Abstract
An interdisciplinary team of researchers in the fields of philosophy, religious studies, cognitive science, and computer science aimed to develop a computer model of ritual behaviour, based on McCauley and Lawson’s theory of ritual competence. That endeavour revealed some questions about the internal consistency and significance of the theory that had not previously been noticed or addressed. It also demonstrated how modeling and simulation can serve as valuable pedagogical and heuristic tools for better specifying theories that deal with complex social phenomena.
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Notes
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It may be important to note that, in the M&S literature, a model is a statement of a theory. A computer model is a theory that has been represented using a computer language. When the model is run (or “executed”) using computer code, this is referred to as a simulation. If we assume that the computational implementation of a theory (i.e. the computer model) is valid, then we can treat the outputs of a simulation as predictions (or hypotheses) of the theory given the parameters of the model (Bryson et al. 2007).
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Lane, J.E., Shults, F.L., McCauley, R.N. (2019). Modeling and Simulation as a Pedagogical and Heuristic Tool for Developing Theories in Cognitive Science: An Example from Ritual Competence Theory. In: Diallo, S., Wildman, W., Shults, F., Tolk, A. (eds) Human Simulation: Perspectives, Insights, and Applications. New Approaches to the Scientific Study of Religion , vol 7. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17090-5_8
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