The dissemination of divination in roman republican times

credibility value in different societies. That could in turn help us explore the differences between
the particular ideas of different cultures.
More generally, it is possible to further develop this approach to account for other cultural
phenomena. The focus on risk factors and web of causation is a helpful heuristic that may serve
to finally integrate cognitive, ecological and social factors as Dan Sperber originally proposed.
This would have to be done with a focus on specific phenomena in specific cultures, which in
turn could also stimulate new questions for cognitive experiments.
In general I hope to have shown that a cognitive historiography is at least feasible, but also that
it may even be helpful. It can throw new light on both history and cognitive science. On the one
hand we saw that traditional historical problems such as the distribution of prodigies, or the
apparent formality of divination ritual could be explained by integrating cognitive explanations.
On the other hand we also saw that the real life importance of cognitive factors such as direct
and indirect prestige, ritualization and category employed in divination, could not be deduced
from the isolated cognitive experiments. Only in the investigation of concrete practices could we
see that ritualization was a sine qua non, direct prestige the most important factor, indirect
prestige only vaguely important, and finally the category employed in divination as altogether
insignificant. Based on the cognitive research, they all seemed to be equally important. Thus the
results of the cognitive historiography proposed here may aid both history and cognitive science.
The experiment has been to combine the in vitro methods of cognitive science with in vivo
methods of history to provide a synergic effect that can improve our knowledge of the
phenomenon of divination.
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