Robert N Mccauley
Biographic Data
| ID | 386608 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Robert N Mccauley |
| GIVEN NAMES | Robert N |
| FAMILY NAME | Mccauley |
| SIGNATURE | MCCAULEY R N |
| AFFILIATIONS | Emory University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-6384-3887 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 37 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 32 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 37 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1978 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Whence and Whither CSR: Expanding the conversation
The cognitive science of religion: Past, present, and possible futures
In defense of thin descriptions: Reflections on some methodological themes in Harvey Whitehouse’s The Ritual Animal
Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s)
Darwinian Bases of Religious Meaning: Interactionism, General Interpretive Theories, and 6E Cognitive Science
Interactionism holds that explanatory and interpretive projects are mutually enriching. If so, then the evolutionary and cognitive science of religions’ explanatory theories should aid interpretive projects concerning religious meaning. Although interpretive accounts typically focus on the local and the particular, interpreters over the past century have construed Freud and Marx as offering general interpretive theories. So, precedent for general…
Diverse evolutionary strategies for explaining features of religions
Gods in Disorder
Commentators’ concerns occasion clarifications of positions in Hearing Voices and Other Matters of the Mind. Philosophical naturalism holds that philosophers needlessly handicap their projects if they ignore the sciences. Ecumenical Naturalism maintains that similar forms of cognition and experience associated with religiosity and mental disorders may submit to similar scientific explanations. The by-product theory, which looks to the operations …
Similarities of experiential features associated with religiosity and mental disorders: Exploring cognitive resources
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?
Theory of Mind, Religiosity, and Autistic Spectrum Disorder: A Review of Empirical Evidence Bearing on Three Hypotheses
The cognitive science of religions’ By-Product Theory contends that much religious thought and behavior can be explained in terms of the cultural activation of maturationally natural cognitive systems. Those systems address fundamental problems of human survival, encompassing such capacities as hazard precautions, agency detection, language processing, and theory of mind. Across cultures they typically arise effortlessly and unconsciously during …
Why science is exceptional and religion is not: A response to commentators on Why Religion Is Natural and Science Is Not
Functions, mechanisms, and contexts: Comments on “Cognitive resource depletion in religious interactions”
A Cognitive Science of Religion Will Be Difficult, Expensive, Complicated, Radically Counter-Intuitive, and Possible: A Response to Martin and Wiebe
Journal Article A Cognitive Science of Religion Will Be Difficult, Expensive, Complicated, Radically Counter-Intuitive, and Possible: A Response to Martin and Wiebe Get access Robert N. McCauley Robert N. McCauley * *Robert N. McCauley, Center for Mind, Brain, and Culture, Psychology and Interdisciplinary Sciences Building, 36 Eagle Row Emory University, Atlanta, GA 30322, USA. E-mail: [email protected]. Search for other works by this author on: …
Cognitive Science and the Naturalness of Religion
Cognitive approaches to religious phenomena have attracted considerable interdisciplinary attention since their emergence a couple of decades ago. Proponents offer explanatory accounts of the content and transmission of religious thought and behavior in terms of underlying cognition. A central claim is that the cross-cultural recurrence and historical persistence of religion is attributable to the cognitive naturalness of religious ideas, i.e., a…
The impact of successful scientific theorizing on conceptualizing religion
Empirically successful scientific theories are intellectual hurricanes. They flood lowlands set aside for worries about definitions. They carry away philosophical reflections that are less dense than the accumulated scientific findings that give these storms their strength, and they fundamentally reshape the conceptual landscape. The history of scholarship reveals that once an empirically corroborated scientific theory explains and predicts pheno…
Introduction: New Frontiers in the Cognitive Science of Religion
The papers in this issue arose from a conference on the Psychological and Cognitive Foundations of Religiosity that took place at Emory University (Atlanta, Georgia) in August, 2003.1 This conference brought together scholars from ten nations and six disciplines (psychology, anthropology, religious studies, biology, philosophy, and cognitive science) to explore new developments at the interface of the cognitive sciences and religion. All four of …
