Conceptual Blending and Religion

2007

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Perhaps the most notable characteristic of the human mind is its profound ability to create and comprehend symbols.  Indeed, humans have been designated “the symbolic species” (Deacon 1997).  While other intelligent animals may be taught token level abstractions, even the least capable human beings form sophisticated symbolic networks that permit them to speak languages, engage in fantasy, and form metarepresentations (Wilson 2003).  Even though symbol usage has long been considered a defining human characteristic, it has only been in the last few decades that researchers have proposed general theories about the cognitive processes that make this world of abstractions possible.

One of the most comprehensive theories available is that of conceptual blending (Fauconnier & Turner 1998, 2002).  Conceptual blending proceeds from the notion that the mind can take structures and inferences from one domain and combine it with elements from another domain to form concepts with novel emergent structure.  In short, conceptual blending helps to explain how humans create new ideas, a focus which has been lacking in most prior theories about thought and comprehension.  Theorists have shown conceptual blending to be operative in literary creation (Dancygier 2005), in mathematics (Nuñez 2005), and in notions about time (Williams 2004; Nuñez & Sweetser 2006) but it is only recently that conceptual blending has been used to understand aspects of religious thought (Sørenson 2007).

Few aspects of human behavior are as deeply symbolic as religion.  Religion develops within a world of abstractions.  Numerous researchers have collaborated to seek the cognitive underpinnings of religious thought and behavior.  They have coined this new field the cognitive science of religion.  Some of the most important ideas from this discipline tacitly rely upon the process of conceptual blending.  For instance, Pascal Boyer’s highly influential ideas about supernatural concepts derive from the processes of conceptual blending.  According to Boyer, supernatural concepts activate a set of ontological categories—schematic representations about such things as animals, objects, and people—which are then counterintuitively tweaked and blended.  Myths about half-men/half-beast chimeras, about deathless humans, and about celestial orbs with psychological properties capture the imagination by blending ontological categories.  Consider this Winnebago myth:

…he [Trickster] said to the waterfall, ‘Remove yourself to some other location for the people are going to inhabit this place and you will annoy them.’  Then the waterfall said, ‘I will not go away.  I chose this place and I am going to stay here.’  ‘I tell you, you are going to some other place,’ said the Trickster.  The waterfall, however, refused to do it.  ‘If you don’t do what I tell you, I will not use you very gently.’  Then the waterfall said, ‘I told you when I first spoke that I would not move and I am not going to.’  Then Trickster cut a stick for himself and shot it into the falls and pushed the falls onto the land. (Radin 52)

Like most myths, this one imparts a set of supernatural ideas that follow the contours of Boyer’s theory about counterintuitive violations.  In particular, through a process of anthropomorphization the waterfall is denoted as a mental agent.  According to Boyer, whenever myths and supernatural tales make these sorts of violations they gain the listener’s attention and achieve a high level of memorability (2000).  Borrowing Dan Sperber’s notion of an epidemiology of representations (1996), Boyer posits these slight advantages in memorability as significant enough to spell the difference between a forgotten tale and one that is communicated over and over again to eager ears.  But how is it that human beings can even understand counterintuitive concepts?  How can the human mind entertain the notion that something like a waterfall, which has none of the attributes of a human being, might be a creature with its own desires and a personality.

Though Boyer does not make the assertion, it is clear that such instances of supernatural concepts rely on conceptual blending.  Here is a brief diagram of the single-scope blend that goes on as part of the ‘backstage cognition’ (Turner 1997) to convey this counterintuitive idea of an anthropomorphized waterfall:

The dominant structure comes from the folk model of the person.  The resultant stubborn waterfall gains all the normal intuitive expectations from the ontological category of person except for the fact that it is not a person, it is a waterfall.  Nevertheless, through this single-scope blend most people have no trouble conceiving of this sentient waterfall and will even find in easier to recall and communicate a story that relies on these sorts of minimal violations than a more mundane story about ‘real’ characters.  In Boyer’s terminology, this representation involves a natural object with a transfer of psychological expectations.  But it is by the process of conceptual blending that we can account for the generation and comprehension of counterintuitive ideas.

