Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon

Researchers have several other terms for the intentional stance. Some call it “theory of mind” (Premack and Woodruff, 1978; Leslie, 1987; Gopnik and Meltzoff, 1997), but there are problems with that formulation, so I am going to stick with my more neutral terminology.⁵ Whenever an animal treats something as an agent, with beliefs and desires (with knowledge and goals), I say that it is adopting the intentional stance or treating that thing as an intentional system. The intentional stance is a useful perspective for an animal to take in a hostile world (Sterelny, 2003), since there are things out there that may want it and may have beliefs about where it is and where it is heading. Among the species that have evolved the intentional stance, there is considerable variation in sophistication. Faced with a threatening rival, many animals can make an informationally sensitive decision either to retreat or to call the other’s bluff, but there is scant evidence that they have any sense of what they are doing or why. There is some (controversial) evidence that a chimpanzee can believe

that another agent—a chimpanzee or a human being, say—knows that the food is in the box rather than in the basket. This is second-order intentionality (Dennett, 1983), involving beliefs about beliefs (or beliefs about desires, or desires about beliefs, etc.), but there is no evidence (yet) that any nonhuman animal can want you to believe

that it thinks you are hiding behind the tree on the left, not the right (third-order intentionality). But even preschool children delight in playing games in which one child wants another to pretend not to know what the first child wants the other to believe

( fifth-order intentionality): “You be the sheriff, and ask me which way the robbers went!”

Whatever the situation is with nonhuman animals—and this is a topic of vigorous and hotly debated research⁶—there is no doubt at all that normal human beings do not have to be taught how to conceive of the world as containing lots of agents who, like themselves, have beliefs and desires, as well as beliefs and desires about the beliefs and desires of others, and beliefs and desires about the beliefs and desires that others have about them, and so forth. This virtuoso use of the intentional stance comes naturally, and it has the effect of saturating the human environment with folk psychology (Dennett, 1981). We experience the world as not just full of moving human bodies but of rememberers and forgetters, thinkers and hopers

and villains and dupes and promise-breakers and threateners and allies and enemies. Indeed, those human beings who find perceiving the world from this perspective difficult—those suffering from autism are the best-studied category—have a more significant disability than those who are born blind or deaf (Baron-Cohen, 1995; Dunbar, 2004).

So powerful is our innate urge to adopt the intentional stance that we have real difficulty turning it off when it is no longer appropriate. When somebody we love or even just know well dies, we suddenly are confronted with a major task of cognitive updating: revising all our habits of thought to fit a world with one less familiar intentional system in it. “I wonder if she’d like…,” “Does she know I’m…,” “Oh, look, this is something she always wanted….” A considerable portion of the pain and confusion we suffer when confronting a death is caused by the frequent, even obsessive, reminders that our intentional-stance habits throw up at us like annoying pop-up ads but much, much worse. We can’t just delete the file in our memory banks, and, besides, we wouldn’t want to be able to do so. What keeps many habits in place is the pleasure we take from indulging in them.⁷ And so we dwell on them, drawn to them like a moth to a candle. We preserve relics and other reminders of the deceased persons, and make images of them, and tell stories about them, to prolong these habits of mind even as they start to fade.