Abstract
Superstitious practices have been considered since the ancient times as signs of deviating cognitive forms (such as the elders’), concerned with irrelevant causal relationships, and/or reducible to religious beliefs (and hence explained away). Recent theories such as the extended mind and cognitive niche construction, though, can shed new light on superstition and its apparently unreasonable success. The trigger is to observe how most superstitions are not mere “beliefs” (such as religious beliefs could be) hosted in a naked mind, but rather involve a strong coupling between the mind and some external props allowing its extensions away from the skull: from bodily gestures, to artifacts and other agents (human and animal). The mind’s capability to extend into the environment supports the related theory of cognitive niche construction, suggesting that human agents achieved better and better performances by creating external structures (cognitive niches) able to provide better and persistent scaffoldings for their cognitive performances. When it is not possible to detect and exploit the presence of a cognitive niche in the environment, superstitious practices can be identified as the possibility to deploy an emergency-cognitive niche projected by the superstitious agent into the world by means of a superstitious prop (item, ritual, gesture). It is poorer and less reliable but preferable to utter blank (and the consequent inaction), and most important it is still coupled with the external world (be it the body or its ecology in forms of artifacts and other agents), thus maintaining the fundamental characteristic of cognitive niches, that is distribution.
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Notes
- 1.
Many entries are quite accurate, and their etymology is indeed illuminating as for the knowledge of the concept, while some other entries are outright hilarious.
- 2.
Religious authorities and scholars have always fought a theological and intellectual battle against superstition, as interestingly shown by the dedicated entry in the Routledge Dictionary of Religious and Spiritual Quotations (Parrinder 2000, p. 24).
- 3.
In agreement with (Odling-Smee et al. 2003, pp. 256–257), the concept of fitness here has to be intended as loosely Darwinian because of the following reasons: extragenetically informed behavior patterns are broadly adaptive and maladaptive; variants occurring during genetic evolution are random, whereas those of extra-genetic information are not.
- 4.
I explicitly refer to how religion is received: this is not the lieu for an analysis of theological debates such as those relating to God’s grace, the relationship between faith and works, and obviously predestination. It is worth noticing, though, that also in theologies preaching predestination the fact that salvation is pre-established automatically excludes it from the kind of luck that can be affected by superstitious practices.
- 5.
This can be linked to confabulatory behavior (Hirstein 2009) towards the exploitation of cognitive niches, inasmuch as an agent is unaware of her own projection—especially when superstition needs to discard a preexistent niche. Still, I uphold this consideration only to the extent that it does not involve a pathologization of superstition, which would utterly go against the spirit of this article.
- 6.
This is akin to the difference between bullshitting (sic.) and lying in their relationship with truth (cf. Magnani 2011, Chap. 4.6; Frankfurt 2005). However noxious, the bullshitter’s lack of commitment towards the truth is usually mirrored by an equal lack of commitment towards the others’ commitment. A liar, instead, has to ensure that the others adhere to the commitment to truth she is denying.
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Bertolotti, T. (2016). Extending Cognition Through Superstition: A Niche-Construction Theory Approach. In: Magnani, L., Casadio, C. (eds) Model-Based Reasoning in Science and Technology. Studies in Applied Philosophy, Epistemology and Rational Ethics, vol 27. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-38983-7_9
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