Journal of Cognitive Historiography, Vol 4, No 2 (2017)

What is Cognitive Historiography, Anyway? Method, Theory, and a Cross-Disciplinary Decalogue

Leonardo Ambasciano
Issued Date: 14 Oct 2019

Abstract


This contribution offers a tentative systemization of different strands of method and theory in the sub-field of cognitive historiography in the form of a decalogue and 30 reflections. The primary aim is to clarify the role of both interdisciplinary collaboration and cross-disciplinary integration. The secondary goal is to provide interested readers, colleagues, and young researchers from a wide range of different academic branches across the two cultures with a crash course and a protocol to basic collaborative research. An indicative and essential bibliography is also provided. This introductory opinion piece is open for further comments, additions, suggestions, and discussions.

Download Media

PDF Subscribers Only

DOI: 10.1558/jch.38759

References


Ambasciano, L. 2018. An Unnatural History of Religions: Academia, Post-truth and the Quest for Scientific Knowledge. London and New York: Bloomsbury.

Ambasciano, L., and T. J. Coleman III. 2019. “History as a Canceled Problem? Hilbert Lists, du Bois-Reymond’s Enigmas, and the Scientific Study of Religion”. Journal of the American Academy of Religion 87(2): 366–400. https://doi.org/10.1093/jaarel/lfz001

Anderson, B. 1991. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Revised Edition. London: Verso.

Arnold, J. H. 2000. History: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Astuti, R., and M. Bloch. 2012. “Anthropologists as Cognitive Scientists”. Topics in Cognitive Science 4(3): 453–61. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1756-8765.2012.01191.x

Barber Wayland, E., and P. T. Barber. 2006. When They Severed Earth from Sky: How the Human Mind Shapes Myth. Princeton, NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press. https://doi.org/10.1086/509695

Baron-Cohen, S., M. Lombardo, and H. Tager-Flusberg, eds. 2018. Understanding Other Minds: Perspectives from Developmental Social Neuroscience. Third Edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199692972.001.0001

Bechtel, W., A. Abrahamsen and G. Graham. 2001. “Cognitive Science, History”. In International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences, eds. N. J. Smelser and P. B. Baltes, 2154–158. Oxford: Elsevier Science. https://doi.org/10.1016/b0-08-043076-7/01442-x

Boudry, M., and M. Pigliucci, eds. 2017. Science Unlimited? The Challenges of Scientism. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11191-019-00037-1

Braudel, F. 1980. “History and the Social Sciences: The Longue Durée”. In On History. Translated by S. Matthews, 25–54. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Originally published in 1958 as “Histoire et sciences socials. La longue durée”. Annales. Économies, Sociétés, Civilisations 13(4): 725–53. https://doi.org/10.3406/ahess.1958.2781. Reprinted in 1969 in Écrits sur l’histoire, 41–83. Paris: Flammarion. https://doi.org/10.3406/ahess.1958.2781

Brüne, M. 2016. Textbook of Evolutionary Psychiatry & Psychosomatic Medicine: The Origins of Psychopathology. Second Edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Bulbulia, J., and E. Slingerland. 2012. “Religious Studies as a Life Science”. Numen: International Review for the History of Religions 59(5-6): 564–613. https://doi.org/10.1163/15685276-12341240

Burguière, A. 2009. The Annales School: An Intellectual History. Translated by J. M. Todd. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. Originally published in 2006 as L’école des Annales. Une histoire intellectuelle. Paris: Odile Jacob. https://doi.org/10.1086/605133

Burman, J. T. 2014. “Bringing the Brain into History: Behind Hunt’s and Smail’s Appeals to Neurohistory”. In Psychology and History: Interdisciplinary Explorations, eds. C. Tileagă and J. Byford, 64–82. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139525404.006

Butterworth, B. 1999. The Mathematical Brain. London: Macmillan.

Carroll, J. 2018. “Minds and Meaning in Fictional Narratives: An Evolutionary Perspective”. Review of General Psychology 22(2): 135–46. https://doi.org/10.1037/gpr0000104

Chatfield, T. 2018. Critical Thinking. Los Angeles, CA and London: SAGE Publications.

Christian, D. 2011. Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History. With a New Preface. Berkeley, Los Angeles, CA and London: University of California Press.

Collingwood, R. G. 1989. The Idea of History. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Originally published in 1946 (Oxford: Clarendon Press).

Cover, J. A., M. Curd, and C. Pincock, eds. 2012. Philosophy of Science: The Central Issues. Second Edition. New York: W.W. Norton & Co.

Crawford, M. ed. 1985. The Sources of History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Currie, A. 2016. “Ethnographic Analogy, the Comparative Method, and Archaeological Special Pleading”. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A (55): 84–94. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.shpsa.2015.08.010

D’Ancona, M. 2017. Post-Truth: The New War on Truth and How to Fight Back. London: Ebury Press.

