but an inference from that information. Even very young children can
produce such inferences because they connect the information
received about a particular animal to an abstract template ANIMAL.
This template works like a recipe and could be called "recipe for pro-
ducing new animal-concepts."
There are, obviously, fewer templates than concepts. Templates are
more abstract than concepts and organize them. You need only one
ANIMAL template for the many, many different animal concepts you
will acquire. You need one TOOL template although you may have
concepts for many different tools. Concepts depend on your experi-
[44] ence, your environment, but templates are much more stable. For
instance, people from Greenland and Congo share very few animal
concepts, simply because very few species are encountered in both
places. Also, a fishmonger certainly has a richer repertoire of fish con-
cepts than an insurance salesman. But the ANIMAL template does not
vary much with differences in culture or expertise. For instance,
everyone from Congo to Greenland and from fishmongers to insur-
ance salesmen expects all members of a species to reproduce in the
same way. Everyone expects that an animal belongs to a species and
only one. Everyone expects that if an animal of a particular species
breathes in a particular way this is true of all other members of the
species.
The distinction between templates and concepts applies to many
other domains. Here is a familiar example: In every place in the world
there are very precise notions about which substances are disgusting
and which are not. But the concepts are really different. To many in
the West the idea of eating cockroaches is rather off-putting, but they
would not find anything especially disgusting in having dinner with a
blacksmith. The opposite would be true in other places. So we might
conclude that there is nothing in common between human cultures in
this domain. However, there is a general template of POLLUTING SUB-
STANCE that seems to work in the same way in most places. For exam-
ple, whenever people think that a particular substance is disgusting,
they also think that it remains so however much you dilute it: Who (in
the West) would want to drink a glass of water if they are told it con-
tains only a tiny drop of cow urine? In the same way, some people in
West Africa would think that the mere presence of a blacksmith in
their home is enough to spoil the food. Take another example, from
the domain of politeness. We know etiquette really differs from place
to place. In the West it would be rude to sit in your host's lap; in
RELIGION EXPLAINED