CHAPTER ONE

There is a problem central to the study of man that goes something like this: why is it that beings, virtually identical in physical makeup and equipped with the same perceptual and cognitive tools, have such different conceptions of what the world is really like? Why do some of these beings think the world is alive with spirits, while others look out on the same world and see only inert matter? Why are some people convinced that one group of human beings is innately superior to another, or that the future can be predicted by the proper study of the stars, while others are equally sure such notions are nonsense? Why do some people believe illness is caused by witchcraft or sorcery, while others claim illness is brought on by unseen micro-organisms? Why do some people believe objects or persons have mystical and magical properties, while others scoff at such ideas? And equally baffling, why do people tenaciously hold to their beliefs even when faced with experiences that contradict them?

The problem is not new. It is a puzzle that men and women in all epochs encountered whenever they met with new peoples and beliefs. Generally they had a ready solution to the dilemma: "We are right, they are mistaken." But why are so many people certain the universe they construe can be sustained, while that of others is so obviously in error? Even we, of course, feel that our beliefs about the world are the "correct" ones. As Barry Barnes puts it:

There is a tendency for us to think that what we know, what we perceive, is solely a function of two things: our cognitive tools--our senses--and the physical reality that provides the stimuli for the senses. What we fail to realize, what we find difficult to admit as human beings is that what we know is as much a function of our cultural and social setting as it is of our senses or the physical world outside us. As anthropologists have argued, human beings are active creators of their worlds, not simply passive receptors of experience. This book, then, is an attempt to provide a framework to understand how people construct the reality they inhabit, why there are so many different ways of interpreting experience, and why people are so certain their interpretations are correct.

To accomplish my purpose I need to make two sets of connections. First, I want to connect work that has been done in various fields of knowledge--anthropology, philosophy, sociology, history and psychology--to help understand how our social settings and patterns of relationships come to influence what we think and believe. The material in the book is not new; rather it is a compilation of the findings of philosophers, anthropologists, sociologists, historians and psychologists that bear on the cultural construction of reality.1 Second, I want to try to make connections between a number of social and cultural phenomenon, especially between social forms, ideas, rituals, magic, science and technology. To help make these connections I propose to construct a belief machine. This belief machine is, of course, a totally imaginary device and will bear no resemblance to those "thinking machines" being built by specialists in artificial intelligence. Instead the belief machine is intended solely as a conceptual device for understanding the worlds that humans create and occupy.

A belief machine of the kind I have in mind must be capable of generating the sorts of beliefs we know people to hold, and convincing the user of the machine that the beliefs it generates are true renditions of reality. In its most basic sense, the machine must convert experience into meaning.

I am going to assume that for a machine to transform experience into meaning it must be capable of performing four separate operations. First, the machine must organize the input into workable units or modules by structuring experience into some manageable form. Second, the machine must be able to portray what it has organized; it must render to the user of the machine the meaning it generates. Third, the machine must have some type of feedback mechanism to correct for outputs that were unacceptable to the user. Finally, the machine must have a built in capability to select the unit or module through which the experience is structured.

I want to demonstrate that it is possible to imagine a device that is able to generate a variety of beliefs, give those beliefs the taken-for-grantedness quality that beliefs seem to have, protect the beliefs from being falsified, and commit the user of the machine to one particular point of view rather than another. Moreover, I am going to try to build this machine solely from social and cultural components and in such a way that it can function without reference to any external reality. The point is that, if such a device can be constructed, even in our imagination, and it is capable of generating all the beliefs we know people to hold, then we must seriously consider the idea that our view of the world is very much constrained by limits set by our social and cultural setting.

The building of the belief machine will proceed as follows. In the remainder of this chapter I want to examine more closely the two notions of "experience" and "meaning." In the next Chapter I want to identify the major components of the belief machine. I will be particularly concerned with the role of metaphor in belief, and how metaphors serve as organizing principles of thought. In Chapter Three I will examine the role of ritual, humor and magic in belief. Ritual, I will argue, plays the role of rendering to the user of the machine the meaning it generates. Moreover, through humor and magic, the meaning is rendered in such a way as to mask the fact that metaphor is not a perfect portrayal of experience. In Chapter Four I will turn to the feedback mechanisms that serve to reduce doubt and engender certainty when a belief has been called into question. Then in Chapter Five I will deal with the social and cultural factors that determine how the belief machine chooses among alternative meanings or convinces the user that the correct meaning has been chosen. Chapters Six and Seven will be reserved for examining some of the consequences of accepting the implications of the belief machine if it is to be constructed in the way I propose.

However before we begin constructing a belief machine, it is necessary to examine more critically the two most important aspects of the machine, the notions of experience and meaning.

