Julien Musolino, Joseph Sommer, and Pernille Hemmer signed a book deal with Cambridge University Press. The book, provisionally titled The Cognitive Science of Belief: A multidisciplinary Approach, is an edited volume dedicated to the scientific understanding of beliefs. The book will include chapters from leading international scholars in a range of disciplines including psychology, linguistics, economics, political science, psychiatry, and anthropology among others. The volume will contain chapters on philosophical approaches to beliefs, models of optimal beliefs, implicit and explicit beliefs, rationality and irrationality, religious beliefs, political beliefs, economic beliefs, moral beliefs, scientific beliefs, cultural variation in beliefs, individual differences in beliefs, pathological beliefs, and belief updating, among other topics.
Below is a brief description of the rationale for the book:
Beliefs play a central role in our lives: they lie at the heart of what makes us human, they shape the organization and functioning of our minds, they define the boundaries of our cultures, and they guide our motivation and behavior. Despite their fundamental importance, however, beliefs have been studied across a number of different disciplines (e.g., philosophy, psychology, sociology, political science, economics). This, in turn, has led to a disparate set of results and to literatures that do not make contact with each other. This state of affairs calls for a systematic effort to integrate these hitherto disconnected lines of research, compel different literatures to make contact with each other, and start a broader dialogue on the nature, role, and consequences of beliefs. This is the goal that we set out to achieve in this volume, under the banner of a new integrative approach called the Science of Beliefs.