Kognition og betydning

Resumé

Over the past decade, the cognitive study of religion has gained momentum as a major theoretical breakthrough. However, most of its major contributors, often referred to as ‘cognitive hardliners’, have so far largely disregarded issues that have otherwise been of central concern to scholars in the study of religion, namely those concerning the cultural levels of e.g. meaning and semantics. Thus the cognitive study of religion appears to be ‘culture-blind’. The analysis presented here explains why this has been so and what could be done to remedy that situation and thus perhaps make the advances provided by the cognitive study of religion more attractive to scholars outside that paradigm. In the initial phase, cognitive theorists of religion have disregarded the cultural and social aspects of religion and religious traditions in pursuit of universals at the mental, psychological and cognitive levels that play a formative, causal role in the production of religious representations. The cultural, symbolic, linguistic etc. levels have not been considered relevant and issues concerning e.g. symbols, language, meaning and semantics were excluded on the basis of the nature of the explanatory frameworks employed. Now it seems that there may be other theories and methods available that permit the re-inclusion of matters cultural, symbolic etc. and that, contrary to the ‘hardliner’ opinion, the development of human cognition, individually as well as collectively, is not solely a matter of what goes on in brains but also what goes on between brains. This contribution reviews the state of the ‘art’ from a perspective of the philosophy of language and discusses some of the proposals to that effect by e.g. Michael Tomasello, Merlin Donald, Edwin Hutchins and Andy Clark.