Conceptual Conservatism 137
required to comprehend the contents of nonmental representations, namely photographs
(Leslie and Thaiss 1992).
All this suggests that we are natural-born detectors of objects that exemplify features
characteristic of minded agents. We are cognitively and affectively outfi tted very early in
development to preferentially attend to certain sorts of stimuli and, in response to those
stimuli, conceptualize the relevant objects as cognitively and affectively endowed. This is
so much a part of our basic orientation, of how we cannot help but see the world, that
only rarely are we in a position to notice it in ourselves. We notice it when confronted,
for example, with the devastating defi cits of severe autism.
The theory of mind theory may help us understand the role of “design” and “purpose”
in our psychology. The suggestion is that the set of mental categories posited by the theory
of mind theory might be the mechanisms that also apply the concepts “design” and
“purpose.” After all, to see an object as a mental agent is to conceptualize it as acting on
some intention, as moving toward some goal, and that, in the usual course of things, is to
see the agent as endowed with various means toward those goals, with strategies for acting
that are purposive or functional. As Deborah Kelemen suggests, our natural disposition
to see the parts of living things as purposive may be a by-product of the disposition to
see various objects in the worlds as minded (Kelemen 2004). And just as we are fooled
by our own capacities—sometimes we feel that a mindless object (a car, computer, or
caterpillar) is a quasi-agent to be reckoned with—so, too, we sometimes feel certain
objects are purposive even when they are not. This, at any rate, is a feature of our minds
that potentially distorts the way we see or feel certain things in the world without our
noticing it.
Now even if you have a healthy skepticism toward contemporary cognitive psychology,
the point here is signifi cant. It is plausible that some of our most basic cognitive and
affective capacities enable us to anticipate and navigate our environments under a limited
range of conditions. It is also plausible that we fi nd ourselves, often enough, in conditions
outside those limits. The resulting false positives may be, from an evolutionary point of
view, a cost worth paying. The false positives may be a nuisance or even deleterious in
some instances, but the presumption is that being possessed of different psychological
structures would be far worse. However, from the point of view of trying to acquire
knowledge, the false positives are intolerable. They are intolerable because they systemati-
cally lead us away from the truth by virtue of the effects of our own psychology, effects
we tend not to notice because they operate well beneath the level of conscious awareness.
If so, then progress in knowledge is limited by the retarding effects of our own psycho-
logical architecture or, less pessimistically, by the bounds of our best efforts to creatively
think or feel our way around our own structural limitations.
One way false positives occur is when there exists a constitutional confl ict between
cognitive systems. Consider Daniel Wegner’s hypothesis that the feeling of having freely
willed an action is produced by a system distinct from the actual lower-level processes