seriously though

[Chris Sinha]

> Date:          Thu, 7 Jan 1999 07:57:36 -0800
> From:          Elizabeth Bates <bates at crl.ucsd.edu>
> To:            chris at psy.au.dk, Susan.L.Engel at williams.edu
> Subject:       Re: seriously though
> Cc:            bates at crl.ucsd.edu, info-childes at childes.psy.cmu.edu

> One problem that I have encountered in talking with a lot of different
> journalists is that certain approaches (innateness, localization) are
> much easier to understand, and much more exciting, for the layman and
> for the journalists themselves.

There can be no doubt this is true; "negative" arguments are widely
perceived as just negative. We can't blame journalists for this, it's
their job to apply news values. But it does have the consequence
that "daring conjectures" (to put it mildly), which make good copy,
are given space and criticisms are not.

Below is the text of a piece I submitted last year to a major
daily newspaper in reply to an article by an academic science writer
using anthropologist Pascal Boyer's work to argue for the innateness
of beliefs about witches and ghosts. My reply was neither
acknoweldged nor published. I'm afraid I don't have the original
article by Wolpert with me at this location to scan in, but I will
send it to anyone who would like it. I did not misrepresent the
article and the quotes below are accurate. And I do think the issues
are important.

-------------------------------------------------------------------

No Ghosts in the Genes

Lewis Wolpert (The Guardian, March 15th) tells us that "there are
cognitive constraints which constrain the learning of religious
ideas", and that these constraints are biologically "inbuilt", to
the extent that there may be "a specific inherited mechanism for
detecting witches". Leaving aside the redundancy of constraining
constraints, what to make of this? Well yes, biology constrains
cognition, and evolution constrains human biology, but innate
witch-finder modules? Even Jerry Fodor, doyen of cognitive nativism,
admits that he only believes in innate Volkswagen-detectors every
other day.

Wolpert castigates social scientists and (by implication)
psychoanalysts for their explanations of religious beliefs, but in
what does his own account differ? He says: "It was fear that produced
gods in the world". So said also the proto-social scientist Karl
Marx, who described religion not only as "the opium of the people",
but also as "the heart of a heartless world". And so, more or less,
said Sigmund Freud too, in "The Future of an Illusion".

But, according to Wolpert, they failed to see that the human
condition is only really to be explained by postulating that "the
human mind consists of a set of evolved information processing
mechanisms which are adaptations produced by natural selection"
(which is so general as to be uncontroversial); and that (here's the
point) these adaptations directly represent, and generate, BELIEFS
with respect to specific cognitive and cultural DOMAINS. He thinks,
as did some 19th and early 20th century anthropologists, that the
beliefs of "primitive" people and children are similar, and he
supposes that this provides evidence for the underlying innate
mechanisms which generate them. So now, not only are infants born
with modules for language, number, face recognition, physics and
only granny knows what-all, but one for religion and superstition too
-- or are these two separate modules? Hegel would have liked to think
so. Is all this really necessary?

Here's an alternative story. Human beings, in evolving human
consciousness (much more than the 1,000 years ago hazarded by
Wolpert, but maybe that's a misprint), also evolved IMAGINATION, to
a far greater extent than any of their primate kin. Many of the
trans-cultural universals we find in beliefs about the supernatural
can be explained by invoking a different kind of constraint than that
envisaged by Wolpert: the constraints imposed upon human perception,
action and communication by virtue simply of having the kinds of
bodies we have, in the kind of physical world which we live in.

There are some things we can't (as far as we know) do. We can't
communicate without a physical medium of communication. We can't see
through, or move unhindered through, solid physical obstacles. We
can't (just using our bodies) fly. We can't act on physical objects
(including other human beings) without employing other physical
objects (including our own bodies and their parts) as instruments of
action. These constraints of EMBODIED HUMAN COGNITION underly, as
cognitive linguists such as George Lakoff and Leonard Talmy have
shown, many aspects of the meaning structure of natural languages.

However, by using their IMAGINATION, human beings can also
metaphorically comprehend and express many beliefs about non-physical
domains of cognition. Philosopher Mark Johnson shows, for example,
that many expressions relating to agreements, contracts and
relationships depend upon an underlying cognitive-linguistic metaphor
that: "An agreement is a constraining container". Thus, "don't try to
weasel out of this agreement", "I feel trapped/bound hand and foot
by this contract/relationship", and more prosaically, "we entered
into an agreement". This metaphor does not (think about it) rely
upon any physical resemblance between agreements and containers.
Rather, it depends upon our EXPERIENTIAL UNDERSTANDING that
interpersonal agreements constrain our freedom of action, much as
physical containers constrain the movement, position and location of
their contents.

