Date: Friday 29th November
Time: 11 am
Place: Conference
room of the Département d’Etudes Cognitives - 29, rue d'Ulm
Speaker: Baptiste Gille (Post-doc, Quai
Branly)
Title: “Supernatural
Beings: Proposal for a New Cognitive Theory of Counter-intuition”
Abstract: I submit for consideration the theory of
ontological violation proposed by Boyer (1994; 2001) and show that it can be
developed and extended to a prototypical level. This extension allows the
cognitive apprehension of supernatural beings on a morphological level for
iconographic or descriptive representations. Boyer considers that the
understanding of supernatural beings is based on the violation of expectations
held in a given ontological domain. I want to show that if there is indeed a
violation, it remains that, in some cases, this violation mainly occurs at the
level of specific or prototypical expectations. Thus, I try to restore the
status of what Boyer calls “oddities”, which are forms of chimerical
constructions, but which do not constitute, for him, a viable criterion for the
understanding of supernatural entities (Boyer 2001, 118).
At a methodological level, I present an
anthropological approach to the morphological analysis of concrete entities. At
a theoretical level, I highlight the fact that a single psychological theory –
the “Domain-Specificity theory” – underpins Boyer’s system (Boyer 2001,
101-106). It is my contention that one can understand the cognitive
constitution of supernatural beings by resorting to intuitive psychological
principles which are not based on the distinction between specific domains. I
suggest focusing on the prototypical analysis of the basic-level category. I
therefore thoroughly follow Boyer’s recommendations: cognitive anthropology is
able to explain religious phenomena in terms of a special use of our basic
cognitive intuitions which are mobilized in our daily interactions.
