Pascal Boyer
Selected Articles
Meta-social science
Boyer P (2015) How Natural Selection Shapes Conceptual Structure: Human Intuitions and Concepts of Ownership, in S Laurence & E Margolis (Eds.), The Conceptual Mind. New Directions in the Study of Concepts, Cambridge, MA; The MIT Press, pp. 185-200.
Click here for proofs [pdf].
How do we map the inventory of human concepts? Here I propose that a precise description of selective pressures on species-specific cognitive systems is the best source of empirical hypotheses about conceptual repertoires, and I illustrate this in the case of ownership concepts. The example of ownership illustrates how a highly specific selective context can predict and explain equally specific aspects of human concepts. Oownership as a conceptual domain is part of our responses to the adaptive challenge of reaching a measure of coordination that optimizes the extraction of resources.This account also suggests more general though tentative lessons, to do with what general computational properties, if any, should be expected from concepts; whether categorization is crucial to concept structure; and what role concepts play in linguistic reference.
Boyer P (2013) Why 'Belief' is hard work: Implications of Tanya Luhrmann's When God Talks Back Hau, Journal of Ethnographic Theory 3(3): 349-57.
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A consequence of our common evolved psychology is that most people, at most times, in most situations will not consider their gods real, in the sense of having a definite intuition of their presence. As Tanya Lurhmann's When God Talks Back (Luhrmann 2012) demonstrates, it requires considerable work to achieve an intuitive grasp of something—the actual presence of a god—that is reflectively accepted as certainly true. Tanya Luhrmann’s detailed monograph addresses the question, why belief, far from being a simple matter of receiving and accepting information, requires complex cognitive processes, some of which can be illuminated by meticulous ethnographic investigation.
Boyer P (2013) Explaining religious concepts. Lévi- Strauss the brilliant and problematic ancestor, in D Xygalatas & L McCorkle (Eds.) Mental Culture, Classical Social Theory and the Cognitive Science of Religion, Durham, UK: Acumen, pp. 164-75. Click here for proofs [pdf].
Claude Lévi-Strauss went further than most in renewing our understanding of universal constraints on human cultures. Surprisingly, his findings and models have had very little influence on contemporary accounts of religion. This is because he was a proponent and an eminent practitioner the “science mode” in anthropology. Also, Lévi- Strauss clearly had no trust in the notion of “religion”. He did not believe that the term denotes any coherent set of phenomena. He was, I will argue, quite right about that, but this of course did limit the appeal of his models for scholars of religion, many of whom do believe that there is such a domain as “religion”. Finally, Lévi- Strauss did not relate his hypotheses on cultural phenomena to any precise cognitive models of psychological processes, for the perfectly good reason that the latter did not exist at the time he put forward the basic tenets of structural anthropology. As a result, most structural models lack the psychological precision required to account for actual religious concepts and behaviours.
Baumard N & Boyer P (2013) Explaining moral religions Trends in Cognitive Science.
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Moralizing religions, unlike religions with morally indifferent gods or spirits, appeared only recently in some (but not all) large-scale human societies. A crucial feature of these new religions was their emphasis on proportionality (between deeds and supernatural rewards, between sins and penance, and in the formulation of the Golden Rule, according to which one should treat others as one would like others to treat oneself). Recent models of evolved dispositions for fairness in cooperation suggest that proportionality-based morality is highly intuitive to human beings. This may explain the cultural success of moralizing movements, secular or religious, based on proportionality.
Baumard N & Boyer P (2013) Religious beliefs as reflective elaborations on intuitions: A modified dual-process model Current Directions in Psychological Science. Click here for proofs [pdf].
Religious beliefs apparently challenge our view of human cognition as evolved system that provides reliable information about environments. We propose that properties of religious beliefs are best understood in terms of a dual-processing model, in which a variety of evolved domain-specific systems provide stable intuitions, while other systems produce explicit, often deliberate comments on those intuitions. This perspective accounts for the fact that religious beliefs are apparently diverse but thematically similar, and that they are immune to refutation and more attractive to imaginative individuals.
Boyer P & Petersen, MB (2012) Studying institutions in the context of natural selection: limits or opportunities? [forthcoming] Journal of Institutional Economics. Click here for proofs [pdf].
In this comment, we respond to comments raised by Eastwood (2010) in response to our article on the role of evolutionary psychology in understanding institutions (Boyer and Petersen, 2011). We discuss how evolutionary psychological models account for cultural variation and change in institutions, how sociological institutionalism and evolutionary models can inform each other, how evolutionary psychological models illuminate the role of power in institutional design and the possibility of a ‘general theory’ of institutionsons.
Boyer, P & Petersen, MB (2011) The Naturalness of (many) social institutions Journal of Institutional Economics 8(1): 1–25.
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Most standard social science accounts only offer limited accounts of institutional design, i.e. why institutions have common features observed in many different human groups. Here we suggest that these features are best explained as the outcome of evolved human cognition, in such domains as mating, moral judgment and social exchange. As empirical illustrations, we show how this evolved psychology makes marriage systems, legal norms and commons management systems, intuitively obvious and compelling, thereby ensuring their occurrence and cultural stability. We extend this to propose under what conditions institutions can become “natural”, compelling and legitimate, and outline probable paths for institutional change given human cognitive dispositions. Explaining institutions in terms of these exogenous factors also suggests that a general theory of institutions as such is neither necessary nor in fact possible. What is required are domain-specific accounts of institutional design in different domains of evolved cognition.
