Cognitivism and Religion: Am I My Keeper’s Brother?

Abstract

The key factor which underwrites both the enduring appeal of cognitivism and its differences with social anthropology relates to its ‘naturalism’, the continuity perceived between animal and humankind, combined with a view of the priority of realism over the imagination. This paper begins by tracing the path by which cognitivism first marginalized religion and then restored it to a central place, always relying on a naturalistic account that links mental properties to long term evolutionary patterns. After a brief review of the problems anthropologists have raised with some of the implications of this approach, the paper turns to a recent essay by an evolutionary biologist that casts doubt, using a wide range of evidence from the natural science side, on the continuity between animal worlds and human world views. It concludes by drawing some lessons as to the kind of realism required which might reconcile the two social scientific approaches.

1. Introduction

The question in the paper’s title, ‘Am I my keeper’s brother?’, comes from a tale about a monkey in a zoo reading the Book of Genesis in the Bible, where Cain, son of the first woman and man, is asked where his brother Abel is—Cain has killed him—and replies with a misleading counter-question, ‘Am I my brother’s keeper?’ The answer to the monkey’s Darwinian-inspired reading appears, sadly, to be ‘no’, at least in some important respects.

The focus of this paper, then, is on whether there is continuity between the natural world and the human or whether, on the contrary, there is a break between the two and different considerations come into play in each.

The cognitive approach to the study of religion argues that continuity is fundamental and that the human world, including matters of meaning, symbolism, culture, morality, and belief, can be understood on the basis of the natural sciences, having recourse to recent disciplines including evolutionary biology, cognitive and developmental psychology, psycholinguistics and neurophysiology, not to mention computer science.

Cognitive science then makes a radical claim, for it offers a way of dissolving the early modern distinction between animals and humans, on the one hand, and humans and machines, on the other. This claim of the ‘end of man’, although radical in form, is not, of course, entirely new. It was anticipated by positivism, which seeks to explain all phenomena, both social and natural, by a few universal natural laws. It also echoes naturalistic claims which propose that human motives of reason may be reduced to the regularities of biological instincts or passions. And it is reinforced by certain themes from modernism, which seeks to portray human behaviour in terms of automatisms, amalgamating humans with machines, robots, and computers. Cognitivism shares in these projects that rewrite the human soul (to echo Hacking 1995), destroying any possibility of a coherent human narrative by recourse to biological drives and inherited patterns, producing at best a fragmented account of gestures towards illusions of meaning, made by congeries of troubled beasts. Cognitivism therefore contains its own paradox: it is a human project of control and redescription, seeking the principles of intelligibility of human behaviour, but without any pay-off in terms of meaning or meaningful (in the sense of ethical) outcomes from the actors’ perspective.

Three comments at this stage. First, cognitivism emerged in a period when arguments concerning the completeness of physical explanation had gained a good deal of ground, combining advances in physiological evidence with arguments about fundamental (physical) forces (see Papineau 2002). In this regard, the second half of the twentieth century strengthened the rejection of any sense of the uniqueness of the human personality—collective or individual—just as it was under pressure at the end of the nineteenth century. Its redefinition of the problems at issue was part of a wider intellectual moment and linked, in particular, with advances in Artificial Intelligence.

Second, there is a thrill to regarding human motivations as the plaything of natural forces. It offers an outside perspective on human affairs. This is clear from literary expressions such as Zola’s novels, which describe human lives not as the product of rational thought and character development but as episodes of natural history. And modern sociology—born in the same period—shares something of the same frisson, showing ‘how common culture shapes the separate lives’ (Auden). One of the recurrent criticisms of this style of thinking, despite its attraction because of its impersonality, is that it encourages a view of human actors as being at the mercy of indifferent forces and removes any account of human initiative and responsibility.

Last, while we might suppose that the elements of the underlying schemes—positivism, naturalism, modernism—all represent a rejection of any notion of a unique human actor, nevertheless, each also represents a challenge to insufficiencies in the preceding form. Naturalism may be seen as a rejection of the claims to total explanation offered by realism in the 1880s, while modernism fragments even the local narratives claiming some sort of intelligibility or pattern. Cognitivism however seeks to recover a sense of explanation at scale by placing the human in a sequence leading from the animal to technology or the machine, projecting the problems pointed to by naturalism and modernism onto a coherent history: the evolution of mental units, their combination for certain functional ends, the unintended consequences of these assemblages, their modelling by certain technical means. Evolution then plays a curious role, giving a coherence or overall narrative to the elements which individually are destructive of any shape or telos. It is a distinct theory but underwrites many of cognitivism’s claims.

1.1. The Foundational Argument

There is a basic move which underwrites this project of control and redescription, which is taking the distinction between realism and imagination as fundamental and prioritizing of the first. If we are to take a naturalistic approach (as we may call it in sum) and regard all human behaviour in terms of mechanism, behaviours that can be described as being symbolically, culturally, or religiously motivated need to be explained in objective or realist terms.

Cognitive approaches to religious life begin from this fundamental distinction. Scott Atran’s (2002) In Gods We Trust offers a good starting point, for he combines wide reading in both anthropology and psychology with remarkable powers of synthesis and exposition, and he lays out the path of the argument with exemplary clarity. We can take the following points from his account of ‘the evolutionary landscape of religion’ (his subtitle).