How is the input of our belief machine to be received? What does the input consist of? Sir Ernest Gombrich supplies a provocative answer. When you look at an object, he says, you get a

The actual world, as he puts it, "is a chaos of swirling impressions that never repeat themselves" (Gombrich 1959:45). Gombrich is dramatizing what we might call the three paradoxes of experience. The first paradox is that we receive far more experience through the senses than we are capable of assimilating. When you "look" out on the world your visual apparatus is flooded with stimuli. The tiny bones of the inner ear are constantly picking up what we call sounds, and our tactile senses are deluged with stimuli from the environment. Clearly, since we cannot possibly comprehend at any moment all the stimuli acting on us, we must be selective in the experience we attend to at any given moment.

The second paradox has even greater import. Since the set of stimuli we receive at any given moment is totally unique and unlike any other have received or will receive, then it follows that no experience we have is ever like any other experience. As Greek philosopher Heraclitus aptly put it, you cannot step twice into the same river. All experience is new experience. Yet we believe that some experience is the same, that we are the same people, or that our surroundings are the same.

The third paradox has to do with the fact that all of our experience is localized in or on our bodies. The things we "see" are simply sensations on the rods and cones of the eye; what we "hear" are vibrations of the bones of the inner ear; what we "feel" are pressures on the nerves on our skin. Yet the objects we see, the sounds we hear and the things we touch and feel seem to be "out there" away from and outside our bodies. It requires a certain act of faith to jump from the fact that our bodies feel, hear or see something to the fact that that objects or sounds are located away from us.

These paradoxes are plainly troublesome. A universe where everything changed at every instant and appeared as a chaotic flux and which seemed localized in our bodies, is intolerable for an organism that depends for survival on order, continuity and a belief in external reality. Stability, order and pattern must somehow be brought into the world; we must believe some things remain the same, that what we experience bears some relationship to what we have previously experienced, and that there is a world beyond the localized sensations we feel. And, of course, we are able to do this; the question is how?

One way to answer this question is to assume that when we have a new experience (and every experience is new), we make sense of it by consciously or unconsciously relating it to some prior experience we have had. In this regard the process of converting experience into meaning is essentially a process of interpreting the new according to the known.

Imagine discovering a new word, one whose meaning is unknown to you. The obvious thing to do is consult a dictionary. But a dictionary is useless in a world where everything is new. You would go to look up the meaning of the new word and discover all the words used to describe it were also new, and their meaning unknown. To discover the meaning of a new word, you must first know the meaning of at least some of the words used to describe it. You must first know something to know anything else. All knowing must proceed like this; a matter of interpreting the new according to the known.

Gombrich illustrates this nicely with an example from art. Figure 2 is a print from a sixteenth century woodcut of locusts.

According to the artist, the drawing was "the exact counterfeit" of insects which swarmed into Europe. As any entomologist will tell you however, it is unlikely there was ever a prancing insect like the one in the drawing. Instead, the artist was influenced by previous drawings of locusts and the fact the archaic German word for locust is "heupferd" (hayhorse).

Or compare the rhinoceros in Figure 4 with the one in Figure 5. The animal in figure four was, according to the artist, "designed from the life"; that is done with a live model. It was more likely that the artist was influenced by past representations of a rhinoceros, such as the one in figure five by Durer, and by descriptions which likened the skin of a rhinoceros to armor.

Like the artist, all persons bring the past to bear on the present. We take the known and we use it to comprehend the new. Put another way, what we already know must play a role in what we see. In his book, Patterns of Discovery: An Inquiry into the Conceptual Foundations of Science, Norwood Hanson writes,

It would seem, then that the first step in converting experience to meaning, taking the "chaos of swirling impressions" and from them constructing a meaningful world, is to seek relations between separate objects and events; the machine must seek similarities among unique experiences, and classify them together and make it seem each new experience is like some previous experience. This process is, of course, a relatively primitive one. All living organisms can make discriminations between objects, states or experiences and react to them accordingly. If you take an egg from a gulls nest, and place it a short distance away, the gull will not only roll the egg back to the nest, but also all roughly egg-shaped rocks in the same area. It perceives similarities among different objects.

There is another way of looking at how we translate our experience into a sense of an external world. There are two ways, says Michael Polanyi, that we are aware of things: one he calls "focal awareness", and the other he calls "subsidiary awareness." Imagine hammering a nail. Your direct experience consists of the pressure of the handle on the palm of your hand and the image striking the retina. Yet the head of the hammer and the head of the nail are "out there" at the spot where we bring the two together. For Polanyi our focal awareness is of the head of the hammer and the head of the nail. Our subsidiary awareness, however, is of the pressure on our palms and the image on the retina, or the flexing and extending of the muscles in our arm.

