ABSTRACT
Chapter 4 is the last chapter presenting James’ approach to scientific truth and I focus on how a claim is true if it is generative: allowing people to move onto new ideas as opposed to friction and tension. CSR takes the position that culturally specific expressions of religious beliefs exist and persist when the beliefs are compatible with evolutionarily formed universal cognitive architectures. This is an example of an a priori paradigm that is problematic because it leaves researchers with little capacity to approach the way that religion involves the constitution of worlds of experience, and this limits the generativity of their work. I outline how CSR predicates itself upon evolutionary psychology and so reduces culture to a phylogenetic feature of the environment. The ontogenetic role of culture is bypassed due to a focus on domain-specific processing mechanisms that are largely irrelevant to religious believers. I propose how we can redirect this focus to generate new directions in CSR. Generative new directions are possible with an enactive approach because it enables paradigm harmonized phylogenetic development with a meaningful ontogenetic role of culture and language. Ultimately, it means that we can research the phenomenologically immediate realities like we see in religious believers and sustain scientifically efficacious theory.
