Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon

I couldn’t resist transmitting it to you. Who will transmit it further? That depends a lot on what other memes infect your brain, and the brains of those you talk to. In the complex world of cultural transmission, the patterns that are directly due to fixed features of human psychology will perhaps not loom particularly large. So it seems to me that those who follow Sperber in his opposition to memes are making points that can better be made in the language of memes: one of the things they are saying, for instance, is that convergent evolution plays such a dominating role in cultural evolution that the transmission of design by actual descent through cultural lineages is much less of a factor in accounting for observed similarities than the shaping of design by selective forces. This is often very plausible, and can be investigated in any case. But we should also be alert to the possibility that many of the similarities between, say, Islam and Christianity may be due to their common Abrahamic ancestor religion rather than to their each having adjusted to similar found conditions in their human adherents.

APPENDIX DKim Philby as a Real Case of Indeterminacy of Radical Interpretation

Â

Philosophers have spent decades dreaming up thought experiments designed to prove or disprove W.V.O. Quine’s (1960) principle of the indeterminacy of radical translation: the surprising claim that in principle there could be two different ways of translating one natural language into another natural language and no evidence at all about which one was the right way to translate the language. (Quine insisted that in that case there wouldn’t be a right way; each way would be as good as the other, and there would be no further fact of the matter.) It seems deeply unlikely at first that this would be possible. Couldn’t a well-informed bilingual, for instance, always tell which of two competing translations of a sentence in one of his languages was the better translation into the other? How could there not be plenty of evidence in favor of one of the two translations?

If you think the resolution is obvious, you haven’t read, or understood, the voluminous philosophical literature on this curious puzzle. A good place to start, after reading Quine’s masterpiece, Word and Object (1960), would be the special 1974 issue of Synthese devoted to a University of Connecticut conference on intentionality, language, and translation, in which Quine took on his most distinguished opponents and left them, and the issue, unresolved, which is where the issue stands today (Quine, 1974a, b).

In the case of Philby’s ultimate beliefs, we have a tantalizing glimpse of how close we might come in the real world (as contrasted with the strange world of many philosophers’ thought experiments) to a case of indeterminacy of radical interpretation (see David Lewis’s essay “Radical Interpretation,” 1974, in the Synthese issue). We may imagine two indefatigable observers, following Philby’s every move, recording his every utterance, reading his most secret papers, listening to him talk in his sleep, and even (now we’re back in philosophy land) recording his every brainwave; and we can see that they might, on the same evidence, come up with staunchly held opposing verdicts: he’s a loyal Brit after all; no, he’s a loyal Soviet.

It would be no use just asking Philby, of course; both observers are well aware of how he’s going to respond to such a query, and their opposing theories account for it about equally well. (For a related argument, see my discussion of the beliefs of “Ella” in “Real Patterns,” 1991b.) No doubt it is hugely unlikely that in such a case neither of the two interpretations would ever unravel, but (Quine insisted) not impossible. That was his point. In every real-world situation, probably, two such radically different interpretations of a whole life history would balance on the knife edge of no verdict for only a short time, and eventually one interpretation would collapse, leaving the other victorious, but we shouldn’t make the mistake of supposing that this was a metaphysical certainty, guaranteed by some special inner fact that settled the issue. We can even come to see, from this perspective, that Philby might himself come to wonder which view was the truth—and not be able to tell! This problem would also face the imagined bilingual who is asked which translation manual is right. He might be astonished to discover that he himself had no resources to say which was “right,” and in that case, Quine insisted, there would be no fact of the matter about which was right. They would be equally good translations, and that’s all one could say.