concrete ones such as CAT or TELEPHONE or ZYGOON. Ontolog-
ical categories are special because they include all sorts of
default inferences that help us acquire new kind-concepts such
as THRICKLER without having to reacquire information such as:
thricklers do not sleep, nor do they eat or breed, etc.Having rich ontological categories like ANIMALor TOOL amounts
to having "minitheories" of certain kinds of things in the world. Our
expectations about animals are not just the outcome of repeated
encounters with animals. They differ from such mindless accumula-
tion of facts in two very important ways. First, we speculate about [61]
many aspects of animals beyond what we know. For instance, we all
assume that if we opened up a tiger and inspected its innards, what we
would find could be found in other tigers too. We do not need to cut
up a huge number of tigers and produce statistics of what we found in
order to conclude that organs are probably similar in all members of
the TIGER category. We just assume that; it is part of our expectations.
Second, we establish all sorts of causal links between the facts avail-
able. We assume that tigers eat goats because they are hungry, they are
hungry because they need food to survive, they attack goats rather
than elephants because they could not kill very large animals, they eat
goats rather than grass because their digestive system could not cope
with grass, and so on. This is why psychologists call such concepts
"theoretical."
TEMPLATES IN RELIGIOUS CONCEPTS:
STEP 1It is quite easy to have precise expectations about imaginary objects.
(As you may have suspected, there are no such things as thricklers
or zygoons.) On the basis of very little information, we sponta-
neously use ontological categories and the inferences they support
to create particular expectations. This confirms a general psycho-
logical finding, that human imagination generally does not consist
in a loosening of constraints, an intellectual free-for-all where all
conceptual combinations are equally possible and equally good,
once the mind breaks free of its conceptual shackles. Imagination is
in fact strongly constrained by mental structures like the animal and
WHATSUPERNATURAL CONCEPTS ARELIKE