1950s, and the disciplines that traditionally participated in this inquiry include
philosophy, psychology, artificial intelligence, neuroscience, linguistics,
and anthropology (Thagard, 2005, p. ix).More recently, evolutionary theory
played an important role in cognitive science. Shortly we will return to the
origins as well as some interesting, new developments in thefield. Before we
do so, however, two questions have to be cleared urgently: what is the“mind”
that cognitive scientists study, and how can such an enterprise help us say
something aboutancientpeople? For the time being, I would like to answer the
first question by giving a minimalistic definition:a mind is something that
performs thinking and feeling. As we will see below (especially in sections 1.2
and 3.1), such a minimalistic definition of the mind allows for a host of
interpretations and applications. The second question concerning the rele-
vance of cognitive science to the study of ancient culture is fundamental and
the answer to it will be spelled out in detail in various parts of this book. When
studying the human mind, cognitive scientists only have access to people
living in our time. How can the insights gained from this research shed light
on the thoughts and feelings of people living in the ancient world?
Let us consider two ways to address this problem. First, we have to realize
that any approach to the ancient world faces the challenge of using modern
methods and assumptions to understand the historical past. Whether we apply
economic theory, sociology, philosophy, or theology to make sense of ancient
history and the New Testament, our knowledge and models used in the
process are not those of the ancient people whom we study. Making such
assumptions and models explicit is the key to gaining meaningful new know-
ledge about the past. Second, and this is what makes cognitive science special,
we can make the assumption that the basic mental architecture of ancient
people was very close to ours. As we will see in subsequent chapters, evolution
does not change the human brain and body substantially in the course of two
millennia. To use an often-cited analogy, ancient people had the same“hard-
ware”as we do, only the“software”running on it differed from ours. Since we
share the anatomy of our brains and bodies with ancients, we can understand
their thoughts and feelings by studying how brain, body, thoughts, and
feelings are related in general. Let us push the analogy of the computer
somewhat further. Your smartphone, desktop computer, and play station all
use the same technology and basic electronic setup. However, each of these
machines can behave very differently from the others. Moreover, the appear-
ance and behavior of the programs on your computer can differ from the
appearance and behavior of the programs on your friend’s computer. By
understanding how the common architecture of those machines functions,
you can understand how they are capable of performing varying tasks and
displaying divergent behaviors. While we often think and feel differently than
ancient people did, especially when it comes to particular concepts, experi-
ences, and situations, cognitive science gives us tools to study such cultural
A Cognitive Turn 9