be very weird if she asked you why you never had dinner at home or
why you never had soup. In other words, you assume that this ghost
has a mind. All of the italicized verbs above describe the sort of thing
a mind does: it perceives actual events in the world and forms beliefs
on the basis of those perceptions. Furthermore, the ghost's mind
seems to work according to definite principles. For instance, we
assume that the ghost sees what happens and believes what she sees.
We do not assume that the ghost sees what she believes.
All this may seem rather banal... and as the old Groucho Marx
joke goes, don't be deceived: it isbanal. Our notions about the ghost's
[74] mind are just similar to our assumptions about the minds we are used
to, that is, our own minds and the minds of people around us. Most of
our interaction with ghosts is informed by assumptions that we rou-
tinely use in dealing with more standard versions of persons. Indeed,
the banality of ghost-representations is a rich source of comic effects,
as in the Woody Allen story where the hero returns from the dead to
visit his widow during a seance only to ask her how long it takes to
roast a chicken in the oven. The world over, people assume that such
agents as ghosts and spirits have minds.
The general process whereby we combine (1) a limited violation
and (2) otherwise preserved inferences from a concept is a very com-
mon phenomenon in human thinking, namely default reasoning. Con-
sider these figures:
[ANOMALOUS CIRCLE AND SQUARE]Most people have no difficulty describing these as "a circle with a
dent" and "a square with a spike on the right-hand side." But such
phrases correspond to no precise geometric features, because a circle
with a dent is not properly speaking a circle at all and a square with a
spike has lost the standard geometrical properties of a square. This isRELIGION EXPLAINED