engleski

Cultural Aspects of Conceptualization and Communication of the Religious Experience. The Cognitive Constraints on the Construal of Meaning and Cultural Selection of Religious Representations

From the perspective of cognitive science, religious experiences are states of consciousness endowed with intentional and phenomenological content. In order for this content to be meaningful in cultural setting it must be conceptualized and made available for cultural transmission. The aim of this paper is to offer an explanatory model for the conceptualization of these experiences in texts of religious traditions. The textual approach to the study of conceptualization is based on the tenets of the cognitive linguistics: embodiment and experiential realism ; with emphasis on the theory of conceptual metaphor and the role of construal in conceptualization of the entity and agency of the culturally postulated religious representations. The proposed cognitive model of communication highlights four levels of conceptualization achieved though ontological, spatial, anthropomorphic and cultural metaphorical mappings, arguing that the conceptually richer agentive construal of culturally postulated religious entities is cognitively derived from the ontological and spatial patterns of conceptualization. Each conceptual level is discussed with reference to linguistic construal, the experiential basis, pragmatic and social inferences and the motivational potential that form the basis of successful transmission of the religious representations in the culture.

Cognitive science of religion; Religious experience; Cultural transmission Conceptual metaphor; Objectification; Agentivisation

nije evidentirano