bly true that hens in general lay eggs. In the same way, a five-year-old
will guess that if one walrus gives birth to live cubs then all other wal-
ruses probably reproduce in that way too. This illustrates another sim-
ple point: Minds that acquire knowledge are not empty containers
into which experience and teaching pour predigested information. A
mind needs and generally has some way of organizing information to
make sense of what is observed and learned. This allows the mind to
go beyond the information given, or in the jargon, to produce infer-
enceson the basis of information given.
Complex inferences allow children and adults to build concepts out
[42] of fragmentary information, but inferences are not random. They are
governed by special principles in the mind, so that their result is in fact
predictable. Even though cultural material is constantly distorted and
reshuffled inside the head, the mind is not a free-for-all of random asso-
ciations. One major reason is the presence of mental dispositions for
arranging conceptual material in certain ways rather than others. Cru-
cial to this explanation is the distinction between conceptsandtemplates.
To illustrate this: A child is shown a new animal, say a walrus, and
told the name for the species. What the child does—unconsciously of
course—is add a new entry to her mental "encyclopedia," an entry
marked "walrus" that probably includes a description of a shape. Over
the years this entry may become richer as new facts and experiences
provide more information about walruses. As I said above, we also
know that the child spontaneously adds some information to that
entry, whether we tell her or not. For instance, if she sees a walrus give
birth to live cubs, she will conclude that this is the way all walruses
have babies. You do not need to tell her that "all walruses reproduce
that way." Why is that so? The child has created a "walrus" conceptby
using the ANIMALtemplate.
Think of the ANIMALtemplate as one of those official forms that
provide boxes to fill out. You can fill out the same form in different
ways. What stays the same are the boxes and the rules on what should
be put in them. The child has identified that the thing you called "wal-
rus" was an animal, not a heap of minerals or a machine or a person.
To put it metaphorically, all she had to do then was to take a new sheet
of the form called ANIMAL and fill out the relevant boxes. These
include a box for the name of the new kind of animal, a box for its
appearance (shape, size, color, etc.), a box for where it lives, a box for
how it gets a progeny, and so on. In the figure below I give a very sim-
plified illustration of this idea of filling out templates for new animals.
RELIGION EXPLAINED