Abstracts

Imagination and Sacred Value

David Stewart Neil van Leeuwen Georgia State University

According to standard theories of human action, preferences interact with beliefs to cause and rationalize behavior. For example, if I prefer having coffee to not having coffee, and if I believe there is a coffee shop two blocks up on the left, this preference-belief pair will cause the action of walking two blocks up and going left (if there are no defeating conditions). Preferences, on this picture, are typically taken to have various fundamental properties, two of which are transitivity and temporal discounting. Transitivity means that if I prefer A to B and B to C, then I also prefer A to C. Temporal discounting means that I prefer a desired outcome sooner rather than later, other things equal. Anthropologist Scott Atran, however, has done field work among terrorist organizations in Indonesia, during which he found evidence of preference structures that violate transitivity and temporal discounting. He calls this non-standard system of preferences “sacred value,” since it’s tied to various religious commitments. A question now arises: if the preferences encoded in sacred values have non-standard properties, should we expect the “beliefs” that interact with these preferences in causing bahavior to have non-standard properties as well? I argue in the affirmative, in particular, that we can expect the “beliefs” that interact with sacred values to have features more similar to imaginings than to ordinary factual beliefs. This is a conclusion I have argued for elsewhere (“Religious credence is not factual belief” Cognition 133, 2014), but the present approach is a new route to it.