Kognition og kultur: Boyer versus Wittgenstein

Resumé

Cognitive science typically insists on procuring causal explanations for psychological activity on a pre-cultural level. In this article it is claimed that the price for doing so may be too high and that it escapes philosophical justification in the first place. A more specific criticism is directed against what thus seems to be an ignorant notion of culture in Religion Explained by Pascal Boyer. Drawing on Ludwig Wittgenstein and Meredith Williams, who is a lucid reader of his work, the psychological attempt to explain feelings and memories on the grounds of innate cognitive capacities is found to be profoundly misleading. The question is how to understand, on the one hand, human language and, on the other, the possible scope of scientific explanation. Arguing for an irreducible level of social reality, this article focuses on the limitations of cognitive science, while also bringing out the aporia caused by an epistemological trap of self-referentiality.