He portrays the cognitive science approach to religion as something new in 2002, focussing on the definition of religion in terms of ‘a family of cognitive processes to produce minimally counter intuitive worlds that are attention-arresting, hence readily memorable and liable to cultural transmission, selection and survival’ (Atran 2002, p. x). The crucial phrase is ‘counter intuitive’, for it identifies religious behaviour as non-adaptive or even dysfunctional, yet, from an evolutionary perspective, anything that does not maximize benefit to self and anything that is not cashable in the sense of being realized in a material and useful form, is going to be selected against. ‘To take what is materially false as true … and to take what is materially true as false [Atran has in mind here the doctrine of life after death and the fact of the finality of death] … does not appear to be a reasonable evolutionary strategy’ (p. 5). How then are religious beliefs possible?

Atran proposes an approach that does two things. In the first place, he disqualifies the notion of ‘agency’, and its accompanying apparatus of intentions, reason and will, from having any primary or causal role (see p. 49). In the second place, he seeks to explain such notions as phenomena, the product of natural causes. He is therefore concerned not with agency or activity as such but, on the contrary, with the idea or representation of agency.

These phenomena—representations—are explained in terms of a number of recently discovered functional units within the mind, which depend on an analogy between the mind and the computer. The mind is regarded as being like a computer, with a series of independent sub-systems or modules that relate functionally to a variety of recurrent stimuli. Atran lists four classes of modules, relating to perception, to emotions, to what he calls secondary affects, and to concepts (see pp. 57–59). These mental modules are innate and are the products of natural selection, in other words, functional adaptations ‘to solve vital problems in ancestral environments’ (p. 243). In this perspective, beliefs and practices ‘spread, develop and survive’ among populations ‘to the extent that they are susceptible to modular processing’. This view on the fitness and dispersion of collective practices is termed ‘cultural epidemiology’ (after Sperber 1996) and links the natural selection of mental modules with cultural selection. Each modular faculty is governed by a set of genetically prescribed core principles which interpret aspects of the world, and both generalize these interpretations and generate resultant behaviours that come under the heading of cultural and social life, including religion. Computation, modularity, innateness, adaptation, and contagion: these are the factors lying behind the cognitive science revolution.

1.2. Explaining Agency

How are we to explain the idea of agency (or false consciousness) on this basis? Atran answers this riddle in two stages; we have to engage in a certain amount of detail to follow him.

First, he asks where does the idea (or representation) of agency come from? The aim is to eliminate any notion of metaphor, which might be thought to be central to any account of mind. A scientific account, in this approach, eliminates speaking of one thing in terms drawn from another context; it is, ideally, a literal description in unequivocal terms. Or, to put it the other way round, the idea of agency, including supernatural agency, comes from the misapplication of adaptive stimulus and response schemes. Atran has a nice example of a frog catching a fly: the fly’s movement is detected by cells in the frog’s eye and triggers a chain of nerve cells firing that result in the frog’s shooting out its tongue to catch the insect (p. 61). The case of the frog and the fly is crucial because it can be misinterpreted in terms of intentional agency: the frog catches the fly by anticipating where it will be (as it flies from a to b) and sticking out its tongue. It is as if the frog had a mind of its own and attributed a mind to the fly. This is an ‘as if’ story, however, for we (scientists) know that the frog and the fly are both on neural automatic pilot. However, there is a further twist, for the frog’s food catching module can be triggered experimentally by small wads of black paper dangling on a string and moved in front of the animal.

‘Theory of Mind’ is built on this kind of analogy. Humans both act and detect agency, initially in situations relating to predation or being preyed upon. Agents in this account are self-propelled; they have will and intentions. They are therefore goal-directed; they have purposes or internal motivations. Furthermore, they have beliefs or desires, attitudes towards propositions which may or may not be capable of being given content (pp. 59–60). The self, goals, and beliefs are all unobservable; they are ‘mental states’, to be inferred from observable facts. Furthermore, this ‘Theory of Mind’, a set of cognitive capacities which permits these inferences, by extension allows humans to engage with and navigate the social world, to co-operate, and to avoid enemies.

This concept of extension bears a lot of weight. The attribution of agency, it is acknowledged, has a ‘proper’ evolutionary domain for which it was selected, anticipating goal-directed behaviour of predators, prey, friends, and foes, and profiting from these inferences in ways that enhance survival and reproductive success (pp. 60–61). But these inferences can also be extended to cover an ‘actual’ domain, so that mistakes can occur, as in the case of the frog snapping at pieces of blackened paper on a thread. It is these extensions which are held to permit human social life, culture and religion. Atran cites Hume’s Natural History of Religion on the universal human tendency to attribute agency to meteorological features, seeing agency in the wind or faces in the clouds, as examples of extension of a natural or proper domain to an actual domain.

The initial move, then, is the suppression of metaphor as a primary form of life, permitting the priority of the literal, and this is achieved by, first, relying on perceptual modules as a model and security for cognitive models, and then, invoking the frog and the fly as the key example which permits a theory of culture and religion as a category mistake. The selective justification for the extension of proper to actual domains is that over-using the mental capacity in question is less costly than under-using it (p. 61; cf. p. 69). ‘In sum’, Atran writes, ‘humans conceptually created actual-domain entities and information to mimic and manipulate the natural input conditions of evolutionary proper-domain entities and information … Cultural domains … ride piggy-back on mental modules’ (p. 70).

However, there is a second half to this argument, concerning how to handle metaphor.

