Four foundations of quantification of religiosity

Using psychometric concepts and methods for measuring religious cognitions, emotions, behaviors, experiences and phenomena is a common trend in academic disciplines that are assumed to study religion scientifically such as psychology and sociology of religion. This trend is based on an unstated and more or less, unverified pre-assumption that psychological attributes and spiritual attributes, both belong to the same category and do not differ from each other. Some evidences against this pre-assumption were discussed and the basic thesis of the main research, which this article is a report of its first section, was introduced: the quantification of religiosity can not be viewed conceptually as a valid scientific endeavor unless it overcome two fundamental challenges, the mind-body challenge and the spirit-mind one, by assuming four ontological/epistemological stances. The basic challenge for measuring psychological attributes is to filling the gap between two ontologically different entities, i.e. body and mind. This challenge has its roots in the long-standing body-mind problem and its most influential formulation was known as Cartesian dualism that somehow entered the scene of debates on psychological measurement in late 19th century as the Quantity Objection. This basic challenge, i.e. the transition from body to mind, was the main focus of discussion in this article.