Boyer, P (2011) From Studious Irrelevancy to Consilient Knowledge: Modes Of Scholarship and Cultural Anthropology [forthcoming, in] Slingerland E & Collard M (Eds.), Creating Consilience, New York: Oxford UP.
Click here for draft version [pdf].
Why is most cultural anthropology largely irrelevant? The voice of that particular field in broader academic discussions is almost inaudible; its scholars are no longer among the recognizable and important public intellectuals of the day; and its contribution to public debates is close to non-existent. My diagnosis is that this is a largely self-inflected condition.What is a stake is that a certain intellectual style has stymied the creative energy and social import of cultural anthropology. The traditional concerns of cultural anthropology are currently being given a new lease of life and often a much more lively public relevance by evolutionary biologists and economists – suggesting that there may be such a field as the “science of culture” or at least some incipient moves towards such an integrated discipline.
Boyer P, (2010) Why Evolved Cognition Matters To Understanding Cultural Variation Interdisciplinary Science Reviews 35(3-4):377-87.
Click here for draft version [pdf].
Geoffrey Lloyd's Cognitive variations: Reflections on the unity and diversity of the human mind seems to perpetuate a misleading description of the state of the role of cognition in culture. As a correction to that picture, it may be important to stress that evolution does not usually result in innate cognitive structures, that more learning requires more, not less, genetically specific structure, that most cognitive processes are not accessible to conscious inspection and therefore also to ethnographic investigation. It may also be of help to emphasize differences between two kinds of mental events, intuitive and reflective, that are sometimes confused in anthropological discussions of cognition and culture. I suggest that a more accurate description may help dispel various misunderstandings, about the connections between evolution and cognition, between evolved cognition and cultural representations, and about the need or value of certain kinds of anthropological relativism.u
Boyer, P (2006) Ten Problems In Search Of A Research Program: Towards Integrated Naturalistic Explanations of Human Culture Unpublished and probably unpublishable programme for an empirically based behavioral science.
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This is a concise statement of ten different problems for which a behavioural science should (and may soon be able to) provide coherent, empirically grounded explanations. These problems were chosen for their social importance as well as their theoretical interest, as demonstrations of the need to integrate psychological, economic and evolutionary factors in explanatory models. For each question, I mention pointers to incipient or possible research programmes. The questions are the following: What are the natural limits to family arrangements? Do we have an intuitive understanding of large societies? Why are despised social categories essentialised? Why gender differences in politics? What logic drives ethnic vio-lence? How are moral concepts acquired? What drives people’s economic intui-tions? Are there cultural differences in low-level cognition? What explains individ-ual religious attitudes? Why religious fundamentalism and extremism? The general aim is to propose a new approach to issues of human culture, not through an ab-stract discussion of paradigms and traditions, but through specific examples of possible empirical research.
Boyer, P (2003) Science, Erudition and Relevant Connections
Journal of Cognition and Culture 3(4): 344-358. Link to pdf version
How does the community of anthropologists actually decide that a person could be considered an anthropologist, or decide that their publications count as contributions to anthropology? It seems that the opposition between “scientiŽfic” and “non-scientiŽfic” modes, or perhaps “humanities” vs. “science”, are too simple, and that there are three clearly distinct ideal types here. I call three modes science, erudition and relevant-connections respectively. In what follows I will try brie�fly to describe these three modes before returning to the speciŽfic case of science in anthropology.
Boyer, P (2000).
Natural Epistemology or Evolved Metaphysics? Developmental Evidence for Early-Developed, Intuitive, Category-Specific, Incomplete, and Stubborn Metaphysical Presumptions, Philosophical Psychology, 13:277 -297.
Link to pdf version.
Abstract: Cognitive developmental evidence is sometimes conscripted to sup-port "naturalized epistemology" arguments to the effect that a general epistemic stance leads children to build theory-like accounts of underlying properties of kinds. A review of the evidence sug-gests that what prompts conceptual acquisition is not a general epis-temic stance but a se-ries of category-specific intuitive principles that constitute an evolved 'natural metaphysics'. This consists in a system of categories and category-specific inferential processes founded on definite biases in prototype formation. Evidence for this system provides a better understanding of the limited 'plasticity' of ontological commitments as well as a computationally plausible account of their initial state, avoiding ambiguities about innateness. This may provide a starting point for a 'naturalized epistemology' that takes into account evolved properties of human conceptual structures.
Boyer, P. (2000)
Evolution of the modern mind and the origins of culture: religious concepts as a limiting case, in Carruthers, P. & Chamberlain, A. (Eds.), Evolution and the Human Mind: Modularity, Language and Meta-Cognition, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp93 -112.
Abstract: The human cultural explosion is often explained in terms of "liberating events", of a newly acquired flexibility in mental representations. This chapter considers a domain where such flexibility should be maximal, that of religious representations, and shows that actual cultural transmission in in fact constrained by evolved properties of ontological categories and principles. More generally, this suggests that the "cultural mind" typical of recent human evolution is not so much an "unconstrained" mind as a mind equipped with a host of complex specialised capacities that make certain kinds of mental representations likely to succeed in cultural transmission.