Frogs, of course, do not imagine that demon scientists deceive them with black paper flies, nor that the gods provide them with real ones. Humans, apparently, do (or believe the equivalent). Having eliminated metaphor in order to give a scientific or functionalist account, it now has to be reintroduced, for one cannot give an account of human culture or social life without it. Representation of agency is not enough; we need a further cognitive processing device or module, and this Atran calls ‘the species-specific cognitive process of meta-representation’ (p. 108). This process gives the capacity to form representations of representations: the use of fictions, the ability to model alternatives to what is the case, to envisage the future and compare it with the past, a capacity which, Atran suggests, allows ‘people to comprehend and interact with one another’s minds’ (ibid.). This permits quite a different sense of representation; over and above the reception of primary impressions of the world, this capacity allows the recombination of impressions at a secondary level.

The claim that this capacity permits the comprehension of other minds introduces a far greater level of complexity into the description of human behaviour: it means, for example, one is capable of seeing another’s grief or joy, and that perception might alter motivation. It also permits the introduction of other possibilities in human behaviour that are not directly related to the perception of empirical facts, for it allows notions of deception and false belief, notions which, Atran notes, may be linked to the development of cooperative behaviour (p. 109). It also allows the mind to entertain half-understood ideas and therefore permits religious propositions, though that is not its primary evolutionary function. ‘Religious acts of faith incorporate universal, meta-representational features of pragmatic communication, including preten(ce)…empath(y)…and promise’ (pp. 109–10).

The meta-representational capacity permits religious beliefs, but the latter have a cognitively specific content. They are what Atran calls ‘quasi-propositions, without falsifiable content, fixed…’ (p. 110). Elsewhere he terms these ‘symbolic’ beliefs, and he puts in a good deal of work to introduce the concept, step-by-step. Again, we should follow him to see the force of this idea.

1.3. Symbolic Beliefs

The first step, which we have met already, is the separation of proper and actual domains for mental modules. Because these modular capacities are universal (inherited), Atran challenges any anthropological notions of separate worlds of meaning or cultures; on the contrary, all people have recourse to the same mechanisms, and share a level of common sense and implicit beliefs (p. 83). For this reason, he believes, intercultural comprehension and translation are possible. But ‘common sense’ is to be distinguished from ‘symbolic beliefs’, because the former relays essentially pragmatic information: people know how to do things, however exotic their beliefs. Atran therefore separates intuition, relating to common sense, from what he calls ‘counter-intuitive beliefs’ (p. 86). The latter are in precisely defined ways counter-factual, so that they ‘violate innate modular expectations about basic ontological categories’ (p. 96); this violation often concerns an excessive human capacity, such as power (omnipotence), or loss of a human characteristic, such as visibility. Counter-intuitive beliefs are memorable because they directly contradict intuitive knowledge about the world (following Boyer 1994). Because of this characteristic, they are easily transmitted between individuals; the ideas are contagious.

In this fashion, Atran begins to construct an account of shared, social representations, as opposed to individual representations. He points to myth as offering a model for cultural representation. A myth begins in a specific episode, concerning an individual in a given context, an episode which gives rise say to a counter-intuitive belief in a god (this is the wind among grasses, or a face in the clouds). Such an account leads to an expectation that all such imaginary entities will behave in like fashion, and this expectation activates intuitive schemes about behaviour, causality, and the world around (human and non-human). The event is generalized by being made memorable, the introduction of a counter-intuitive figure, providing scripts others can employ in variant forms. These scripts can be shared, used in novel situations, and serve as structures shaping the particular; Atran points to Lévi-Strauss as demonstrating how ‘regularities [emerge] in the distribution of representations’ (p. 89). Only a fraction, then, of personal representations become embodied in cultural institutions (p. 90), and these can carry a good deal of information; a few stories or episodes mobilize a network of implicit background beliefs (p. 96).

The functional significance of the distinction between common sense and symbolic beliefs is then linked to the memorability of the latter. However, they also introduce a second feature; because they are counter-factual and counter-intuitive, they have ‘great inferential potential’, because they cannot be fully processed—or given a factual content—and are thereby ‘emotionally provocative’ (p. 97). The specific characteristic of religious belief, then, beyond its memorability, is that it is indeterminate1: incapable of being given a fixed content, emotive therefore rather than cognitive. Both the memorability and the derivative indeterminate nature of such beliefs are by-products of the meta-representational capacity. ‘The meaning of an act of faith is not an inference to a specific proposition or set of propositions, but is an emotionally charged network of partial and changeable descriptions of counter-factual and counter-intuitive worlds’ (p. 110).

This is then how the metaphorical is reintroduced. The evidence for such a complex function (the meta-representational capacity) is arbitrary, in the sense that it is needed in this perspective in order to account for certain lower-order findings (see p. 108). It cannot be directly demonstrated, rather, it is part of a programmatic statement: there are primary and secondary representations and, within the latter, there is a strict division between factual common sense representations and deductions, on the one hand, and affective symbolic representations and deductions, on the other. There is an order of pragmatism and an order of belief, sitting side-by-side: together, a programme to generate both kinds of behaviour.

Just as the function of the agency detection device is the elimination of metaphor, so the function of the capacity for meta-representation is to eliminate rhetoric, if we take rhetoric to be how a person is ‘at home’ in human affairs. Rhetoric concerns such matters as how a person makes him- or herself understood, and understands others’ reasons, complaints and admiration. We need some such concept in order to grasp how someone may defend her actions, make accusations, and offer eulogy, praise, recommendation or warning. All these things concern not only physical forces but also moral authority, questions of responsibility, assistance, duties, rights (and the circumstances of them), and so forth. Atran however regards such matters as derivative and is concerned with them only as a class of event and not with their internal organization.

