Edward Slingerland

• University of British Columbia

The Database of Religious History is a large-scale digital humanities project dedicated to capturing scholarly perspectives on the history of religious groups across the globe. Analysis of the current state of the data shows a remarkable consistency between a taxonomic tree generated from the entries submitted by our expert contributors and larger...

Perhaps the biggest challenge facing designers of large-scale, cross-cultural databases is that ofontology, both in terms of defining the unit of analysis and the construction of an appropriateback-end architecture. These decisions are also impacted by the coding strategies adopted,envisioned users, and funding limitations. This article explores ho...

High gods have been found to be associated with resource stress and climate stability in ethnographic samples. In this research we aimed to replicate these analyses, using data from the Database of Religious History (DRH; religiondatabase.org), a large qualitative and quantitative database that encompasses samples from a much larger temporal range...

Ritual protocols aimed at rainmaking have been a recurrent sociocultural phenomenon across societies and throughout history. Given the fact that such protocols were likely entirely ineffective, why did they repeatedly emerge and persist, sometimes over millennia even in populations with writing and record keeping? To address this puzzle, many schol...

Psychology has traditionally seen itself as the science of universal human cognition, but it has only recently begun seriously grappling with cross-cultural variation. Here we argue that the roots of cross-cultural variation often lie in the past. Therefore, to understand not only how but also why psychology varies, we need to grapple with cross-te...

Considerable progress in explaining cultural evolutionary dynamics has been made by applying rigorous models from the natural sciences to historical and ethnographic information collected and accessed using novel digital platforms. Initial results have clarified several long-standing debates in cultural evolutionary studies, such as population orig...

A major source of attention paid to high gods in the fields of cultural evolution and cognitive science is the social effects of belief in high gods. Belief in high gods is both hypothesized to catalyze a cognitive punishment-avoidance mechanism at the level of individual minds, and a group cultural evolutionary mechanism that amplifies in-group co...

As historians, archaeologists, and database analysts affiliated with the Database of Religious History (DRH; religiondatabase.org), we share with the Seshat: Global History Databank team, authors of a recent study published in Nature, an excitement about the potential for deep and sustained collaborations between historians and analysts to answer b...

Whitehouse, et al.’s creation of the Seshat open archaeo-historical databank is laudable. However, the authors’ analysis methods, treatment of missing data, and source quality undermine the paper’s key conclusion that moralizing deities appear only after rapid increases in social complexity. First, their report fails to address the inherent ‘forwar...

Historians explain the serious shortcomings of the historical data coding and vetting procedures behind a recent Nature article that received a great deal of press.

Whitehouse, et al.’s creation of the Seshat open archaeo-historical databank is laudable. However, the authors’ analysis methods, treatment of missing data, and source quality undermine the paper’s key conclusion that moralizing deities appear only after rapid increases in social complexity. First, their report fails to address the inherent ‘forwar...

This chapter documents the various forms of holist claims made about early China, showing how they are grounded in the sort of extreme cultural and linguistic relativism that is characteristic of postmodernity. It then focuses on mind-body concepts because this binary in particular tends to be the locus of holistic claims about early China and ther...

The xin is most commonly characterized in pre-Qin texts as a locus of thought and decision making, sometimes linked to cognition or moral emotions like worry or compassion, but primarily concerned with what we could very well call “reason.” Especially once we enter the Warring States, it is represented as at most only vaguely located in the body, w...

Drawing upon cutting-edge knowledge and techniques from the sciences and digital humanities, Mind and Body in Early China employs the lens of mind-body concepts to critique Orientalist accounts of early China. Views of China as the radical, “holistic” Other are unsupportable for a variety of reasons. The idea that the early Chinese saw no qualitati...

It is time for naturalistic hermeneutics to replace the hermeneutics of the free-floating Geist , explained by nothing, explaining nothing, completely sui generis and shrouded in holy mystery. Once the shift from radical cultural-linguistic constructivism to embodied commonality is made, the landscape of comparative thought begins to appear in a ve...

This chapter presents traditional archaeological and textual evidence against the strong soul-body holist position—that is, the claim that the early Chinese lacked any sense of a qualitative distinction between an immaterial soul and a physical body. This evidence includes afterlife beliefs as gleaned from mortuary practices and textual evidence dr...

