71102.pdf

commonsense explanations for the origin of each particular aspect of our environment, but all these explanations do is "pass the ...

tures are bound to cave in at some point. What they want to find out is why the roof collapsed at the precise time when so-and-s ...

heal. In this way [the statuettes] are believed to become themselves diviners.^3 The patient in this ritual has been identified ...

The mind as a bundle of explanation machines Is it really true that human ideas are spurred by a general urge to understand the ...

The mistake of intellectualism was to assume that a human mind is driven by a generalurge to explain. That assumption is no more ...

died because they were distressed. We don't think that the animal leaped up because it was pushed by a gust of wind. We reserve ...

great deal about human thinking, including religious thoughts. But— this is the most important point—the workings of inference s ...

with a great interest in our behavior, are widespread the world over, and other possible religious concepts are very rare. It al ...

invisible enemies. So we might think that in such societies magical rit- uals, prescriptions and precautions are essentially com ...

endemic diseases and arbitrary oppression to the same extent as Mid- dle Age Europeans or present-day Third World peasants. So m ...

dangerous option. So fear is not just what we experience about it; it is also a program, in some ways comparable to a computer p ...

simple as we thought. It is probably true that religious concepts gain their great salience and emotional load in the human psyc ...

Again, these scenarios point to real issues, and a good account of religion should have something to say about them. For instanc ...

into a proper account of religion. But we do not have the easy solution we may have anticipated. RELIGION AND THE SOCIAL MIND So ...

As a student, I always found these criticisms less than perfectly convincing. True, extant functionalist explanations were not v ...

There were no solutions to these puzzles until anthropologists started taking more seriously the fact that humans are by nature ...

The study of the social mind by anthropologists, evolutionary biol- ogists and psychologists gives us a new perspective on the c ...

Refutation is more difficult than belief. It takes greater effort to challenge and rethink established notions than just to acc ...

Indeed, we should go even further and abandon the credulity sce- nario altogether. Here is why. In this scenario, people relax o ...

you can start describing the effects of concepts in the mind and under- stand why some of them may well become persuasive enough ...