2. Moving the Social to the Centre

In sum, Atran demonstrates how counter-intuitive representations may be explained: what they are, how they arise, why they are retained, how they spread. This demonstration demands an apparatus: mental modules, including a theory of mind to allow the extension of perception from proper to actual domains, allowing representation; the introduction of a species-specific cognitive device of meta-representation, permitting the manipulation of representations; the distinction on these grounds between the common sense world and symbolic beliefs in the individual; and the spread of beliefs, myths and religious commitments across populations because of their shared (genetic) mental capacities. The primary criterion for such cultural beliefs is their non-obvious nature, their standing apart from common sense. In short, the human is the ceremonial animal (from Wittgenstein’s ‘Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough’ (1931), via James (2003)), characterized by behaviours which stand on their own and which cannot immediately be explained by adaptation and selection, but which nevertheless keep the human in continuity with the rest of the natural kingdom.

Over the last twenty years, while cognitivist arguments have developed and new perspectives (such as ‘embodied cognition’) have appeared, the basic presuppositions have remained constant: the absolute distinction between real and imaginary—pragmatic and symbolic behaviours—and the priority in explanatory (causal) terms of the first over the second. I want to consider briefly a recent essay, both to confirm this claim and to see the refinements that are possible on this basis. Harvey Whitehouse’s (2021) account of The Ritual Animal offers a number of parallels to Atran’s approach; both are anthropologists, both cover a great range of materials, topics and theories, and both effect a remarkable synthesis, presenting a general theory and a research programme. Whitehouse’s particular interest is his repositioning of complex social behaviour: rather than making such activity secondary and derivative it is given a primary role in human evolution; symbolic thought is held to offer selective advantage. In contrast to Atran, Whitehouse places cultural behaviour—and therefore religion—at the heart of the project.

Nevertheless, the contrast is not as great as it appears. The two approaches begin from common ground: like Atran, Whitehouse distinguishes between ‘technically useful behaviours’ (Whitehouse 2021, p. 1) and rituals, which are at once costly, idiosyncratic, and yet universal. In this regard, rituals, which can stand in for many collective human practices, ‘lack a fully specifiable causal mechanism’. The explanatory framework, again, assumes an evolutionary perspective, common to all life; the challenge then is (as before) to explain ‘why people everywhere perform rituals’, if rituals lack any knowable causal structure so that they appear to work by magic (having therefore no objective technical value) and at the same time draw on valuable time and resources.

Whitehouse’s solution is to attribute positive functional value to the causal opacity of rituals. This is the focus of his work of redescription, drawing the ‘evolutionary origins, functions, causes, and consequences’ (p. 3) of rituals into a single narrative of inheritance. As with Atran, who introduces the concept of ‘minimally counter-intuitive’ ideas to explain the survival and transmission of symbolic forms, Whitehouse identifies the problem in terms of the passing on of what he calls ‘the causally opaque conventions of the community’ (p. 2). And, likewise, he looks to mental mechanisms, invoking ‘an evolved predisposition to imitate causally opaque behaviour … motivated by a desire to affiliate with groups’. In short, humans join in groups by imitating ill-understood shared patterns of behaviour, and this is a mental property that has been selected for.

Why has this inherited behaviour been selected for? Rituals can be redescribed in terms of group belonging, cashed out in terms, first, of ‘hope of magical assistance’ and, more potently, in terms of banding together in the face of ‘outgroup threats and natural disasters’ (p. 2). The hope of magical assistance is not irrelevant because religious thinking of this kind—impracticable beliefs—represent the hard case, given its apparently non-functional behaviour. In this fashion, rituals can be understood as operating as social glue, explaining diverse forms of solidarity, and driving cooperation.

The grounds of social solidarity and the explanation of cooperation are of course classical sociological territory. Whitehouse introduces a further important distinction in terms of the scale of operation of the group. In small bands, these functions may give rise to self-sacrifice on behalf of the group (a functionalist conundrum) in the face of a collective challenge or threat, while, at a larger scale, a ‘less powerful but highly spreadable adhesive’ operates in larger ‘imagined’ communities (nations or world religions, for instance), ‘where group survival depends on being able to access and centralize resources gathered from widely distributed populations’ (p. 3). The first, ritual responses to local pressures, may explain extreme cases, while the diffuse, expansive form of cohesion is ‘a cultural adaptation to cooperative challenges and intergroup competition in much larger coalitions’. We have, in short, the basis for an inventory of the forms of cooperative life; the correlation of varieties of group adhesion with group scale allows a range of collective behaviours to be classified and related, including compassion, boundary making, action at a distance, sect and church, minorities and majorities, repulsion and contagion. A whole range of social phenomena running from the individual life to that of large collectivities can be explained on the basis of psychological modules subject to natural selection.

Cooperation is the key criterion underwriting solidarity, and morality is the actors’ account of behaviours based in its practice. These selected-for, universally shared properties underly ritual behaviour, which can be routinized in seven cooperative ‘rules’ which are to be found in every human society: ‘help your group, support your family, return favours, be brave, defer to superiors, divide resources fairly, and respect other people’s property’ (p. 6). Whitehouse continues: ‘all the collective rituals of the world can be classified according to which of the seven cooperative moral concerns they serve most directly’. In this account, religious behaviour arises from moral concerns and is expressed in a variety of ideas such as solidarity, transcendence, collective meals, rites of passage, reciprocity with ancestors, fostering courage, deference to authority, distribution of goods, notions of equity, charity, and rights, and supporting a range of institutions and practices.