Why should the same human cognitive capacity for imaginative
projection not underly many culturally universal beliefs about
supernatural beings? The kinds of things THEY can do are the kinds
of things WE (at least in normal states of awareness) CAN'T do: they
can communicate without language or other physical signs, they can
fly, move through and see through objects, and act without physical
instruments of action. They are, as Talmy would say, freed from the
constraints of the "force dynamics" underlying our experiential
understanding of the world and our own agentive powers in it. The
powers we attribute to supernatural beings are nothing other than the
lifting of the constraints which we experience in our ordinary,
embodied commerce with the world. They are (as Marx and Freud would
have agreed), the product of imagination and wishful thinking.

Wolpert says, regarding ghosts, that "it would be difficult to
acquire and represent ideas about such non-physical beings except
against the background of intuitive theories about ghosts and
witches" (meaning innate beliefs about ghosts and witches). I fear
his devotion to "the integrated causal model of evolutionary
psychologists" has limited his imagination. I don't find it necessary
or plausible to assume the existence of an innate Superman module to
account for children's "intuitive" understanding of Superman's
powers, and nor do I find it necessary or plausible to suppose that
just because Superman shares powers with other supernatural beings,
he is the culturally updated or parameterized product of an innate
witches-and-ghosts module.

In fact, I would say, our intuitive and naive ideas about
supernatural beings derive from EXACTLY the same source as our
intuitive and naive ideas about human action on and in the physical
world: embodied human experience and its imaginative and metaphoric
projection and transformation. "Witchcraft thinking" does not, as
Wolpert claims, provide ways of "evading logic". It may, from our
standpoint, be wrong, epistemologically and ethically. But belief in
witches (as well as other "non-Western", "pre-scientific" cultural
belief systems) does provide perfectly logical explanations of
aspects of human reality which are hard to account for. It does this
by "evading" (or denying, or transforming, or transcending) the
everyday, naive experiential realism which underpins mundane human
activity.

Wolpert says, rightly, that scientific explanations violate or
transcend common sense (or what I have called embodied and
experiential understanding). The difficulty which many of us
experience in comprehending science, though, does not lie in our
enslavement to innate, biologically programmed belief systems. It
lies rather in the way in which scientific explanations go "beyond"
experience: Newtonian physics, for example, defies our experiential,
force-dynamic understanding that when we cease to apply a force to an
object it eventually stops moving.

Wolpert would have us believe in what I, for one, would regard as a
thoroughly naive proposition -- namely that science and non-science
are two totally opposed and different modes of knowing. He goes so
far as to locate "non-science" -- read, superstition -- in human
biology. In fact, Wolpert's "new" integrated causal model is an old
idea dressed up in new terminology: "Culture" -- read, Western,
scientific culture -- is opposed to "Nature", and Nature's script
can be read in the utterances and beliefs of children, "primitives"
and the insane (and women too?). That this kind of thinking is
totally discredited in contemporary anthropology and human sciences
seems to bother Wolpert not a jot. His assumptions about the
unalloyed superiority of modern Western science over other belief
systems are revealed, too, in his claim that only in the last 100
years have (Western) doctors been able to do more than "virtually
nothing" for patients. In one stroke, all and every system of
knowledge and practice of healing except the modern, Western one is
consigned to rank superstition.

Many years ago Noam Chomsky demonstrated the difficulty of accounting
for children's language acquisition without appealing to an innate
and specifically linguistic kind of "knowledge". Chomsky's ideas have
been extremely influential on the entire field of cognitive
psychology and cognitive science, to the extent that some of his
supporters would claim that they are scientifically unchallenged.
That is not, in fact, the case, but those disputed issues make for
another, much longer story for which there is no space here. What is
indisputable, however, is that Chomsky's original "Argument from the
Poverty of the Stimulus" was and is intellectually extremely
powerful. The same cannot be said for Wolpert's mis-appropriation of
it to try to show that ideas about ghosts and witches must be innate.
Wolpert's reasoning simply does not hold water.

At base, Wolpert's "integrated causal evolutionary model" of
"constraints on cognition" is a pure and simple biological
determinism of the most reductive and distorting kind. It also
represents a kind of thinking which is truly, and worryingly,
constraining. If our base nature -- the bit of us which witch hunts,
for example -- is inscribed in our genes, then we can't do anything
about it, can we? Or, at best, the rest of us need to be set on the
right and noble path by a scientifically enlightened elite -- though
in order to be properly "adapted" we, if not they, need to be fed
the "placebo" of religion. It sounds depressingly familiar.

Wolpert's limiting, deterministic, constraining tunnel-vision is not
the only one in the cognitive sciences. There are some of us who
would identify ourselves as cognitive scientists, but who would base
our approach to the mysteries of the human mind in a recognition of
the crucial role played by the human imagination. And, as we all
know, imagination may sometimes make for witch hunting, but it is
also the moving spirit behind every step to human emancipation.

Chris Sinha
University of Aarhus
Department of Psychology
Asylvej 4
DK-8240 Risskov
Denmark

Tel. 00 45 89 42 49 87 (direct)
     00 45 89 42 49 00 (switchboard)

Fax  00 45 89 42 49 01

E-mail chris at psy.aau.dk