Carles Salazar

The point of departure of this paper is Penrose's definition of conscious action as that in which stimulus and response are linked by a non‐algorithmic relationship, which Penrose defines as ‘understanding’. My purpose is to explore the nature of this understanding by means of a two‐step process. The first step is provided by Tononi's Integrated Information Theory of consciousness. This theory provides us with a quantitative measure of conscious states that we need to transform into qualitative meaning. In the second step, we obtain this qualitative meaning with the help of the structuralist theory of mind. From this perspective, meaning originates in the set of qualitative contrasts that define the alternative courses of action that might have been implemented. Work on the analogy between quantitative bits and qualitative binary oppositions does not solve the hard problem of consciousness, but it might help to reformulate it in a new, productive way.

Nobody doubts that culture plays a decisive role in understanding human forms of life. But it is unclear how this decisive role should be integrated into a comprehensive explanatory model of human behaviour that brings together naturalistic and social-scientific perspectives. Cultural difference, cultural learning, cultural determination do not mix well with the factors that are normally given full explanatory value in the more naturalistic approaches to the study of human behaviour. My purpose in this paper is to alert to some of the theoretical vulnerabilities or concerns that the cross-cultural study of mind and behaviour might entail. I classify these theoretical concerns into three, loosely defined, categories: epistemological, ontological and ethical. The first have to do with what in anthropology was once labelled as ‘butterfly collecting’. What kind of supplementary, or additional, general theoretical knowledge do we produce when we add to the research different, particularistic, culturally determined, ways of knowing? Ontological concerns refer to the underlying reality that those ways of knowing are meant to disclose. If there are so many ways of knowing the world, where is the reality to be known? Ethical concerns are those entailed in the forms of ‘othering’ that unqualified cross-cultural research is likely to produce in research participants.

La creencia religiosa es una creencia «ordinaria» en un mundo o unos seres «extraordinarios». ¿Cuáles son los medios ordinarios que nos llevan a creer en la existencia de lo extraordinario? ¿Por qué creemos en lo que no entendemos? ¿Por qué tenemos creencias irracionales? Creencias irracionales no son creencias (necesariamente) falsas, sino contraintuitivas: son creencias que contradicen la idea de realidad que usamos en nuestra vida cotidiana. A partir de las aportaciones de las grandes voces de la antropología (Frazer, Malinowski, Lévi-Strauss), la sociología (Durkheim, Weber), la lingüística (Saussure) y el psicoanálisis (Freud, Jung), esta obra ofrece una antropología de las creencias que no plantea lo irracional como patológico ni el análisis correspondiente como una terapia: el autor no quiere curar a nadie de sus creencias irracionales; simplemente, las quiere explicar.

Nobody doubts that culture plays a decisive role in understanding human forms of life. But it is unclear how this decisive role should be integrated into a comprehensive explanatory model of human behaviour that brings together naturalistic and social-scientific perspectives. Cultural difference, cultural learning, cultural determination do not mix well with the factors that are normally given full explanatory value in the more naturalistic approaches to the study of human behaviour. My purpose in this paper is to alert to some of the theoretical vulnerabilities or concerns that the cross-cultural study of mind and behaviour might entail. I classify these theoretical concerns into three, loosely defined, categories: epistemological, ontological and ethical. The first have to do with what in anthropology was once labelled as ‘butterfly collecting’. What kind of supplementary, or additional, general theoretical knowledge do we produce when we add to the research different, particularistic, culturally determined, ways of knowing? Ontological concerns refer to the underlying reality that those ways of knowing are meant to disclose. If there are so many ways of knowing the world, where is the reality to be known? Ethical concerns are those entailed in the forms of ‘othering’ that unqualified cross-cultural research is likely to produce in research participants.

Popular religiosity manifests itself alongside a heterogeneous continuum of beliefs, behaviours, modes of thinking and modes of living that flows between two poles: the experiential pole and the normative pole. A central theme in this paper will be that all forms of religiosity originate in a combination of innate predispositions and cultural upbringing; hence human religious experience needs to be approached by combining both cognitive and symbolic approaches. To this effect, this paper attempts to make use of an ethnographic research into ordinary forms of religiosity in order to show that religious ideas are not only parasitic upon evolved human cognitive abilities, as mainstream cognitive approaches to religion have claimed, but also on human symbolic languages, which in turn should be seen as a by-product of those evolved cognitive abilities.