Atran was interested in the implications of recent advances in psychology, while Whitehead can take these for granted and redescribe the sociological field as a branch of the anthropology of symbols. In his account, social behaviour moves centre-stage rather than arising as a series of accidental side effects of selective processes. But the two approaches are compatible and, indeed, complementary; both take the continuity between animal life, subject to adaptation and selection without remainder, and human life, subject to cooperation and moral orderings, to be a given, fundamental to the intelligibility of social life and religious forms.

3. Anthropological and Philosophical Criticisms of Cognitivism

Some anthropologists and philosophers have posed a number of criticisms of the cognitive science approach. In broad terms, Cognitivism appears to revive features of nineteenth century anthropology, treating ritual, sacrifice and religion as natural categories of an unproblematic kind and opening the way to an uncritical comparativism, of the kind Malinowski accused Frazer of perpetrating. It also has a strongly individual base to social explanation, seeing the common ground as mental units found within each individual’s mind, which in turn demands a theory of imitation or contagion to explain collective behaviour. In sum, natural categories, comparativism, and a method based on individualism.

As an example, see Laidlaw’s (2007) nuanced criticism. He suggests, first, that cognitive science concerns itself with causes not reasons (nor with imagination or will), and with a single method or explanation, thereby excluding the plurality of intentions of historical actors: a natural scientific as opposed to a historical or humanistic approach. Second, Cognitive science ignores the history of the term ‘religion’, imagining it to be a natural object, and yet adopts a recent historical product, the focus on beliefs, conceived in terms of sets of representations and practices relating to these representations. This is ‘Natural Religion’, a genus with a series of species, which can then be related to a limited set of mental products, expressed in a limited series of ritual forms, and related to a theory of a few memorable representational forms (Boyer’s contribution, in particular). The scientific question then becomes what in human nature inclines man to belief? The focus is on mind and its mistaken products, and historical events are considered as instances of probabilistic regularities. And third, beliefs in cognitive science are treated as representations, which then are divided into two classes, as ‘reflective’ and ‘intuitive’ (Sperber 1997), or as pertaining to cognitive and affective causes, which then involves re-description of behaviour in circular fashion.

Atran would defend some of these moves on the basis of recent scientific advances; other accusations he would object to as misreading him. Likewise, Whitehouse places himself within a revived functionalist tradition, deriving his account of social scale and symbols from the Durkheimian School; in effect, he offers a neo-functionalist account of collective representations on the basis again of a number of recent discoveries.

In a little more detail, the basic objections appear to be these (for convergent philosophical criticism, see (Descombes 2001)). First, the move to mental images or representations and their recombinations creates a problem of solipsism, or a version of the private language argument. How can representations created in the mind/brain of individuals be shared? How do the individuals know that the representations are shared, so that they may act in common?

Second, the focus upon programmes/structures leaves the world of actual practices and behaviours behind, as both unimportant and as examples of the kind of thing the structures permit. Corresponding to this, there are the standard problems of where the programme is situated, how it is realized, and how deviations or exceptions are permitted (how novelty arises). Although a programme can generate all kinds of behaviour, this does not explain why certain behaviour is generated under particular circumstances. All these issues may be expressions of the private language problem: how does explanation cope with the move between levels without demanding all kinds of special conditions that are not part of the representation/programme?

Third, the reduction of metaphor to error and the elimination of rhetoric (which correspond to analysis in terms of Lockean primary and secondary impressions) remove the entire object of our interest—the world of human affairs. This is where Laidlaw’s criticisms hold particular force.

Fourth, putting the mind inside the head involves a reduplication of the real world in terms not only of representations, but of the number of functions or black boxes that are needed in the head. This I call the ‘Numbskulls’ problem (after the Beano comic strip): every discrimination to be explained demands its own function or module.

And fifth, hinted at in the Introduction, naturalistic accounts of this kind encourage the view that humans are without either initiative or responsibility.

For a recent exemplification of the arguments on both sides, see Gellner et al. (2020), which gives the text of a debate between advocates of the theory of ‘morality as co-operation’, drawn from evolutionary cognitive anthropologists, and critics drawn from the anthropology of ethics. The point to take away, perhaps, is that the criticisms raised by anthropologists and philosophers are unable to breach the confidence placed in the naturalistic argument, so that the two sides speak past one another.

The precise locus of the disagreement, I believe, is in the status of language each side holds to be the case, or the two ‘language ideologies’ in play. Very briefly, the anthropological critics (and the philosophers) belief the attribution of agency may not be a category mistake, but rather be due to the human capacity to speak of one thing in terms of another. That is, they oppose the claim to a literal (scientific) language that can eliminate any causal powers to metaphor (exemplified by the frog-fly model above). Rather, metaphor—or imagination—may play a foundational role in the human world and may, indeed, be essential to the working of the scientific mind and its models. In order to produce a more scientific version of Cognitivism, it may need to become more historically aware (cf. Jenkins 2014); hence the interest of studies in ‘embodied cognition’. Here, however, I wish to follow the argument in another direction.

