71102.pdf

your body's position, of various noises around, etc. The same would be true for any other situation of social interaction. If a ...

with a sexual proposition or an invitation to attack another band. For each domain of interaction, there is a specific range of ...

moves. This technical term does not imply that the information in question is important or vital. For instance, people are gener ...

mation. This is the general principle of imperfect access: In social inter- action, we presume that other people's access to str ...

whenanotherancestor was causing trouble was just a waste of one's resources. The offended spirit would carry on making people si ...

tion. God knows more than we know, the ancestors are watching us. More generally: In most local descriptions of spirits and othe ...

This is in fact the way people represent ancestors and gods the world over. People experience particular situations. Some inform ...

supernatural agents. The latter are full-access strategic agents—agents whom one construes as having access to any piece of info ...

between their wishes and reality. You infer that spontaneously. In the same way you need not be told that the gods (or spirits o ...

people conceive of agents with counterintuitive properties. In general this temptation leads to purely imaginary solutions. Ther ...

be new to the subjects. They were then asked whether the disease would also affect other animals, ranging from other members of ...

cepts, that they are driven by relevance.This notion was first formu- lated by Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson in studies of verb ...

inferences only if your intuitive psychology produces them. So it is quite natural that supernatural ideologies revolve around i ...

The first two types are not common, for obvious reasons. Brutes are easy to understand, but their representation generates no in ...

documented the spread of such ideas, showing that these beings are often described in a way that is very similar to religious ag ...

CONSEQUENCES OF FULL-ACCESS AGENTS Given this expectation of full access, it is not surprising that in many human groups people ...

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5 WHY DO GODS AND SPIRITS MATTER? "Why do you let some religious doctrine deter- mine what you may or may not do?" This is a com ...

doctrines and salient events: that gods and spirits are seen as endowed with great power, including that of bringing about or av ...

Obviously, the presence of such different accounts of personality creates an inconsistent or at least ambiguous theory. But that ...