Summary
The opening session sets up the workshop’s core conceptual problem: before supernatural belief can be measured, researchers need to decide what counts as “supernatural”, what counts as “belief”, and how these categories shift across cultures and research traditions. Jong and Talmont-Kaminski distinguish intuitive everyday uses of the terms from the operational definitions needed in empirical work. The talk frames the rest of the workshop as a craft problem: methods are not neutral containers, but tools that highlight some parts of religious cognition while hiding others.