240 mind
explanation is not only more complex, but also much more interesting than
that.
Religious Notions Are Supernatural Notions
The world over, people’s supernatural repertoire includes a variety of concepts
of imagined artifacts, animals, persons, and plants: concepts of floating islands,
of mountains that digest food or have blood circulation, of trees that listen, of
animals that change species, or of people who can disappear at will. These are
found in folktales, anecdotes, myths, dreams and religious ritual and corre-
spond to a small “catalog” of templates for supernatural concepts.^1 We also
find that a particular subset of these concepts is associated with more serious
commitment, strong emotions, important rituals, and/or moral understand-
ings. An association between a supernatural concept and one or several of these
social effects is our main intuitive criterion for what is “religious.”^2
There are, to simplify matters a great deal, two major levels of conceptual
information in semantic memory. One is that of “kind-concepts,” notions like
“table” and “tiger” and “tarmac” and “tree.” The other consists of “domain-
concepts,” such as “intentional agent,” “manmade object,” “living thing.” Most
of the information associated with these broader concepts comes in the format,
not of declared statements (e.g., “living things grow with age”) but of intuitive
expectations and inferences. Without being aware of it, one expects living
things to grow, intentional agents to have goals, and their behavior to be caused
by those goals, the structure of artifacts to be explained by a function, and the
latter by a designer’s intention.
Now supernatural concepts describe minimal violations of such expecta-
tions: a tree is said to listen to people’s conversations, a statue is said to bleed
on particular occasions, a person is described as being in several places at once,
another one as going through walls, and so on. Note that such concepts violate
domain-level and not kind-level expectations. A talking ebony tree goes against
expectations not because ebony trees in particular are usually silent but because
all plants are assumed to be nonintentional. Also, note that the violations are
minimal, keeping in place all the (nonviolated) default assumptions that usu-
ally accompany a given domain concept. A talking tree is still assumed to grow
like all plants, ghosts that go though walls still perceive and represent their
environment like other intentional agents. Indeed, these nonviolated assump-
tions provide an indispensable grounding for people’s inferences about super-
natural entities and agents.^3
This twofold condition: (a) include a violation of domain-level intuitions
and (b) allow inferences from relevant nonviolated assumptions, is sufficient
to account for the recurrent features of supernatural concepts the world over.
That is, the subject matter of fantastic imagination, dreams, folktales, and re-