CGSC 1001 Lecture Notes - Lecture 6: Pascal Boyer, Dead Bodies, Enculturation
17 Feb 2018
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Pascal boyer"s counterontology theory: we have subsystems for understanding different things in the world: contagion, persons, living things, tools, physical objects. Person permanence: our belief that people still exist when we can no longer perceive them. It seems that this does not shut off immediately when someone dies, leading to beliefs that their minds still exist: studies show that most people, even self-described atheists, attribute mental states to the dead. If something is learned, we predict that it gets stronger during enculturation: the opposite happens with attributing mental states to the dead. The old brain and the new: the old brain is intuitive. We are conscious of its outputs, not its processing: people"s implicit reasoning about the supernatural can be at odds with what they say they believe. (subbotsky 1997;2001) Dead bodies are naturally counterontological: we are fascinated with corpses because they bring up intuitions from different systems that are contradictory.