Or imagine holding a probe or stick; imagine you experience the outside world only through the probe. The feeling in your palm is the subsidiary through which you are aware of the chair touched by the probe. Yet you think you "feel" the chair at the end of the probe! Close your eyes and with a pen or pencil tap on a chair or table; you hear the tapping external to yourself, and feel the table at the end of the probe. But the sensory experience is all localized in your body.

Polanyi calls the relationship of the subsidiary to the focal point a "from-to" relationship. We go from the subsidiaries to the focal point. In essence, our focal awareness of the world is based on the subsidiaries we bring to it. We can destroy this relationship, and our focal awareness, by switching our attention to the subsidiaries through which we are aware of something. Close your eyes and strike the table or chair again with a pencil or pen, but this time focus your attention on the feeling of the pencil on your fingers or hand. When that feeling becomes the focal point, the table or chair "disappear", so to speak. Try to hit a nail with a hammer while focusing on the feeling of the hammer in your hand and the muscles contracting and expanding in your arm. You'll probably miss.

Polanyi says all our knowing is "from-to" knowing; we are aware of things--objects, persons, ideas, or rules--through subsidiaries such as sensory stimuli on our bodies or memories of past experiences that we bring with us to the act of knowing.

The artist who drew the rhinoceros "from the life" brought with him to the creative act, not only his perception of the animal, but also past representations he had seen, past descriptions he had heard, and probably a whole host of other subsidiaries, all merging into his drawing as a focal object. Our experiences can only be comprehensible through the subsidiaries that we bring to bear on those experiences.

Polanyi's idea of from-to knowing has interesting consequences for the belief machine. First, since there must be many subsidiaries that we bring to bear on a focal object or experience, the machine must work a phenomenal transformation by fusing the subsidiaries into a focal object. Take a stereo-viewer. The focal image we see through it is a single three-dimensional picture, but the subsidiaries are two separate, two-dimensional pictures. The stereo-viewer has performed a phenomenal transformations; there is a new sense perception not contained in the two separate two-dimensional pictures.

In addition, the subsidiaries that we bring to our knowledge of a focal object or experience are unspecifiable. This does not mean we cannot be focally aware of subsidiaries. However, it does mean that when we switch our awareness to the subsidiaries, as we did when we tapped the table with the probe, the original focal object disappears. We must, says Polanyi,

To illustrate what Polanyi is saying, imagine your encounters with new words, that is words you don't know the meaning of. Take the word "rhadamanthine." If you don't know its meaning, it is itself a focal object. Now contrast your perception of "rhadamanthine" with familiar words. Take any word on this page, such as "illustrate." This word is itself a subsidiary you bring to bear on its meaning. Your familiar use of a word, your subsidiary use of it, renders it bodiless, says Polanyi; it becomes transparent. And it must, for if all words were focal objects, like "rhadamanthine," they would be unable to bear on and give meaning to the things they represent.

In sum, the paradoxes of experience must be overcome by some mechanism that allows us to select from our sensory intake a portion of the stimuli we receive, must make it seem that some experiences are like others, and must encapsulate the subsidiaries we bring to bear on focal objects. But if we need a mechanism to overcome the paradoxes of experience, what do we get when they are overcome?

Man, it seems, is distinguished by the ability to take experience and encode it into highly complex forms, and transfer these forms from one experience to another. These forms contain systems of relations that create a "connectedness" in the world. These forms encapsulate meaning. When something is meaningless, on the other hand, it lacks coherence or sense. Objects and events in a meaningless universe are isolated from each other, and enter no relationship with other objects or events. Objects or events in such a world are like a string of nonsense syllables none of which relates to any other. Meaning is the experience of connectedness. Things are seen as bearing some relation to each other and to other things. The relationship between things can be of different types; things or events may be similar to each other, may be physically bound together, may co-occur, have an affinity for each other, or call forth each other. Regardless, when things relate to other things we can say they are meaningful. Objects and events in a world with meaning are linked together in systems of relations. In a totally meaningful universe all things would be related to all other things.

We have, then, some general idea of what is required as a first step for a machine to convert experience into meaning, to take an input of essentially chaotic, bodily centered and non-repeating experience and convert it into an output in which things are connected or related to other things. The problem now is to find some organizing principle capable of working such a transformation.

1 There are already some excellent works that try to make accessible to the general reader work on social construction of reality. One of the first is Emile Durkheim's classic work The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. Of the more recent works, especially noteworthy are the works of Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann (1967), Barry Barnes (1974), David Bloor (1976), and Michael Kearney (1984).