Is Religion a Rube Goldberg Device? Or Oh, What a Difference a Theory Makes
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…
Explanatory Pluralism and Heuristic Identity Theory
Explanatory pluralism holds that the sorts of comprehensive theoretical and ontological economies that microreductionists and New Wave reductionists envision and antireductionists fear offer misleading views of both scientific practice and scientific progress. Both advocates and foes of employing reductionist strategies at the interface of psychology and neuroscience have overplayed the alleged economies that interlevel connections (including ide…
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…
Overcoming Barriers To a Cognitive Psychology of Religion
The aims of this paper are to identify three barriers to the development of cognitive approaches to the study of religion and to suggest how each might be circumvented. The first of these barriers is methodological and lurks amid two issues that, historically, have dominated anthropologists' reflections on the relationship of their discipline to psychology. The older of the two can be characterized as the "psychic unity" controversy (see Shore 19…
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…
Associative Engines: Connectionism, Concepts and Representational Change
Journal Article Book Reviews Get access Associative Engines: Connectionism, Concepts and Representational Change. By Andy Clark. (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1993. Pp. xiii + 252. Price £24.95.) Robert N. McCauley Robert N. McCauley Emory University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Philosophical Quarterly, Volume 45, Issue 179, April 1995, Pages 241–243, https://doi.org/10.2307/2220426 Published: 01 Ap…
Rethinking Religion: Connecting Cognition and Culture
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…
Intertheoretic Relations and the Future of Psychology
In the course of defending both a unified model of intertheoretic relations in science and scientific realism, Paul Churchland has attempted to reinvigorate eliminative materialism. Churchland's eliminativism operates on three claims: (1) that some intertheoretic contexts involve incommensurable theories, (2) that such contexts invariably require the elimination of one theory or the other, and (3) that the relation of psychology and neuroscience …
Profiling States for Foreign Policy Analysis
Cognitive Science and the Naturalness of Religion
Cognitive approaches to religious phenomena have attracted considerable interdisciplinary attention since their emergence a couple of decades ago. Proponents offer explanatory accounts of the content and transmission of religious thought and behavior in terms of underlying cognition. A central claim is that the cross-cultural recurrence and historical persistence of religion is attributable to the cognitive naturalness of religious ideas, i.e., a…
Introduction: New Frontiers in the Cognitive Science of Religion
The papers in this issue arose from a conference on the Psychological and Cognitive Foundations of Religiosity that took place at Emory University (Atlanta, Georgia) in August, 2003.1 This conference brought together scholars from ten nations and six disciplines (psychology, anthropology, religious studies, biology, philosophy, and cognitive science) to explore new developments at the interface of the cognitive sciences and religion. All four of …
Functionalism Reconsidered
Interactionism and the Non-Obviousness of Scientific Theories: A Response To Michael P. Levine
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
Problem Solving in Science and the Competence Approach to Theorizing in Linguistics
Overcoming Barriers To a Cognitive Psychology of Religion
The aims of this paper are to identify three barriers to the development of cognitive approaches to the study of religion and to suggest how each might be circumvented. The first of these barriers is methodological and lurks amid two issues that, historically, have dominated anthropologists' reflections on the relationship of their discipline to psychology. The older of the two can be characterized as the "psychic unity" controversy (see Shore 19…
The not so happy story of the marriage of linguistics and psychology or why linguistics has discouraged psychology's recent advances
Profiling States for Foreign Policy Analysis
A Compendium of IMF Troubles: Turkey, Portugal, Peru, Egypt
My Factor's Better Than Your Factor: Methodological Orthodoxy Versus Analytic Progress
Hypothetical Identities and Ontological Economizing: Comments on Causey's Program for the Unity of Science
