ing a prince into a frog is all right because frogs are animate beings that
go where they want, have goals and intentions, and so on. So you can
still run all sorts of inferences about the narrative character once it is
turned into an animal. You can describe it as knowingthat it can be
saved by a princess, hopingto meet one, tryingto get a kiss, and the like.
All this would be more difficult to imagine if the prince had been
turned into a potted geranium and far more contrived if he had become
a carburetor.^4
These two features—metamorphoses are not complete, and they
often occur between close categories—are connected. They both pre-
[68] serve a source of inferences. Naturally, people are generally not aware
of the consequences of such ontological choices. It is just that their
intuitive expectations either produce rich inferences or they do not,
which makes the difference between good and bad stories.
Now the notion of metamorphosis is where this account of super-
natural concepts, in my experience, sometimes leaves people quite
puzzled. "Surely" (they say) "there is something wrong in a model
that describes metamorphoses as counterintuitive. Metamorphoses
do happen! Caterpillars become butterflies. This is a natural
process." This is where having a precise model (or paying attention
to the precise features of the model, if I may say so) is important.
Intuitive ontological categories and principles do not always consti-
tute true or accurate descriptions of what happens in our environ-
ment. They are just what we intuitively expect, and that's that. Now
the fact that caterpillars become butterflies, if you assume that cater-
pillars and butterflies are two different species, violates the principle
that organisms cannot change species. You can of course accommo-
date it by considering caterpillars and butterflies as members of the
same species seen at different points in a rather exceptional growth
process. This, however, violates our intuitive grasp of such
processes. We expect growth to produce a bigger and more complex
version of the initial body-plan, not two different kinds of animals,
each of them perfectly functional but in completely different ways,
like caterpillars and butterflies. Tocut a long story short, a natural
metamorphosis of this kind is, whichever way you want to represent
it, counterintuitive in precisely the sense described here. It violates
intuitive, early-developed expectations about the ontological cate-
gory ANIMAL. Many aspects of the real natural world are in fact
counterintuitive relative to our biological expectations.
RELIGION EXPLAINED