in cognition and evolution. Culture and society do not explain themselves
in this scheme. Rather they are themselves produced, determined, and are
to be explained in general cognitive terms. A favorite context in which this
topic is pursued is religion (and with it ritual). The mode of explanation
offered lies in generalizations across cultures, not from within the culture
studied. Cognitivism therefore proposes to break the frame of analyzing
culture or society as both phenomena and the means to explain phenom-
ena. The explanation is to come from outside,theoria ex machina, like the
ancient theater god who came down on a swing to pronounce judgment
on humans, thedeus ex machina.
How successful has the cognitivist approach been? This is a dynamic
growth arena of research in which a prominent part has been played by
Pascal Boyer and Harvey Whitehouse and their many collaborators. It is
important, as Boyer has been at pains to point out (Boyer 2001 ), to
understand what exactly his cognitivist approach aims to explain and
what it does not. Boyer’s work, as he repeatedly says, does not seek to
explain all of religion in cognitivist terms. It does seek to explain why there
is a recurrent set of similarities between cultures in terms of ideas about
spirits, ghosts, etc. that may plausibly be argued to be foundational to
religious beliefs. Boyer aims to explain these similarities as the product of
evolved capacities that are triggered biographically in the cognitive devel-
opment of children. Children, he says, universally develop a knowledge of
realities in the world. (Note that we are back here to postulates of uni-
versalism.) This kind of knowledge Boyer calls“intuitive ontology”(Boyer
2001 , p. 58). It is not the same, he says, as the language-based acquisition
of classificatory terms. An example of intuitive knowledge is the cognized
difference between humans and others: another is the difference between
animate and inanimate things in the world (Boyer, p. 61). Boyer says that
the tendency to learn these distinctions is an evolved propensity of the
species, so it shows up everywhere. Allowing that this is a massive claim,
we are next invited to move on to“religious ontology”(p. 63). In this,
propositions emerge that run counter to the realitiesfirst learned. Spirits,
for example, are said to be able to move through physical objects and to be
mostly invisible themselves (p. 63). How does this come to be? Boyer
appeals to another heuristic idea, that by being counterintuitive these ideas
capture attention, become memorable, and so are passed on.
Moreover, Boyer argues, such ideas are counterintuitive only in mini-
mal respects. In other respects spirits are like people and hence the ideas of
them gain plausibility. We are presented, therefore, with a theory of
62 BREAKING THE FRAMES