4. Criticism from the Perspective of Evolutionary Biology

The conviction that a naturalistic account will prevail over any explanation in terms of human endeavour, whether put in terms of imagination, culture, symbols, or religion, is very strong in the contemporary world. It appeals to educated common sense and has a self-evident quality to many including bureaucrats and administrators, politicians and businessmen, for it promises means of regulating social order and resolving anomalies. It is all the more striking, then, to encounter a strong case put against the continuity between animal and human cognition by an evolutionary biologist. This is the subject of a recent essay, ‘The myth of animal minds’, by Simon Conway Morris (in Conway Morris 2022), which I turn to in order to gain a different perspective on the relation of cognitivism and religion.

Conway Morris’s object is to grasp the unique properties of human minds. He approaches this topic not as a psychologist but as a zoologist, considering the distinction between animal and human cognition to be one of kind rather than degree. Evolutionary biologists in general note the continuities in human physical properties with the animal kingdom and tend to assume similar continuities in mental properties. Conway Morris argues that in making such claims, evolutionists tend to project human models and seek similarities rather than differences; moreover, they repeatedly construct their continuities in ways that exceed the evidence. In short, they produce fables, which is a distinctly human thing to do. Instead, we should accept an uncrossable gulf between animal and human minds and seek to understand the singular nature and source of human intelligence.

Accepting this difference in kind means facing up to the claim that Darwinian principles do not apply to the human case. Or rather, the Darwinian principles of variation and selection serve to explain both the physical and cognitive properties of animals but cannot be invoked to make human behaviour intelligible. Animal behaviour, on this line of argument, however it may be construed for human parallels or human-like anticipations, is strictly functional: it deals in matters like food, territory, mate selection and other needs, and it is confined to the immediate environment, to the present both in time and place. Humans, although an animal species produced by the same evolutionary principles, have made a step-change: they have moved beyond the primacy of need and functional responses and are not confined to the here-and-now: instead, they are capable of imagining different times and places and for these acts of imagination to alter their behaviour decisively in the present. The uses their biological bodies are put to, even meeting their functions and needs, are in the human case determined by the invisible properties of the mind, by things that are not present. Animals, we might say, are defined by needs and by the present indicative case, while humans are shaped by desires—though that is not a term Conway Morris uses—and by ‘modal’ cases: what might be, or what ought to be, or what must be, the case.

Atran and Whitehouse of course mark this step-change by invoking, in the one case, a module allowing ‘meta-representation’ and, in the other, ‘an evolved predisposition to imitate causally opaque behaviour’ and a desire to affiliate with groups, but these are, as many critics have noted, simply black boxes; they cannot explain the importance of the imagination, the influence of the past and the future over the present, and the nature of desire; they state the problem, but offer no mechanism or explanation. So let us pursue our reading of Conway Morris’s argument.

The distinction animal mind/human mind is therefore shaped by a series of oppositions, the one present, the other stretched between past and future, the one concerned with will, the other with memory and hope, the one with biological needs, the other with human desires (which may include some very strange developments in terms of putting biological needs to work), and so forth. Two things follow from this distinction. On the one hand, attempts to describe human behaviour as being in continuity with animal behaviour will miss what is essential about human beings. And, on the other hand, quite of lot of things have become unclear. When we speak of animals, we have a number of terms with which, rightly or wrongly, we feel secure. We know what we mean when we talk of needs and functions, of environmental pressures, of variation and selection, of means to achieve ends, of competition and its consequences. In essence, this is a vocabulary taken from Utilitarianism, developed to describe the situation of industry and urbanism in the nineteenth century and applied, somewhat surprisingly, in the 1860s to make the natural kingdom intelligible. It is surprising because the utilitarian vocabulary does a pretty good job, allowing a series of problems to be resolved, first in the theory of natural selection, then in the New Synthesis which joined genetics and the statistics of populations. But, from the perspective of this vocabulary, there are a number of terms which simply do not fit; all we know about them—from this perspective—is that they have escaped from the explanatory framework. Desire and imagination are, first of all, excessive terms: they signal our escape from the confines of need and the present context; they do not, by that, have a great deal of content.

And this is exactly how Conway Morris sees their work: the human mind exceeds the limits of animal life, including cognition. As its most general expression, the division between the individual and its setting, between the unit of selection and the environment, breaks down in the human case. This is where some initial questions arise. Is it the case that the utilitarian vocabulary works without remainder in the non-human kingdoms, or are there things left out of consideration there too? And is it the case that selection has to operate exclusively at the level of the individual—either organism or gene—in the plant and animal world? The whole essay plays around this absolute boundary between the single organism and the environment in the case of animals and its breakdown in the case of humans: humans interpenetrate through sympathy, and shape and are shaped by their environment. A further pair has to be added to our series of oppositions marking the animal to human divide, then, that is, individual to collective as the functional or operational unit.

This pattern of reflection on the overcoming of limits among humans ends in the essay with consideration of the brain: is the human mind best thought of as ‘inside’ the individual’s head at all, or is it, on the contrary, ‘out there’, in a collective mind, simply to be registered by the individual’s brain acting as a filter? This is entirely the right sort of question, speaking as a sociologist. Sociologists, at least from my background, think of this larger mind as ‘the social’ (an ugly word which tries to avoid making collective human intelligence too substantial a thing), something that is accessed or participated in by desire and imagination (or, of which desire and imagination are instances). There is, however, a residual question, left to the end of Conway Morris’s essay, of whether or why we need to go beyond the social or collective order to name what is excessive about the terms we have identified. We will leave that question to one side for the moment.

