The crucial point is this: All inferences delivered by specific sys-
tems are compatiblewith an explicit interpretation like "This child is
like an adult but with underdeveloped capacities"; but none of these
systems actually handled the general, explicit question "Are children
like adults but with underdeveloped capacities?" So this is a statement
that people would agree with although it has not been treated in that
general format anywhere in their minds.
SPECIAL BELIEFS, SPECIAL PEOPLE,
SPECIAL NEURONS? [307]
Our explicit beliefs about children are quite clearly a justification for
consistent intuitions delivered by specialized systems, away from con-
scious inspection. But when people tell us that invisible spirits are lurk-
ing around or that some people have an extra organ that flies off at
night, we consider these explicit beliefs as produced exclusively by such
explicit processes as considering evidence, weighing it, examining alter-
native explanations and coming to a conclusion. Why this difference?
We do this because we tend to think that religious beliefs are special,
that the processes underpinning everyday judgements and the ones
involved in supernatural matters must be different. When William
James, one of the pioneers of modern psychology, turned his attention
to religious concepts, he naturally adopted this stance too. He
assumed there had to be something really special about mental func-
tioning as far as gods and spirits and ancestors were concerned. But
what was that something special? James realized that it was not so
much in the concepts themselves, for they were quite similar to those
of fiction, dream and fantasy. So what made religious concepts special
might be a special kind of experiencethat prompted people to acquire
them and find them self-evidently true. This is indeed why James's
book was called Varieties of Religious Experience and dealt with faith,
mysticism, visions and other kinds of exceptional mental events.
Accepting this also led James to focus on exceptional people, that
is, on mystics and visionaries. After all, these people seemed to have
more of these religious mental states than others. In most human
groups there are people who claim some special connection to super-
natural agents—they fall into trances, proffer inspired divinations,
renounce all worldly matters or devote their lives to deepening their
WHYBELIEF?