Beyond fakers and fanatics: A reply

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Acknowledgements

For extremely helpful discussions about the writing of this piece, I’d like to thank Adrian Bardon, Paul Bloom, Maarten Boudry, Scott Danielson, Helen De Cruz, Dan Dennett, George Graham, Larisa Heiphetz, Anna Ichino, Casey Landers, Tania Lombrozo, Tanya Luhrmann, Bob McCauley, Eddy Nahmias, Victoria Slocum, and David Spurrett. As it happens, I received so many good and interesting comments that I was quite unable to incorporate them all. I am sorry for this. But I am glad to have learned many things that will no doubt benefit future work. I thank Nick Young for lending me his computer while I drafted this paper. This work was supported by a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellowship from the European Commission [call identifier: H2020-MSCA-IF-2014; contract number: 659912].

Notes

1. The application, however, is in fact much broader than liberal churchgoers. See below for an explanation of how Boudry and Coyne misread my theory.

2. In my terms, it would be more accurate to use the term ‘extremist credence’ rather than ‘factual belief’, since the terrorists’ attitudes were not evidentially vulnerable, whereas factual beliefs are. But nothing turns on this at the moment.

3. I am using ‘fanatic’ as a term of art here. Many people that we loosely call fanatics won’t be fanatics in this special sense, though pretty much anyone who is a fanatic in this special sense will count as fanatics in everyday speech too. Thanks to Helen De Cruz for a comment on this point.

4. Boudry and Coyne are also mistaken to imply that I think that religious credences are in a “special compartment of the mind.” In my paper (2014, pp. 708–709), I make a point of explaining how my view fits with the received view in cognitive science of religion that religious psychological states arise from general capacities. I am just adding a capacity to the list: the capacity to have secondary cognitive attitudes. Relatedly, contrary to what Boudry and Coyne think, the fact that many ordinary capacities are in play in producing religious psychological states does not imply the attitude involved in those states is just like mundane factual belief. Imaginings and hypotheses, too, deploy a variety of mechanisms that are also involved in producing factual beliefs, but that doesn’t make them factual beliefs. Likewise for religious credence. I thank Bob McCauley for input on this point.

5. Boudry and Coyne might wish to escape being committed to this view by appealing to some of the qualifiers they introduce in section 2, for instance, that belief “varies in strength.” But first, those qualifiers don’t sit well with the way they take extremists (such as jihadists and people who build creationist museums) to be the paradigm of a religious person. And second, those qualifiers, on closer analysis, turn out to be concessions in the direction of a theory that more resembles my own.

6. This gives Boudry’s and Coyne’s view more parsimony at the level of kinds of person. But at the level of psychological mechanisms, their theory can’t be more parsimonious, because my theory is built up out of components that everyone (including Boudry and Coyne) has independent reason to posit. For example, since practical setting dependence is a feature of imagining, it doesn’t increase our ontology of psychological mechanisms to say credences have it too.

7. There are various estimates of the size of ISIS. For a brief discussion, see: http://www.vocativ.com/world/isis-2/how-big-is-isis/.

8. I emphasize Boudry’s and Coyne’s dichotomous outlook here. But in fact I think there are two inconsistent outlooks present in their piece. The dichotomous one that I emphasize is far more prominent; it says that religious people factually believe their doctrines—either that, or they don’t “genuinely believe” at all, in which case they’re fakers. Though it’s mistaken, this at least is a fairly clear view that stands in stark opposition to my own. The other outlook present in their piece is less noticeable; it says that the many things called “beliefs” are a motley crew and that “beliefs” differ in all sorts of ways. I focus on the former outlook here, because (a) it’s more prominent and (b) it’s not at all clear in what substantive way someone with the latter outlook actually disagrees with me.

9. Boudry and Coyne say my claim that credences are practical setting dependent (and may be turned on by identity challenges) is not falsifiable. But my claim is falsifiable: it predicts that if we look persistently, we will find circumstances in which credences don’t guide behavior (especially non-verbal behavior), even though their contents would make them relevant. Persistent failure to find such circumstances would falsify my claim.

10. See De Cruz and De Smedt (2014, chapter 3) for complications.

11. Fictional imaginings, of course, also have a form of free elaboration. But the way elaboration in religious credences unfolds is quite different. See section 4.2 of my (2014) paper.

12. People often point out that factual beliefs are formed on testimony from authority too. But evidential authority is a very different thing from the special authority to which credences are vulnerable. See section 4.3 of my (2014) paper.

13. This view is reminiscent of Sperber: “Incidentally, to say that the way a subject is aware of his factual beliefs is different from the way in which he is aware of his representational beliefs, is not to say that the subject is aware of the difference between the two kinds of beliefs. In fact, I assume most people are not aware of this difference (or else I would not be at work establishing it)” (1985, p. 54).