Conway Morris begins the argument as a biologist, and an evolutionary biologist at that. Beginning there means focussing on individual animals as the locus of both variation and selection and presents the conundrum of how to generate social life, taken as a higher order in which humans uniquely live and move and have their being. Having set out the problem, the middle part of the essay discusses the characteristics of social life, in a series of sections which, to my reading, recapitulate the arguments of Schopenhauer and Durkheim. In particular, neither of them nor Conway Morris make the acquisition of language the crucial human characteristic, and this I believe is a fruitful approach. I want to outline some of the parallels both for their own interest and because they help us get a grip on the question we have left to one side.

In On the Basis of Morality, Schopenhauer identifies three kinds of human motivation and reviews each in turn as the possible basis for human behaviour, behaviour which he sees as defined by obligation, that is, what we owe one another. He begins from ‘egoism’, which is linked to need and therefore corresponds to the claims of evolutionary biologists, and states that any social order emerging from such grounds must inevitably break down, although forms of temporary cooperation would be possible where mutual interests coincide. He then intriguingly proposes ‘malice’ as a second candidate, working from the observation that, on occasion, we enjoy the misfortune of others, and that one might on this basis explain a good deal of human behaviour. He uses this notion to make two points, the first being a repeat of the argument about egoism, that it would be impossible to erect enduring social arrangements on such motivation. But the second point is the crucial one: once you have accepted that another’s misfortune constitutes a possible source of pleasure, you have allowed the principle of representation. Impossible for an animal, another’s state of mind has effects within you, alters your behaviour and possibilities. This possibility allows the human world to come into being—hence the title of Schopenhauer’s major work, The World as Will [Egoism] and Representation. And it allows his third candidate for explaining human obligation, our linked natures and possibilities, which is ‘compassion’. Once we acknowledge representation, we may be affected in our motivations and activities by the pity we feel for another or others. Indeed, he suggests, that motivation may on occasion be strong enough to impede our self-interest and can be strengthened in the higher societies by social arrangements in the forms of law and, even, charities.

Schopenhauer is extremely stimulating, and his arguments closely resemble those employed in Conway Morris. This is because he starts from the resources available in the individual from which one might then derive social forms. Nietzsche offers some variations on Schopenhauer, seeking improvements and designing thought experiments, although I am not sure he advances much on him. He criticizes Schopenhauer for focussing on pity (which comes from the latter’s reading Rousseau) and suggests we may also be moved by others to joy, not simply pity; that is a considerable advance. And he also explores whether you could derive human sociability from the discarded candidate of malice; not so good, perhaps. On this score, we get the argument in The Genealogy of Morality which resembles some of the evolutionary biologists but on speed: man is an ape that makes promises, that is, he binds the future through obligation. How, then, Nietzsche asks, is he caused to remember and be bound to others in this fashion? By primitive festivals of torture and inscription on bodies—tattoos and the like—in orgies of ape effervescence (a parody of Rousseau’s primitive assemblies). Memory—and obligation—is produced by socially inscribed pain. I am sure bonobos could be recruited for this line of argument, but I am equally sure the thought experiment would fail, for the kind of reasons Conway Morris gives, mentioned above, that we are dealing in a projection of human models and concerns.

Durkheim then took up Schopenhauer’s arguments and developed them into a fuller sociological account, with the social order being defined by obligation (and desire too, to do him justice: both what you have to do and what you want to do) and existing through shared social categories, which he called collective representations. For Durkheim, sociology could be defined as a response to the problem of ‘idolatry’ (though the formulation is mine): humans make things with their hands and construe the world with their minds, and yet their artefacts, what they collectively make and think, controls them and determines their possibilities. Humans manufacture money, tools, drugs, public offices and so forth, they create such notions as authority, legitimacy, value, and sanctity, and yet these artefacts (idols) control them and construct and order their lives, always constraining their liberty and sometimes causing them real harm. Durkheim explains the compelling power of these obligations, the fashion in which they oblige individuals and shape (or even countermand) their desires, as well as their enduring and objective existence, by their collective nature: they are sanctioned, sustained, and transmitted by our collective life.

Durkheim’s criticism of Nietzsche was that he was too focussed on the individual as the source and origin of human activity, even though he gave wonderful speculative histories (genealogies) of the mixed nature of human institutions, such as the law, where successive motives and purposes take over earlier forms created for quite different ends. Starting with biological accounts likewise tends to be caught up in the problems of origins and the shift in levels: how did these elements get caught up in a higher-order synthesis? Durkheim starts from the other end, taking the collective representations as given and then deriving matters of psychology (motivations, such as to whom are you attracted?) and even biology (who mates with whom) from them. When he does talk about origins, he simply uses a version of Rousseau’s primitive assembly—‘collective effervescence’—which allows him to talk about a society derived from a Revolution, drawing a concept from a recent historical context.

Conway Morris likewise explores the various faces of collective representations, which are lacking to the animal kingdom. We have successive discussion of kindness, tools, gods, and instruction; largely from the perspective of animal failures to score, we consider compassion, the merging of means and ends, the possibility of cooperation and teaching and, generally, the construction of the world through our understanding. All this works very well, as do the succeeding sections on language, mathematics, and music. These centre around the positive qualities of recursiveness (embedding of phrases) and the manipulation of abstractions, as you would expect from a natural science perspective; as a sociologist, I tend to notice failures to communicate, the approximations of abstract systems (or their frequent inability to account for specifics) and their dependence upon their context of use. But these differences of emphasis are of little significance; we are much on the same page, although the scientist tends to look for the clarity of intellectual operations and the social scientist to muddles which bring out the mental operations at work in, as it were, relief. There is however one further question to be explored, set aside earlier, and especially relevant given the overall topic of cognitivism and religion.

