anthropomorphism to fresh possibilities

anthropomorphism to fresh possibilities for interpretation that are especially important for understanding its role in the human spiritual traditions in modernity, as well as the controversies surrounding that role. This research proposes that a single set of psychological mechanisms is likely to explain when people perceive a mind at work in an encountered phenomenon, regardless of whether the thing in question is a god, a machine, an animal, another person, or an uncanny sequence of events. From this perspective, the psychological process of anthropomorphic inference works in concert with two other motivational mechanisms: the need to interact effectively with nonhuman phenomena in our environment and the desire to establish social connections with other humans.” The phrase anthropomorphic inference fails to capture, however, the interactive dynamism that infuses a person’s perception that a mind is at work in another agent. Put more strongly, our sense that mind is present in the other is, in no small measure, the sense that we are communicating. The absence of this communicative dimension of mind perception is precisely the tragedy in the family of an Alzheimer’s patient—the loss of reciprocal recognition. As Tanya Luhrmann vividly illustrates in the next chapter, religious anthropomorphism builds on the notion that this communicative reciprocity extends beyond the boundary of human society into the wider environment and includes social connection and communication with the divine. Anthropomorphism adds an obvious but important twist to these psychological mechanisms: whenever a person ascribes human attributes to a Page |105 nonhuman phenomenon, the person nonetheless continues to perceive it as nonhuman. When, for instance, a pet owner observes a dog’s reliability and infers that this behavior arises from the dog’s faithfulness, the owner does not go on to say that the dog is human. Indeed, an indispensable aspect of an anthropomorphic way of seeing Fido’s faithfulness is that the person also continues to see Fido as a dog. This dual perception is even more pronounced in a parallel illustration: a person observes the everyday reliability of gravity and infers that this arises from faithfulness at the heart of the natural order. Both illustrations indicate a close connection of anthropomorphism to metaphor, in which persons understand one kind of thing in terms of another by identifying a feature that bridges their difference without eliminating it. The specific feature, in this case faithfulness, posits a point of comparison that enables a familiar human capacity for loyalty to enable interpretation of another, unfamiliar or alien phenomenon. The illustrations further suggest that Fido’s faithfulness is what could be called weak anthropomorphism, because one could plausibly argue that dogs and humans actually do share a capacity for faithfulness. We perceive that, as mammals, they exhibit many behavioral similarities. By contrast, the perception of faithfulness as an attribute of the natural order is strong anthropomorphism, because it makes a far more daring inference in its effort to draw an analogy that produces insight or knowledge about the communicative reciprocity of the human and the nonhuman. Religions, as Edwards’s sermon illustrates, build primarily on strong anthropomorphism in order to propound communicative social HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_021351