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Functionalism Reconsidered
Intertheoretic Relations and the Future of Psychology
In the course of defending both a unified model of intertheoretic relations in science and scientific realism, Paul Churchland has attempted to reinvigorate eliminative materialism. Churchland's eliminativism operates on three claims: (1) that some intertheoretic contexts involve incommensurable theories, (2) that such contexts invariably require the elimination of one theory or the other, and (3) that the relation of psychology and neuroscience …
Science as Cognitive Process: Toward an Empirical Philosophy of Science . Robert A. Rubinstein , Charles D. Laughlin, Jr. , John McManus
Problem Solving in Science and the Competence Approach to Theorizing in Linguistics
The not so happy story of the marriage of linguistics and psychology or why linguistics has discouraged psychology's recent advances
Rethinking Religion: Connecting Cognition and Culture
Why the Blind Can′t Lead the Blind: Dennett on the Blind Spot, Blindsight, and Sensory Qualia
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
Associative Engines: Connectionism, Concepts and Representational Change
Journal Article Book Reviews Get access Associative Engines: Connectionism, Concepts and Representational Change. By Andy Clark. (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1993. Pp. xiii + 252. Price £24.95.) Robert N. McCauley Robert N. McCauley Emory University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Philosophical Quarterly, Volume 45, Issue 179, April 1995, Pages 241–243, https://doi.org/10.2307/2220426 Published: 01 Ap…
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…
Interactionism and the Non-Obviousness of Scientific Theories: A Response To Michael P. Levine
Overcoming Barriers To a Cognitive Psychology of Religion
The aims of this paper are to identify three barriers to the development of cognitive approaches to the study of religion and to suggest how each might be circumvented. The first of these barriers is methodological and lurks amid two issues that, historically, have dominated anthropologists' reflections on the relationship of their discipline to psychology. The older of the two can be characterized as the "psychic unity" controversy (see Shore 19…
Explanatory Pluralism and Heuristic Identity Theory
Explanatory pluralism holds that the sorts of comprehensive theoretical and ontological economies that microreductionists and New Wave reductionists envision and antireductionists fear offer misleading views of both scientific practice and scientific progress. Both advocates and foes of employing reductionist strategies at the interface of psychology and neuroscience have overplayed the alleged economies that interlevel connections (including ide…
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…
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…
Is Religion a Rube Goldberg Device? Or Oh, What a Difference a Theory Makes
Introduction: New Frontiers in the Cognitive Science of Religion
The papers in this issue arose from a conference on the Psychological and Cognitive Foundations of Religiosity that took place at Emory University (Atlanta, Georgia) in August, 2003.1 This conference brought together scholars from ten nations and six disciplines (psychology, anthropology, religious studies, biology, philosophy, and cognitive science) to explore new developments at the interface of the cognitive sciences and religion. All four of …
The impact of successful scientific theorizing on conceptualizing religion
Empirically successful scientific theories are intellectual hurricanes. They flood lowlands set aside for worries about definitions. They carry away philosophical reflections that are less dense than the accumulated scientific findings that give these storms their strength, and they fundamentally reshape the conceptual landscape. The history of scholarship reveals that once an empirically corroborated scientific theory explains and predicts pheno…
Cognitive Science and the Naturalness of Religion
Cognitive approaches to religious phenomena have attracted considerable interdisciplinary attention since their emergence a couple of decades ago. Proponents offer explanatory accounts of the content and transmission of religious thought and behavior in terms of underlying cognition. A central claim is that the cross-cultural recurrence and historical persistence of religion is attributable to the cognitive naturalness of religious ideas, i.e., a…
Psychology (26 works) · Sociology (25 works) · Epistemology (21 works) · Philosophy (21 works) · Cognition (14 works) · Computer Science (13 works) · Evolutionary Game Theory and Cooperation (12 works) · Religion, Spirituality, and Psychology (12 works) · Study and Philosophy of Religion (12 works) · Religion and Society Interactions (11 works)