This concluding chapter briefly considers the puzzle of why belief in the supernatural is endemic in certain times and places but not, for the most part, in modern Western Europe. It explores a range of theoretical possibilities: salience; the theory dependence of observation; the effects of language, concepts, cultural conditioning; and what might be called cultural and scientific myths and liturgies. It then moves to a brief consideration of how the general thesis of the book relates to other ‘modernity stories’, including those of Charles Taylor, Brad Gregory, John Milbank, and Alasdair MacIntyre.

This chapter reviews recent developments that reflect a convergence of work in various branches of linguistics and psycholinguistics around the implications of the incremental sequencing of speech units for understanding grammar and the cognitive processing that underlies the production, comprehension, and interpretation of utterances. Notions from Functional Discourse Grammar are used to present a view of syntactic structure as arising from the incremental extension of holophrases, i.e., minimal utterances. By prioritizing the timecourse of language processing, the chapter interprets syntactic hierarchy as arising from chunk-and-pass operations supported by predictive processing. Spoken dialogue is identified as the primary arena for these processes, with grammaticality subordinated to situational appropriateness. Linguistic data are seen as protocols of joint action aimed at the incremental co-creation of meaning. All of these notions make essential reference to context as constantly active, prior to and during the utterance of the linguistic signal, and as a crucial component of the operations and processes that take place in verbal interaction.

Storytelling can be understood as a performative social event that instantiates a specific relationship between storyteller and audience. This relationship supports inferences of narrative causation in hearers, both locally (episode x caused episode y) and globally (repeated patterns of causation at a more abstract level). This applies to passages of performative speech in a narrative event that are non-narrative, such as description or digression. Scientific writing is often conceived as non-performative and impersonal, with causation expressed explicitly. However, I suggest in this chapter that discourse of this kind can make the task of configuring global patterns of causation more difficult. Performative narrative discourse, on the other hand, offers support for readers in the task of remodelling existing theoretical causal structures through reconceptualization. I illustrate this argument through an analysis of narrative and non-narrative performative discourse in the field of cognitive psychology.

Chapter 16 examines the processing of three types of long-distance dependencies: a forward syntactic dependency, a backward syntactic dependency, and a backward referential dependency. First, backward syntactic and referential dependencies show a processing asymmetry of subject/object gap sentences similar to that seen in forward syntactic dependencies, and they all elicit similar brain responses (Kwon 2008; Kwon et al. 2010, 2013). However, given that views among some typologists that backward dependencies are much more limited in distribution (Dryer 1992) and subject to more linguistic constraints (Lakoff 1968; Kuno 1972; Mittwoch 1983) than forward dependencies, processing of a backward dependency may be more difficult or less efficient (cf., Hawkins 1994, 1999, 2004). Likewise, the parser is “more cautious” in the processing of referential dependencies (Kwon and Sturt 2014). Finally, dependency formation may be affected by the relative importance of linguistic cues in a given language. In Korean, dependency formation is more strongly motivated by discourse context than in English (Kwon and Sturt 2013).

How do cultural artifacts influence the ways we experience and act? In this chapter I propose that cognition is cultural tout court and that habits provide a central link between human organisms and the sociocultural environment. I will defend an enactive account of habits that sees them as expansive in the temporal (they relate us to a history of sociocultural interactions) and spatial sense (they are co-constituted by our brains, bodies, and cultural artifacts). This account is based on Dewey's pragmatist–organicist concept of habits that rigorously anchors experience in culture. I will trace cultural factors in Dewey's philosophy and 4E (embodied, embedded, enacted, extended) cognitive science with a focus on pervasive artifacts – such as architecture, pictures, and moving images. Such artifacts have become part of our habits of perceiving. I finally situate artifactual habits within recent predictive processing theories that claim to provide the corresponding neuroscientific theory to our cultural minds.

This chapter examines some conceptual problems that arise when we apply new embodied theories of mind in literary analysis. Critics have used affordance theory and models of predictive processing to reflect on narrative and genre, the literary devices and codes that shape our expectations about how a text will unfold. Instead of reinforcing the functionalist assumptions that guide cognitive scientists, including the effort to treat reading literature as just another cognitive task that is directed toward problem solving, this chapter proposes to view it instead as an emotionally engaging or ethically challenging way of reconstructing the ecology in which we think. This approach helps theorists honor the conceptual resources that the 4Es offer by giving more heed to individualized and culturally specific encounters with literary texts. I end by examining a poem that demands that we alter prevailing interpretive practices, thus exposing the way literature reorganizes emotional responses and value schemes.

Music exists in all cultures and appears to elicit intense emotions and pleasure in the vast majority of people. Recent scientific advances have linked the pleasure of music listening to biological mechanisms associated with rewarding or reinforcing stimuli, including the activation of the brain’s reward system. Specifically, we and others have shown that the neurotransmitter dopamine is central to this phenomenon, and that it engages one subregion of the reward system in anticipation of pleasurable musical events and another during its realization. This dissociation implies that musical pleasure operates via some predictive mechanism that creates expectations, which the music then either fulfills or not. Accordingly, a growing body of evidence highlights the prevalence of prediction-based neural processing and its importance for learning about and adapting to one’s environment. Drawing on these findings and on related research into the optimization of learning, we propose that musical structures recruit neural systems of reward and emotion by evoking sufficiently uncertain expectations to build anticipation, and sufficiently surprising events to foster learning, reward, and pleasure. We explore the role that musical experience and culture play in engendering expectations, and offer suggestions for future research into the neuroscience of musical aesthetics and reward.

In this chapter, we discuss the hypothesis people help to regulate each other’s bodies (for better or for worse), and this is a main mechanism through which culture wires a human brain. Cultural transmission prepares the developing brain and body to meet recurrent demands within a particular cultural context, thereby supporting the development of an internal model that is sufficiently tuned to specific environments. In this way, a human brain becomes wired to run a model of the world that will control the body in an efficient, predictive manner. Our approach provides an empirically inspired account of how a human brain becomes a cultural artifact.

Agency refers to the human capacity to choose, initiate, and control actions to influence events in the world. The experience of agency is fundamental to our sense of self but may be altered in certain neurological conditions and forms of psychopathology. In this chapter, we review recent work in cognitive neuroscience that shows how agency depends on sensorimotor loops between the body and the environment as well as higher-order processes of attribution and interpretation. The sensorimotor loops that contribute to the sense of agency and ownership of the body and its actions can be manipulated in laboratory experiments to give rise to startling illusions like being out of one’s body, having a rubber hand, or controlling random events. Religious experiences like spirit possession and dissociative symptoms like conversion disorder may depend on attributing action to agencies other than the self. Even everyday actions depend on interpretive processes that draw from cultural affordances and ontologies as well as social and political structures. Embodied experience grounds to the sense of agency, but culturally mediated attributions can alter bodily experience. Far from being simply a consequence of individual cognition or ability, therefore, agency is rooted in ongoing engagement with the social–cultural world.

This contribution explores how the predictive processing framework could be employed to explain imagination. At first sight, this framework seems well suited to explaining imagination, since a wide range of mental processes, such as perception and action, are seen as employing imagination-like generative processes. However, it faces problems with explaining distinctively deliberate, voluntary, and purposeful acts of imagination in which agents aim to generate content that departs from immediate reality. In order to explain imagination of this kind, more work is needed. We suggest that one clue might lie in understanding the role language plays in shaping and cueing imaginative episodes.