This chapter argues that, now that we have the texts of our traditions in fully searchable, digitized form, we can begin to read them in new ways. Basic quantitative textual analysis methods are introduced, as well as more sophisticated methods such as word collocation, hierarchical cluster analysis, and topic modeling. The use of online databases...

The topic of this chapter is a body of work from various branches of the cognitive sciences suggesting that the tendency to distinguish qualitatively between bodies and minds—between physical objects subject to mechanical causality and agents capable of free will, planning, and intentionality—is a human cognitive universal. It develops reliably and...

Given the massive evidence, both internal and external, against strong mind-body holism, this chapter explores the reasons that the position has remained so popular and widespread. Common interpretative mistakes include monolithic views of cultures, mistaking theory for everyday cognition, and allowing normative or religious commitments to trump ev...

As historians, archaeologists, and database analysts affiliated with the Database of Religious History (DRH; religiondatabase.org), we share with the Seshat: Global History Databank team, authors of a recent study published in Nature, an excitement about the potential for deep and sustained collaborations between historians and analysts to answer b...

Michael Hunter. Confucius Beyond the Analects. Leiden: Brill, 2017. - Volume 41 - Edward Slingerland

This article presents preliminary findings from a multi-year, multi-disciplinary text analysis project using an ancient and medieval Chinese corpus of over five million characters in works that date from the earliest received texts to the Song dynasty. It describes “distant reading” methods in the humanities and the authors’ corpus; introduces topi...

This article focuses on the debate about mind-body concepts in early China to demonstrate the usefulness of large-scale, automated textual analysis techniques for scholars of religion. As previous scholarship has argued, traditional, "close" textual reading, as well as more recent, human coder-based analyses, of early Chinese texts have called into...

This chapter argues against the strong “holist” position that the early Chinese lacked any concept of mind-body dualism, and more broadly against a “neo-Orientalist” trend that portrays Chinese thought as radically different from Western thought. In the first half, it makes the case against strong mind-body holism by drawing upon traditional archeo...

This article explores the potential impact and contribution of the Database of Religious History (DRH) project within the field of Cognitive Historiography. The DRH aims to bring together, in a systematic and open-access format, data on religious groups from across the globe and throughout history. By utilizing robust, open-source technologies and...

Text-heavy and unstructured data constitute the primary source materials for many historical reconstructions. In history and the history of religion, text analysis has typically been conducted by systematically selecting a small sample of texts and subjecting it to highly detailed reading and mental synthesis. But two interrelated technological dev...

Introduction: Digital Humanities, Cognitive Historiography, and the Study of Religion

This article introduces a new online, quantitative encyclopedia of religious cultural history, the Database of Religious History (DRH). The DRH aims to systematically collect information on past religious groups from around the world in a standardized form, providing a novel digital humanities resource for the religious studies community, a forum f...

In our response to the 27 commentaries, we refine the theoretical claims, clarify several misconceptions of our framework, and explore substantial disagreements. In doing so, we (1) show that our framework accommodates multiple historical scenarios; (2) debate the historical evidence, particularly about “pre-Axial” religions; (3) offer important de...

We present a cultural evolutionary theory of the origins of prosocial religion s, and address two puzzles in human psychology and cultural history: 1) the rise of large-scale cooperation and 2) the simultaneous spread of prosocial religions in the last ten-to-twelve millennia. We argue that these two developments were importantly linked and mutuall...

Although modern Western society tends to emphasise the importance of willpower and striving, there are some central human goals - happiness, relaxation, charisma - that appear to come only to those who are not trying to achieve them. The importance of 'not trying' was recognised by early Chinese thinkers, who understood how relaxed spontaneity coul...

This article discusses critiques raised by historians of religion concerning Ara Norenzayan's Big Gods: How Religion Transformed Cooperation and Conflict (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013), offering some defense of Norenzayan's position, but also discussing in detail the more substantive challenges. It concludes with some reflections on...

I have very much enjoyed David Wong's essay, which has made me think in new ways about both Confucian self-cultivation and the cognitive science-Confucianism connection. The productiveness of bringing Chinese thought and contemporary psychological research into dialogue is, in my opinion, one of the more exciting trends in the study of early Chines...

