lot of evidence that people spontaneously adjust their behavior with-
out having the explicit beliefs that would justify the change. Although
they adapt their syntax to (their intuitive view of) the toddler's capaci-
ties, adults do not generally have a precise, explicit notion of the
child's linguistic capacities. Ten-year-olds often do not even realize
that they use a simplified syntax with their younger interlocutors. If
we ask adults why they do all this, they will certainly produce some
version of the statement above ("Children are adults minus some
capacities"). This belief is, to them and their interlocutors, a plausible
interpretation of their own intuitions, a way of making sense of their
[306] own behavior.
Third, the implicit representations are often handled by several
inference systems, each of which has its own logic. The moral emo-
tional system finds the child's behavior difficult to understand and
yields the representation that she is not moved by moral intuitions.
The verbal communication system yields the representation that she
did not understand what we said. The intuitive psychology system tells
me that she does not foresee what may happen if she pets a large dog.
Each of these systems seems to deliver inferences that support the
general, explicit interpretation ("children are immature") but each of
them does that for different reasons and in different situations. These
multiple inferences about the two-year-old are on the wholeconsistent
with the explicit interpretation.
So what does it mean to say that someone "has" a belief? Superfi-
cially, it means that they can assent to a particular interpretation of
how their minds work. If I ask my friends whether they expect their
three-year-old daughter to grasp the finer points of moral reasoning
or the subtlety of poetic meaning, they admit for all their parental
pride that such intellectual feats are still beyond her. But if we want to
go beneath the surface and explain why my friends react in this way,
we realize that each of these simple beliefs is the outcome of several
processes in the mental basement that they are not really aware of.
It would be slightly odd to ask my friendswhythey believe that
their daughter is not mentallyfully developed yet, what theirevidence
is, what reasonsthey have to believe that. They could of course men-
tion various occasions that illustrate the phenomenon. But they and
I would know that they had the belief before they could think of
these illustrations, because it is an intuitive belief that their minds
just produced.
RELIGION EXPLAINED