Embodiment in Religious Knowledge

Increasing evidence suggests that mundane knowledge about objects, people, and events is grounded in the brain’s modality-specific systems. The modality-specific representations that become active to represent these entities in actual experience are later used to simulate them in their absence. In particular, simulations of perception, action, and mental states often appear to underlie the representation of knowledge, making it embodied and situated. Findings that support this conclusion are briefly reviewed from cognitive psychology, social psychology, and cognitive neuroscience. A similar representational process may underlie religious knowledge. In support of this conjecture, embodied knowledge appears central to three aspects of religious experience: religious visions, religious beliefs, and religious rituals. In religious visions, the process of simulation offers a natural account of how these experiences are produced. In religious beliefs, knowledge about the body and the environment are typically central in religious frameworks, and are likely to affect the perception of daily experience. In religious rituals, embodiments appear central to conveying religious ideas metaphorically and to establishing them in memory. To the extent that religious knowledge is like non-religious knowledge, embodiment is likely to play central roles. When most lay people hear the term, “knowledge,” they think of material acquired explicitly in formal education, such as knowledge of history or algebra. They also think of products that result from academic inquiry, *Emory University. **Correspondence to: Lawrence W. Barsalou, Department of Psychology, Emory University, Atlanta, GA 30322. E-mail: [email protected], http://userwww.service. emory.edu/~barsalou/. ***We are grateful to Bob McCauley and Harvey Whitehouse for the opportunity to write this article, and for helpful comments on an earlier draft. Preparation of this article was supported by Grant BCS-0212134 from the National Science Foundation to Lawrence W. Barsalou. c © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2005 Journal of Cognition and Culture 5.1-2 RELIGIOUS EMBODIMENT 15 such as scientific theories and findings. What people often fail to realize is that their cognitive systems contain tremendous amounts of mundane knowledge that enter into every facet of cognitive activity, from relatively simple perceptual processing to complex socio-cultural reasoning. Mundane knowledge remains hidden from view given that, to a large extent, it is acquired and used unconsciously. Because mundane knowledge is essential for effective cognition, the mechanisms that underlie it have important biological origins and operate relatively automatically. Clearly experience is also central. Nevertheless, the mechanisms that encode, store, and retrieve knowledge are present at birth, and operate automatically and unconsciously to a large extent from then on. Across the lifetime, extensive amounts of mundane knowledge accrue that are central to acting effectively in the world. The Nature of Mundane Knowledge Mundane knowledge exists for virtually every aspect of experience. People have mundane knowledge about physical objects (e.g., animals such as dogs; artifacts such as chairs), physical settings (e.g., geographical entities such as forests; dwellings such as houses), complex events (e.g., naturally occurring events such as storms; cultural events such as weddings), simple actions and behaviors (e.g., human actions such as pounding; animal behaviors such as flying), mental states (e.g., emotions such as happiness; cognitive operations such as reasoning), properties (e.g., physical properties such as roundness; social properties such as cooperativeness; mental properties such as intelligence), relations (e.g., spatial relations such as insideness; causal relations such as intending), and so forth. In general, people have the ability to focus on components of experience, and to then establish categorical knowledge about these components (e.g., Barsalou, 1999, 2003a). Over time, people focus on a particular component of experience repeatedly, and establish categorical knowledge about it. As people focus attention repeatedly on dogs, for example, memories of these entities are extracted and integrated, relatively unconsciously, to establish categorical knowledge about them. By similarly focusing attention on specific types of settings, events, actions, mental states, properties, and relations, categorical knowledge develops in all these domains as well (cf. Keil, 1989; Sommers, 1963). Human knowledge consists of categorical 16 LAWRENCE W. BARSALOU ET AL. knowledge for thousands of components that have been processed in this manner. For many of these categories, words become learned that can be used when referring to them. Many categories, however, do not have associated words (e.g., categories for various tastes, shapes, moods, etc.). Although categorical knowledge is extracted out of the situations in which it occurs, it nevertheless retains information about these situations. As people extract categorical knowledge about DOGS, for example, they do not simply represent information about dogs in isolation.1 Instead, they also represent the settings, events, and mental states that occur in these situations, given that this information is central to interacting with dogs effectively. Thus, categorical knowledge is typically situated in relevant background knowledge (e.g., Barsalou, 2003b; Barsalou & Wiemer-Hastings, in press; Murphy & Medin, 1985; Yeh & Barsalou, 2004). Mundane knowledge is not a detached system that represents isolated facts about the world, which people can look up, as if consulting an encyclopedia. Instead, mundane knowledge permeates every aspect of cognitive activity from high to low cognition (e.g., Barsalou, 1999, 2003b). As people interact with the environment during goal pursuit (i.e., online cognition), mundane knowledge contributes in three ways. First, it supports perception, predicting the entities and events likely to be perceived in a scene, thereby speeding their processing. Mundane knowledge also contributes to the construction of perceptions through figure-ground segregation, anticipation, filling in, and other perceptual inferences. Second, mundane knowledge supports the potential categorization of everything perceived in a situation. As people perceive objects, settings, events, actions, mental states, properties, relations, etc., they use mundane knowledge to establish their category membership. Third, once an entity has been assigned to a category, category knowledge provides rich inductive inferences that guide interactions with it. Rather than starting from scratch during these interactions, agents benefit from category knowledge in memory. Such inferences provide an important source of expertise about everyday activities. 