Anthropologists have documented substantial cross-society variation in people's willingness to treat strangers with impartial, universal norms versus favoring members of their local community. Researchers have proposed several adaptive accounts for these differences. One variant of the pathogen stress hypothesis predicts that people will be more li...

As a classicist religious studies scholar and someone involved in the growing cognitive science of religion movement, I find the essays in this inaugural issue of the Journal of Cognitive Historiography exciting, despite the fact that I know little about the Graeco-Roman world. In my contribution I have been asked to make a few conclud - ing commen...

Religion may be one factor that enabled large-scale complex human societies to evolve. Utilizing a cultural evolutionary approach, this chapter seeks explanations for patterns of complexity and variation in religion within and across groups, over time. Properties of religious systems (e.g., rituals, ritualized behaviors, overimitation, synchrony, s...

Building on foundations from the cognitive science of religion, this chapter synthesizes theoretical insights and empirical evidence concerning the processes by which cultural evolutionary processes driven by intergroup competition may have shaped the package of beliefs, rituals, practices, and institutions that constitute modern world religions. F...

Religion is a ubiquitous aspect of human culture, yet until recently, relatively little was known about its natural origins and effects on human minds and societies. This is changing, as scientific interest in religion is on the rise. Debates about the evolutionary origins and functions of religion, including its origins in genetic and cultural evo...

Leading scholars report on current research that demonstrates the central role of cultural evolution in explaining human behavior. Over the past few decades, a growing body of research has emerged from a variety of disciplines to highlight the importance of cultural evolution in understanding human behavior. Wider application of these insights, how...

Leading scholars report on current research that demonstrates the central role of cultural evolution in explaining human behavior. Over the past few decades, a growing body of research has emerged from a variety of disciplines to highlight the importance of cultural evolution in understanding human behavior. Wider application of these insights, how...

Leading scholars report on current research that demonstrates the central role of cultural evolution in explaining human behavior. Over the past few decades, a growing body of research has emerged from a variety of disciplines to highlight the importance of cultural evolution in understanding human behavior. Wider application of these insights, how...

This article argues against the strong "holist" position that the early Chinese lacked any concept of mind—body dualism, and more broadly against a "neo-Orientalist" trend that portrays Chinese thought as radically different from Western thought. In the first half, it makes the case against strong mind—body holism by drawing upon traditional archeo...

The origin of human ultrasociality—the ability to cooperate in huge groups of genetically unrelated individuals—has long interested evolutionary and social theorists, but there has been little systematic empirical research on the topic. The Historical Database of Sociocultural Evolution, which we introduce in this article, brings the available hist...

We respond to several important and valid concerns about our study ("The Prevalence of Folk Dualism in Early China,"Cognitive Science 35: 997-1007) by Klein and Klein, defending our interpretation of our data. We also argue that, despite the undeniable challenges involved in qualitatively coding texts from ancient cultures, the standard tools used...

Religious studies assumes that religions are naturally occurring phenomena, yet what has scholarship uncovered about this fascinating dimension of the human condition? The manifold reports that classical scholars of religion have gathered extend knowledge, but such knowledge differs from that of scientific scholarship. Classical religious studies s...

The distinction between the humanities and the natural sciences is often described in terms of two types of description, "thick" versus "thin," or two modes of apprehension, "interpretation" (Verstehen) versus "explanation" (Erklären). This chapter argues that, although it is rarely made explicit, these distinctions are themselves fundamentally bas...

One of the most commonly assigned secondary texts in university classes on early Chinese religious thought is Herbert Fingarette's classic Confucius: The Secular as Sacred (Fingarette 1972). This is not only because of its brevity and the lucidity of its prose, but also because Fingarette's book marked a sea change in the manner in which Western ph...

Calls for a "consilient" or "vertically integrated" approach to the study of human mind and culture have, for the most part, been received by scholars in the humanities with either indifference or hostility. One reason for this is that consilience has often been framed as bringing the study of humanistic issues into line with the study of nonhuman...

In this article, we introduce the general rationale behind the evolutionary cognitive science of religion, answer some sensible humanistic objections to it and defend the promise of a ‘consilient’ approach to advance the academic study of religion.

We present the first large-scale, quantitative examination of mind and body concepts in a set of historical sources by measuring the predictions of folk mind-body dualism against the surviving textual corpus of pre-Qin (pre-221 BCE) China. Our textual analysis found clear patterns in the historically evolving reference of the word xin (heart/heart-...

