2.2.3 Teleological ReasoningGhosts and spirits seem perfect candidates to cause phenomena in the envir-
onment that we intuitively attribute to agency and behind which we suspect
personal and psychological rather than simply physical causes. Experiments
have shown that children have a widespread tendency to ask about the
purpose of things in the world, such as why natural formations take a
particular shape (Kelemen, 1999; see also section 1.3). For example, when
asked why a rock has a pointy shape, young children until the age of eight
prefer a teleological explanation such as the rock is pointy so that animals do
not sit on it and smash it. Moreover, similar explanations continue into
adulthood if people have to give a quick, intuitive response, as opposed to
formulating a more articulated explanation (Kelemen & Rosset, 2009). It is
unclear whether teleological reasoning is an adaptation—that is, whether it
increased thefitness of early humans. On the one hand, one could argue that
teleological reasoning is simply a by-product of the tendencies to detect agents
in the environment and use the Theory of Mind to think about them. It might
be safer to suspect human creativity at work where there is none than the other
way around. On the other hand, the intuition that things are made for a
purpose can be related to the human use of tools. In particular, we are good at
recognizing that an object was made by a human being; once we start thinking
about something as an artifact, we try tofind out who made it and for which
purpose if was made (Asher & Nelson, 2008). Our teleological bias might be a
manifestation of“hypersensitive artefact detection.”
2.2.4 Expectations about ontological categoriesThe evolved cognitive functions we have just described (together with other
mechanisms to be mentioned later) form the basis of a set of expectations
toward groups of things in the environment (Atran, 1989). For example,
although it makes good sense to expect animals and other human beings to
have psychological motivations, and to use language when communicating
with humans, our ancestors would have wasted time and energy if they had
dealt with each and every tree or rock in the same fashion. Innateontological
categoriesconsist of bundles of expectations about how items belonging to
each category behave (Barrett, 2008). These categories result from implicit,
intuitive notions about “clusters of properties that unambiguously and
uniquely belong to all members of a given category at that level”(Keil, 1989,
p. 214). For example,“[a]ll animals are alive, have offspring, and grow in ways
that only animals do”(p. 214). Remember that such expectations are“innate”
in the sense of being maturationally natural (see section 1.3): children are not
34 Cognitive Science and the New Testament