and the new comparativism, old and new
From infancy human beings are by necessity engaged in the act of compar ison This fact is not only a matter of common sense but of sophisticated theoretical work Psychologists engaged in research on cognitive structure and development are increasingly discovering the very complex cognitive resources which human beings possess from the earliest moments of life For example, not only does the very young child have the cognitive equipment which enabl…
Interactionism and the Non-Obviousness of Scientific Theories: A Response To Michael P. Levine
Towards a Cognitive Science of Religion
L'A. presente une theorie des religions qui veut remplacer les approches sociologique et hermeneutique anterieures par une nouvelle approche explicative. De meme que les linguistes concoivent le langage comme la capacite a parler, l'A. envisage la religion comme une ressource cognitive. Il etudie l'importance de la science cognitive pour l'etude des idees et des pratiques religieuses de l'humanite en s'interessant a trois questions : la science c…
Religion in Mind: Cognitive Perspectives on Religious Belief, Ritual, and Experience
Religion in Mind is a 2001 text which summarizes and extends the advances in the cognitive study of religion throughout the 1990s. It uses empirical research from psychology and anthropology to illuminate various components of religious belief, ritual, and experience. The book examines cognitive dimensions of religion within a naturalistic view of culture, while respecting the phenomenology of religion and drawing together teachers of religion, p…
Ritual Intuitions: Cognitive Contributions to Judgments of Ritual Efficacy
Lawson and McCauley (1990) have argued that non-cultural regularities in how actions are conceptualized inform and constrain participants' understandings of religious rituals. This theory of ritual competence generates three predictions: 1) People with little or no knowledge of any given ritual system will have intuitions about the potential effectiveness of a ritual given minimal information about the structure of the ritual. 2) The representati…
Bringing Ritual to Mind: Psychological Foundations of Cultural Forms
Bringing Ritual to Mind explores the cognitive and psychological foundations of religious ritual systems. Participants must recall their rituals well enough to ensure a sense of continuity across performances, and those rituals must motivate them to transmit and re-perform them. Most religious rituals the world over exploit either high performance frequency or extraordinary emotional stimulation (but not both) to enhance their recollection (the a…
Sociology (32 works) · Philosophy (29 works) · Epistemology (22 works) · Psychology (18 works) · Religion and Society Interactions (16 works) · Study and Philosophy of Religion (16 works) · Computer Science (14 works) · Cognition (13 works) · Religious studies (13 works) · Political science (11 works)