This question is, do we need to posit a single unifying mental universe—a Cosmic Mind—which is borne witness to, apprehended, and participated in by human social behaviour? I wonder whether this last step, which Conway Morris only hints at, is a function of the original starting point, the presupposition that selection operates at the level of the individual organism. In this account, there may be only two truly real realities: the individual and the whole, each finding their meaning in the other. In contrast, the sociological presupposition is that the only secure reality is at the intermediate scale, the social level. Sociologists tend to take the social order as primary, while operating at a number of intermediate scales from the quite small to the fairly large, and the notions both of the individual and the universal as being temporary effects of various local collective operations. You need not deny there are metaphysical systems—universal explanations—but you want to watch out for who is using them and under what conditions. Furthermore, our individuality is more or less pronounced according to circumstances. I agree, then, with the argument, taken from Kelly et al. (2007), that the mind is not ‘in’ the individual brain but ‘out there’, in the collective products of human intelligence at various scales—language games, institutional practices, dress codes and styles, legal processes and on and on—but I do not see any need to leap from that to evidence of a Cosmic Mind. Kelly is a psychologist, and so readily sees the importance of the individual/Universal framework, but this frame then wastes a lot of the work done on intermediate forms like language, music, mathematics. It is true that these forms point to values which transcend the human context of their production, but their transcendence is what might be called ‘virtual’ rather than ‘real’.

In sum, Conway Morris has identified a problem, the uniqueness of the human mind with respect to animal cognition. He rightly (in my view) points to the essentially social nature of humans to explain this phenomenon but cannot offer any account of the transition from able ape to conscience-stricken human, a problem he shares with sociologists and social philosophers (who simply recount myths when they try to describe the problem). And he needs to come to terms with the Cosmic Mind; do we need it, or is it a piece of German Romanticism whose work could be better achieved by recourse to some more sociological thinking?

5. Discussion/Conclusions

Conway Morris’s essay serves mostly as a check on the optimistic assumption of continuity between the animal and the human on the part of cognitivists. His value lies in his careful review of the evidence for each and every assertion. Take, as an example, the instances which are supposed to show co-operation and moral concern between animals, when, in his words, ‘we misattribute mental states to animals, reading their often noisy reactions into moral equivalents, especially altruism’ (Conway Morris 2022, p. 171). Having considered claims for evidence of empathy, consolation, and fairness between chimpanzees, he turns to food sharing and concludes that ‘even when collaborating, this has nothing to do with sharing but only the aim of obtaining a bigger share of the goodies … Chimpanzees can certainly be alert to the actions of others, but they remain “heartless”. They are fundamentally competitive, lack common goals, and remain unaware of what (let alone who) a partner really is or how to see another’s perspective’ (p. 173).

The last point is crucial: animals lack both any sense of self as self and any notion that another animal might have an equivalent sense; they have no inner life and so no way of imagining an inner life in others. Conway Morris’s conclusion is that ‘unable to step out of their minds, animals will never step into a moral universe. Fairness is far beyond their ken, and they will never learn to take turns’ (p. 174).

On these grounds, we should leave open the question of the singular nature of human intelligence, let alone its ‘source’. In so doing we are no worse off that the cognitivists, who acknowledge the closed nature of the black box that marks this unique quality. However, rather than bracket it out and assume a continuity between human and animal kinds, we might acknowledge this discontinuity and learn to work with it.

That is the main conclusion of this essay. However, it is worth offering some indications of a possible way forward.

My reason for suggesting this conclusion is that even such a basic distinction as that between realism and imagination, with which we began, is altered depending on whether one brackets out the fundamental difference between animal life and the human mind or faces it. We are confronted with different ideas of realism. For realism within a human world is shot through with imaginative elements; for example, it presupposes an external world that is ordered by causal sequences which are reliable, which can in principle be deciphered and understood by the actor, and which can respond to human intervention so that its direction can be altered in some regard in a predictable outcome. Yet, both the order and the perception are to a degree fictions and the outcomes rarely in accordance with the understanding and motivations of the moment. That is why we have to have recourse to notions of culture, social order, symbols, religion and so forth to offer descriptions of the world we live in and are part of; they are not extras, useful or otherwise. In this perspective, realism is a social fact, a world view that distributes values backing up secure and insecure understandings, ‘facts’ and ‘symbols.’

The realist position adopted by cognitivism, by which real elements can be sorted from imaginative and given absolute priority, is simply in this view a strong form of the pragmatic hypothesis: one needs to think like this in order to be able to act, let alone hope to achieve ends. The imaginative position adopted by the Humanities advocates paying attention, particularly in situations which do not readily lend themselves to decisive action, instead being satisfied with observing and describing. Imagination in this sense is no less disciplined than realism, but it conceives the world differently. Man’s relation to animals—itself a prime anthropological topic—is simply a signal of which position is uppermost.

Along this line of argument, I suggested earlier one way forward may be to bring both forms into a common frame and to consider each as alternative ways of construing language, classifying the presuppositions behind different models of how language works, which would allow us to understand the distributions of secure and insecure—clear and unclear—terms in each settlement. In this fashion, we may further integrate cognitivism and the humanistic social sciences, which would be to the advantage of both. At present, cognitivism may need a more scientific epistemology, rather than any less, and this would allow more detailed, historical engagement with human practices, among them religion, which will continue to play its elusive but indispensable role.