The first cognitive scientist of religion to explicitly draw from conceptual blending theory in order to model religion is Jesper Sørensen.  In A Cognitive Theory of Magic, Sørensen relies upon blending theory to understand magical ritual.  He writes: “…religious and magical rituals involve a blended space consisting of elements projected from input spaces themselves created by elements from two general domains—‘sacred’ and ‘profane’—and structured by a ritual frame” (63).  It is this relationship between sacred and profane realms that lies at the heart of the blended space known as magical ritual.  Depending on the magical ritual, the outcome may be a change in the physical world, a change in the spiritual world, or a transformation of the material world into the spiritual world.  Any of these processes require a high level of abstraction and a mixture of profane objects and sacred ones.  One might argue that the essence of magic is this blending of ontologically distinct realms.  Sørensen provides a representation of this generic framework in the following diagram:

The sacrament of communion is an example of this process readily available to everyone familiar with the Catholic ritual.  The philosophy/theology behind the transubstantiation of the host holds that while the tangible host remains the same—just an unleavened sliver of bread—its essence has been transformed into the very ‘stuff’ of Jesus Christ.  This transubstantion is effected through the ritual of communion and through the special powers vested in the priest.  Sørensen provides the following diagram of the ritual:

What is schematically represented in the diagram above is the ritualized repetition of a mythical story about Jesus and the Last Supper.  The priest, taking on the symbolic identity of Jesus, repeats the ritualized language of the Last Supper.  For the language of this, one may look to the Gospel of Luke: “…he took the bread, gave thanks and broke it, and gave it to them, saying, ‘This is my body given for you; do this in remembrance of me.’  In the same way, after the supper he took the cup, saying, ‘This cup is the new covenant in my blood, which is poured out for you’” (22:19-20).  Given the details of the narrative, one discerns that the diagram presented by Sørensen fails to capture important details.  The following diagram stipulates more of the intricacies of the ritual:

To make sense of this ritual and understand its theological and metaphorical efficacy, one must consider the special ideas of the person implied.  Namely, the bread and wine of the meal and the flesh and blood of Christ both serve as SUSTENANCE which ties into a complex cultural model of food and eating.  But whereas bread sustains the body, it is the grace of Christ (mediated through the consumption of his body and blood) that sustain the soul.  The following helps to unpack these ideas of the person as they relate to the ritual of communion.

Behind a ritual like communion lies a number of such cultural models about persons and objects.  Conflating ontologically distinct categories, like body and soul, lies at the heart of magical ritual.

Conceptual blending shows great promise as a tool to better understand the complex abstractions behind religion.  While theorists like Boyer have not yet appreciated how blending lies behind important ideas, such as that of supernatural concepts, others—like Sørensen—have made it central and explicit.  As a means to understand the backstage cognition behind highly symbolic concepts, conceptual blending will surely find a place in the future of the cognitive science of religion.

References

Boyer, Pascal

2000 “Functional Origins of Religious Concepts: Ontological and Strategic Selection in Evolved Minds.”  The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute  6(2), pp. 195-214.

Dancygier, Barbara

2005 “Blending and Narrative Viewpoint.”  Language and Literature 14(2): 99-127.

Deacon, Terrence

1997 The Symbolic Species: The Co-Evolution of Language and the Human Brain.  London: Penguin.

Fauconnier, Gilles & Mark Turner

2002 The Way We Think.  New York: Basic Books.

1998 “Conceptual Integration Networks.”  Cognitive Science 22(2):133-187.

Nuñez, Rafael

 2005 “Creating Mathematical Infinities.”  Journal of Pragmatics 37:1717-1741.

Nuñez, Rafael & Eve Sweetser

 2006 “With the Future Behind Them”  Cognitive Science 30:401-450.

Radin, Paul

1972 The Trickster: A Study in American Indian Mythology.  New York: Schocken Books.

Sørensen, Jesper

            2007 A Cognitive Theory of Magic.  Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press.

Sperber, Dan

1996  Explaining Culture: A Naturalistic Approach.  Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishers.

Turner, Mark

1997 “Backstage Cognition in Reason and Choice.” http://markturner.org/backcog/bcframe.html

Williams, Robert

2004  Making Meaning from a Clock.  PhD Dissertation.  UCSD.

Wilson, Deirdre

2003 “Metarepresentation in Linguistic Communication.”  In Dan Sperber (ed.) Metarepresentations.  Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 411-448.