Abstract
The relationship between understanding other natural minds, often labeled ‘mindreading,’ and putative understanding of the supernatural is a critical one for the dialogue centering on the cognitive science of religion (CSR). A basic tenet of much of CSR is that cognitive mechanisms that typically operate in the ‘natural’ domain are co-opted so as to generate representations of the extra-natural. The most important mechanisms invoked are, arguably, the ones that detect agency, represent actions, predicate beliefs and desires of others, and track social hierarchies, coalitions, and exchanges. In this essay, I show that where one lands on the interdisciplinary debate over the nature of mindreading has a significant impact on parts of CSR that invoke social cognition. I focus my essay on the case of CSR explanations of religious experiences in terms of a hyperactive agency detective device (HADD).
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Notes
Sorenson 2007 develops a case for thinking that other mechanisms having to do with magical cognition might be primary, but even he would admit that these social mechanisms are at least very important.
The most uninteresting way in which one could argue from anthropological diversity to HADD’s unreliability would be to assume some form of naturalism/materialism up front. If natural agents are all there is, then obviously, HADD must be unreliable. All the work in this case would be done by the metaphysical assumption, however. After all, the argument could be run in an identical manner if there were no diversity in conceptions of the extra-natural. See Visala 2011 for a critical analysis of the use of naturalistic assumptions in the cognitive science of religion.
See Basinger 2012 for a review of the relevant philosophical literature.
Though it is not, strictly speaking, a case of agency detection, a good illustration of the dynamics in play comes from the British anthropologist E. E. Evans-Pritchard who was studying the Zande people of Sudan. When a dwelling place collapsed on its inhabitants, the Zande would explain the event in terms of witchcraft. The Zande people were aware of the fact that termites eroded the support structure of the dwelling and that the victims of the incident were in doors at a given time for a normal reason such as the desire to escape the heat of the day. The Zande, nonetheless, would invoke witchcraft to explain why the building collapsed on the victims. Witchcraft and termite infestation were not competing explanations in their minds. One of the things that needed explaining for the Zande was why the dwelling fell in at the particular time that it did as opposed to some time when there was no one inside. The timing of the events indicated to them that extra-natural agency was at work (Evans-Pritchard 1976, 22–23).
It is not always clear where exactly Meltzoff’s view should be classed in the mindreading debate. He is primarily an experimentalist. One could think of him as a theory theorist or as ascribing to a hybrid view that incorporates literal perception of the states of others.
A theory theorist does not have to posit the existence of a ‘like me’ inference, but I think it is the clearest example of how a theory theorist could try to give an account of agency detection from within her framework. The alternative is positing some subconscious computational mechanism that, in my opinion, is only dubiously described in terms of theorizing.
One might think of this move toward two-level systems as consonant with the trend in psychology and the cognitive sciences toward thinking in terms of ‘System 1’ and ‘System 2’ (cf. Kahneman 2011), but it is not dependent on the success of that paradigm.
The statistical difference between the different conditions is small enough that one should be careful here until further data is available on cross-species mirror neuron activity.
I have not, for example, mentioned enactivism, which juxtaposes itself to the representational theory of mind. On this theory, what it is for a mindreading system to be reliable has to be completely reconceptualized insofar as there are no representations that depict the presence of agents at all. See Hutto 2008 for an exposition and defense of the view.
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Green, A. The Mindreading Debate and the Cognitive Science of Religion. SOPHIA 54, 61–75 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-014-0450-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-014-0450-0