Dennett, D. C. 2006. Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon. New York: Viking.

Diamond, J., and J. Robinson, eds. 2010. Natural Experiments of History. Cambridge, MA and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

DiMaggio, P. 1997. “Culture and Cognition”. Annual Review of Sociology 23: 263–87. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.soc.23.1.263

Dunbar, R. I. M. 2014. Human Evolution. London: Penguin.

Eidinow, E., and L. H. Martin. 2014. “Editors’ Introduction”. Journal of Cognitive Historiography 1(1): 5–9. https://doi.org/10.1558/jch.v1i1.5

Evans, R. J. 2000. In Defence of History. New Edition. London: Granta. Originally published in 1997.

Fedyk, M. 2015. “How (Not) to Bring Psychology and Biology Together”. Philosophical Studies 172(4): 949–67. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-014-0297-9

Ferraris, M. 2014. Manifesto of New Realism. Translated by S. De Sanctis. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Originally published in 2012 as Manifesto del nuovo realismo. Rome and Bari.

Ferraris, M. 2017. Postverità e altri enigmi. Bologna: il Mulino.

Fischer, D. H. 1970. Historians’ Fallacies: Toward a Logic of Historical Thought. New York and London: Harper Perennial.

Gaddis, J. L. 2002. The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Geertz, A. W. 2010. “Brain, Body and Culture: A Biocultural Theory of Religion”. Method & Theory in the Study of Religion 22(4): 304–21. https://doi.org/10.1163/157006810X531094

Geertz, A. W. 2015. “Religious Belief, Evolution of”. In International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences. 2nd edition, J. D. Wright (editor-in-chief), Vol 20, 384–95. Oxford: Elsevier. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-08-097086-8.81055-7

Gottschall, J. 2012. The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Gould, S. J. 1986. “Evolution and the Triumph of Homology, or Why History Matters”. American Scientist 74(1): 60–69. https://www.jstor.org/stable/27853941

Gould, S. J. 2002. “Freud’s Evolutionary Fantasy”. In I Have Landed: The End of a Beginning in Natural History, 147–58. New York: Harmony Books. Originally published in 1987 as “Freud’s Phylogenetic Fantasy: Only Great Thinkers Are Allowed to Fail Greatly”, Natural History 96(12): 10, 14, 16, 18, 19. https://doi.org/10.4159/harvard.9780674063419

Jacob, F. 1977. “Evolution and Tinkering”. Science 196(4295): 1161–66. http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.860134

Jensen, J. S. 2014. What Is Religion? London and New York: Routledge.

Kennerley, H., J. Kirk and D. Westbrook. 2017. An Introduction to Cognitive Behaviour Therapy. Los Angeles, CA and London: SAGE Publications.

Laplane, L., P. Mantovani, R. Adolphs, H. Chang, A. Mantovani, M. McFall-Ngai, et al. 2019. “Opinion: Why Science Needs Philosophy”. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 116(10): 3948–952. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1900357116

Lincoln, B. 1996. “Theses on Method”. Method & Theory in the Study of Religion 8(3): 225–27. https://doi.org/10.1163/157006896X00323

Lincoln, B. 2000. “Culture”. In Guide to the Study of Religion, ed. W. Braun and R. T. McCutcheon, 409–22. London: Cassell.

Martin, L. H. 2014. Deep History, Secular Theory: Historical and Scientific Studies of Religion. Boston and Berlin: De Gruyter. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781614515005

Martin, L. H., and J. Sørensen, eds. 2011. Past Minds: Studies in Cognitive Historiography. London and New York: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315478371

McCauley, R. N. 2011. Why Religion Is Natural and Science Is Not. New York: Oxford University Press.

McCauley, R. N. 2017. Philosophical Foundations of the Cognitive Science of Religion: A Head Start. With a Chapter Co-written with E. T. Lawson. London and New York: Bloomsbury.

McCutcheon, R. T. 1997. Manufacturing Religion: The Discourse on Sui Generis Religion and the Politics of Nostalgia. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Momigliano, A. 2016. “The Rules of the Game in the Study of Ancient History”. Translated by K. W. Yu. History & Theory 55(1): 39–45. Originally published in 1974 as “Le regole del giuoco nello studio della storia antica”, Annali della Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, Cl. Lett. e Fil., Serie III(4): 1183–192. https://doi.org/10.1111/hith.10786

Monod, J. 1972. Chance and Necessity: An Essay on the Natural Philosophy of Modern Biology. Translated by A. Wainhouse. New York: Vintage. Originally published in 1970 as Le hasard et la nécessité. Paris: Éditions du Seuil. https://doi.org/10.1086/407100

Newen, A., L. De Bruin and S. Gallagher, eds. 2018. The Oxford Handbook of 4E Cognition. Oxford: Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198735410.001.0001

O’Rourke, M., S. Crowley and C. Gonnerman. 2016. “On the Nature of Cross-disciplinary Integration: A Philosophical Framework”. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 56: 62–70. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.shpsc.2015.10.003

Panksepp, J., and L. Biven. 2012. The Archaeology of Mind: Neuroevolutionary Origins of Human Emotion. New York: W.W. Norton & Co.

