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Dissertation Defense |
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Candidate: Joel Mort Degree of: Doctor of Philosophy Committee: Dr. E. Thomas Lawson, Chair Abstract: Engagement in ritual acts is, from a scientific point of view, a surprising feature of human behavior given the commitment to counterfactual worlds. As such, why people engage in ritual acts has preoccupied many scholars in the history of anthropology. These scholars have engaged in the Rationality Debate; the goal of which is to determine standards that should be used to make judgments about the rationality of human behavior. While ritual behavior might be ineffective for the achievement of purported goals and fail to conform to principles of reasoning based on rules of logic, the simple fact that this behavior is widespread, transmitted in a stable fashion, and the result (at least indirectly) of evolutionary processes suggests that considering its rationality or lack thereof is largely irrelevant. The question is no longer ‘if’ ritual behavior is rational but rather ‘why’ this behavior is consistently exhibited. I argue that in order to answer this question anthropologists and religious studies scholars ultimately depend on heuristics recast as postulated entities. These are conceived as causal variable(s) governing patterned human behavior and consequently circle back and affirm a fallacious Durkheimian description of ritual behavior. This is a major and fundamental flaw in the current anthropological and religious studies research tradition and a new fractionated approach to understanding ritual within the research tradition of the natural sciences in general and cognitive science in particular is needed. |
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