Early Chinese Confucian virtue ethics saw effortless harmony with the “Way” as essential for ethical life, but raised the problem of how one can, through effort, reach a state of effortless perfection. We decompose this paradox into three sub-paradoxes and review evidence from cognitive psychology relevant to each of them. First, how can one attain...

Western scholarship on early Chinese thought has tended to either dismiss the foundational role of metaphor or to see it as a uniquely Chinese mode of apprehending the world. This article argues that, while human cognition is in fact profoundly dependent on imagistic conceptual structures, such dependence is by no means a unique feature of Chinese...

memories, abstract reasoning skills, mathematical aptitude, and performance on standard IQ tests were completely unimpaired. They were also perfectly physically healthy, with no apparent motor or sensory disabilities. Nonetheless, these patients had been brought to Damasio’s attention as a physician because, despite their apparent lack of physical...

This article argues that strong versions of the situationist critique of virtue ethics are empirically and conceptually unfounded, as well as that, even if one accepts that the predictive power of character may be limited, this is not a fatal problem for early Confucian virtue ethics. Early Confucianism has explicit strategies for strengthening and...

This chapter reviews how human reasoning and decision making evolves from the cognitive sciences, challenging basic assumptions of objectivism-rationalism along with ethical models based on reason. It emphasizes the significance of effortless attention in human reasoning and suggests that virtue ethics is preferable to authoritative thinking. By ex...

This paper discusses certain conceptual tensions in a set of archeological texts from the Warring States period, the Guodian corpus. One of the central themes of the Guodian corpus is the disanalogy between spontaneous, natural familial relationships and artificial political relationships. This is problematic because, like many early Chinese texts,...

This paper aims to defend the application of tools and knowledge drawn from the natural sciences to the study of religion from the common charge that such approaches are overly “reductionistic.” I will argue that “reductionism” is ultimately an empty term of abuse—any explanation worthy of being called an explanation involves reductionism of some s...

What Science Offers the Humanities examines some of the deep problems facing current approaches to the study of culture. It focuses on the excesses of postmodernism, but also acknowledges serious problems with postmodernism's harshest critics. In short, Edward Slingerland argues that in order for the humanities to progress, its scholars need to tak...

Recent research suggests that cultural differences in Chinese and Western modes of conceptual reasoning play a significant role in political discourse and relations between the United States and China. In contrast, our analysis of the discourse surrounding the 2001 collision of an American surveillance plane with a Chinese fighter jet over internat...

2006 by University of Hawai‘i Press landscape. For instance, in place of a more-or-less linear picture of the development of ‘‘Confucian’’ thought, originating with Kongzi and then diverging with the two followers Mengzi and Xunzi, Csikszentmihalyi argues for a view of the ru 儒 tradition that sees it as consisting of many competing disciple lineage...

One purpose of this article is to support the universalist claims of conceptual blending theory by documenting its application to an ancient Chinese philosophical text, and also to provide illustrations of complex multiple-scope blends constructed over the course of longer dialogues. Another purpose is to supplement existing theories of conceptual...

The purpose here is to explore metaphorical conceptions of the self in a fourth century B.C.E. Chinese text, the Zhuangzi, from the perspective of cognitive linguistics and the contemporary theory of metaphor. It is argued that the contemporary theory of metaphor provides scholars with an exciting new theoretical grounding for the study of comparat...

This article argues for the usefulness of a new methodology for the study of comparative religion, the analysis of conceptual metaphor, as well as for the advantages of the theoretical orientation in which it is grounded, “embodied realism.” The manner in which this methodology and theoretical orientation avoid some of the shortcomings of previous...

In an interview with the British magazine Cogito, Professor Alasdair MacIntyre posed three thought-provoking questions: "What is our common inheritance from our common past? What should we have learned from our shared experience to value in it? and What in it is open to criticism and requires remaking?"1.

In support of the thesis that virtue ethics allows for a more comprehensive and consistent interpretation of the Analects than other possible models, the author uses a structural outline of a virtue ethic (derived from Alasdair MacIntyre's account of the Aristotlelian tradition) to organize a discussion of the text. The resulting interpretation foc...

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Stanford University, 1998. Includes bibliographical references (leaves [412]-429). Photocopy.