Petersen, A. K. et al. eds. 2018. Evolution, Cognition, and the History of Religion: A New Synthesis. Leiden and Boston: Brill.

Pigliucci, M., and M. Boudry, eds. 2013. Philosophy of Pseudoscience: Reconsidering the Demarcation Problem. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226051826.001.0001

Pinker, S. 2010. “The Cognitive Niche: Coevolution of Intelligence, Sociality, and Language”. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 107 (Supplement 2): 8993–999. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0914630107

Plotkin, H. 2004. Evolutionary Thought in Psychology. Oxford: Blackwell.

Richerson P. J., and M. H. Christiansen, eds. 2013. Cultural Evolution: Society, Technology, Language, and Religion. Cambridge, MA and London: The MIT Press.

Rovelli, C. 2011. The First Scientist: Anaximander and His Legacy. Yardley, PA: Westholme Publishing. Originally published in 2009 as Anaximandre du Milet, ou la naissance de la pensée scientifique. Paris: Dunod.

Russell, E. 2011. Evolutionary History: Uniting History and Biology to Understand Life on Earth. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/cbo9780511974267

Sagan, C. 1996. The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark. New York: Ballantine Books.

Scheidel, W. 2014. “Evolutionary Psychology and the Historian”. The American Historical Review 119(5): 1563–75. https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/119.5.1563

Shermer, M., and A. Grobman. 2009. Denying History: Who Says the Holocaust Never Happened and Why Do They Say It? Updated and Expanded. Berkeley, Los Angeles, CA and London: University of California Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/hgs/16.2.321

Shettleworth. S. J. 2010. Cognition, Evolution, and Behavior. Second Edition. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.

Shryock, A., and D. L. Smail, eds. 2011. Deep History: The Architecture of Past and Present. Berkeley, Los Angeles, CA and London: University of California Press.

Slingerland, E., and M. Collard, eds. 2012. Creating Consilience: Integrating the Sciences and the Humanities. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.

Smail, D. L. 2008. On Deep History and the Brain. Berkeley, Los Angeles, CA and London: University of California Press.

Sørensen, J. 2004. “Religion, Evolution and an Immunology of Cultural Systems. Evolution and Cognition 10(1): 61-73.

Sperber, D. 2011. “A Naturalistic Ontology for Mechanistic Explanations in the Social Sciences”. In Analytical Sociology and Social Mechanisms, ed. P. Demeulenaere, 64–77. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/cbo9780511921315.004

Sulloway, F. J. 1992. Freud, Biologist of the Mind: Beyond the Psychoanalytic Legend. With a New Preface by the Author. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press.

Sulloway, F. J. 1998. Born to Rebel: Birth Order, family Dynamics, and Creative Lives. London: Abacus.

Turner, J. H., A. Maryanski, A. K. Petersen and A. W. Geertz. 2018. The Emergence and Evolution of Religion by Means of Natural Selection. London and New York: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315111995

Turner, M., and G. Fauconnier. 2002. The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities. New York: Basic Books. https://doi.org/10.1086/378014

Weinstein, F. 1995. “Psychohistory and the Crisis of the Social Sciences”. History and Theory 34(4): 299–319. https://doi.org/10.2307/2505404

White, L. A. 1938. “Science is Sciencing”. Philosophy of Science 5(4): 369–89. https://www.jstor.org/stable/184653

Whiten, A., R. A. Hinde, C. B. Stringer and K. N. Laland, eds. 2012. Culture Evolves. Oxford: Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:osobl/9780199608966.001.0001

Wiebe, D. 1999. The Politics of Religious Studies: The Continuing Conflict with Theology in the Academy. New York: St. Martin’s Press.

Wilson, R. A., F. C. Keil, eds. 1999. The MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences. Cambridge, MA and London: The MIT Press.

Wyatt, F. 1961. “A Psychologist Looks at History”. Journal of Social Issues 17(1): 66–77. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-4560.1961.tb01664.x


Refbacks

  • There are currently no refbacks.





Equinox Publishing Ltd - 415 The Workstation 15 Paternoster Row, Sheffield, S1 2BX United Kingdom
Telephone: +44 (0)114 221-0285 - Email: info@equinoxpub.com

Privacy Policy