1Italics will be used to indicate concepts, and quotes will be used to indicate linguistic forms (words, sentences). Thus, DOGS indicates a concept, and “dogs” indicates the corresponding word. Within concepts, uppercase words will represent categories, whereas lowercase words will represent properties of categories (e.g., DOGS vs. paws). RELIGIOUS EMBODIMENT 17 Besides being central to online processing of the environment, mundane knowledge is central to processing during memory, language, and thought (i.e., offline cognition). In each of these activities, a non-present situation is processed, with perception of the current environment being suppressed to facilitate processing of the imagined situation (Glenberg, Schroeder & Robertson, 1998). During memory, a past situation is evoked. During language, conversants often represent past and future situations, and also situations that have never occurred. During thought, a wide variety of situations are assessed to support decision making, problem solving, planning, and causal reasoning. In all three forms of offline processing, mundane knowledge plays central roles. In memory, mundane knowledge provides elaborative inferences at encoding, organizational structure in storage, and reconstructive inferences at retrieval. In language, mundane knowledge contributes to the meanings of words, phrases, sentences, and texts, and also to the knowledge-based inferences that go beyond them. In thought, mundane knowledge provides representations of the objects and events on which reasoning processes operate. Besides supporting online and offline processing, mundane knowledge supports the productive construction of novel concepts (e.g., Hampton, 1997; Rips, 1995; Wisniewski, 1997). The conceptual system is not limited to representing entities and events that a person has experienced in the world. Because the conceptual system establishes mundane knowledge about components of experience, it can combine representations of these components in novel ways to represent novel entities. Thus, people can combine categorical knowledge for purple and SAND to represent the novel category, PURPLE SAND. This process allows people to categorize novel entities during online processing, and to represent these entities offline in language and thought This powerful capability allows humans to envision non-present situations, thereby increasing their evolutionary fitness (e.g., Donald, 1991). Rather than simply reacting to external and internal stimuli in the current situation – the dominant mode of cognition for most other species – humans can analyze non-present situations systematically, plan actions deliberately far into the future, and use division of labor effectively to coordinate group activity. Finally, mundane knowledge is widely recognized as being central to social and cultural cognition. For decades, social psychologists have shown 18 LAWRENCE W. BARSALOU ET AL. that knowledge of stereotypes, traits, situations, and so forth is central to social perception, attribution, and interaction (e.g., Kunda, 1999; Wyer & Srull, 1984a, b, c). Similarly, anthropologists have long argued that cultural knowledge of plants, artifacts, rituals, beliefs, and so forth are central to cultural identity and practice (e.g., Berlin, Breedlove & Raven, 1974; Shore & Bruner, 1998). Knowledge in Religion Given the universal importance of knowledge across the spectrum of cognitive activities, it is likely to be important in religious cognition as well. Knowledge clearly enters into people’s religious beliefs (e.g., Barrett, 2000; Boyer, 1994, 2001). In particular, beliefs about the self, the universe, and deities constitute central forms of religious knowledge. In principle, some religious knowledge could have a biological or even purely spiritual basis. For the most part, though, we assume that religious beliefs are acquired, and thus focus on acquired religious beliefs.2 Knowledge also enters into religious institutions and practices. People have knowledge about churches, religious organizations, clergy, and so forth. People also have knowledge about how to perform rituals, along with the associated meanings. Knowledge further represents courses of religious development that might occur as a person practices a religion over time, along with various things that can go awry, the divergence of possible paths at various points, and many other related matters. 2Note that we are using “knowledge” in a relatively general sense throughout this article. Specifically, we do not draw the sharp distinction between knowledge and belief typically found in philosophy (e.g., Carruthers, 1992; Lehrer, 1990). That is, we do not assume that knowledge is solely information about the world that is likely to be true. Similarly, we do not assume that a person has strong justification for believing something that we refer to as knowledge, nor that it is coherent. Instead, we group together a broad collection of representations that people have about the world and themselves, ranging from coherent systems of validated knowledge to incoherent fragments of tentative beliefs. Consistent with broad usage across the cognitive science community, we simply assume that knowledge is information stored in memory used to guide intelligent action. More specifically, we assume that knowledge consists of representations about components of experience, along with collections of these components, as described earlier. Because religious beliefs can be viewed as assemblies of componential representations that guide action, we assume that they constitute a form of knowledge. RELIGIOUS EMBODIMENT 19 Knowledge appears no less central to religious cognition than to mundane cognition. In later sections, we explore several possible roles further.