Experimental Cognitive Historiography and the “scientific turn”: a cautionary tale
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.11606/issn.2179-5487.v14i19p195206Keywords:
Cognitive Historiography, Interdisciplinarity, Cognitive Science, History of Science, Theory of History, Contemporary HistoriographyAbstract
The present article offers a brief critical analysis of the “scientific turn” in historiography from the particular example of Cognitive Historiography. To this end, we will describe the environment of development and recent partial redirection of Cognitive Historiography towards an experimentalist agenda, in order to demonstrate how this specific trend of the cognitive-historiographic project might be ignoring the complexities involved in the establishment of an adequate dialogue between History and the Natural Sciences. In fact, by resorting to the illustrative context of the historical study of religion, we will try to demonstrate how such agenda could even imply the obstruction of some of the very foundational goals of Cognitive Historiography, by dangerously approaching itself to an essentialist, acultural and ahistorical idea of “religion”.
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Copyright (c) 2023 Thales Silva, Lucas Soares dos Santos, Maria Luiza Iennaco de Vasconcelos
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