shows. Suppose I had a new kind of paranormal belief, for which this
was the evidence: first, when I try magically to move my socks to the
laundry bag this invariably propels my teacup into the kitchen sink
(and vice versa); second, whenever my friend Jill is in danger I dream
of my friend Jack eating cake (and vice versa). This would be counter-
intuitive enough (my thoughts move objects, future events have direct
effects on my mind), but the intuitive inferential elements would be
absent. I do not think anyone would make much of a career in the
paranormal on the basis of such claims.[78]
FROM CATALOGUES TO EXPERIMENTS
The combination of ontological violation and preserved inferential
potential explains the family resemblance among supernatural con-
cepts. The common features are not in the conceptsthemselves but in
thetemplatesthat produce them, in the recipe that specifies an onto-
logical category, a violation-tag, as well as the use of all nonblocked
inferences. This would suggest that there are not that many different
templates. To produce a good supernatural concept, you must
describe something as belonging to an ontological category. But there
are not many different ontological categories. Indeed, we have some
reasons to think that ANIMAL, PERSON, TOOL (including many man-
made objects other than tools proper), NATURAL OBJECT (e.g., rivers,
mountains) and PLANT more or less exhaust the list. Once you have
the ontological category, you must add a violation. But we also have
evidence that there are not that many violations that can preserve
expectations in the way described here. As we saw above, some viola-
tions are cognitive dead-ends. You can imagine them but you cannot
produce many inferences about the situation described (if this statue
disappears when we think about it, what follows?).
This is why there is only a rather short Catalogue of Supernatural
Templatesthat more or less exhausts the range of culturally successful
concepts in this domain. Persons can be represented as having coun-
terintuitive physical properties (e.g., ghosts or gods), counterintuitive
biology (many gods who neither grow nor die) or counterintuitive
psychological properties (unblocked perception or prescience). Ani-
mals too can have all these properties. Tools and other artifacts can be
represented as having biological properties (some statues bleed) or
psychological ones (they hear what you say). Browsing through vol-RELIGION EXPLAINED