The intentional stance and the manifest image

In Chapter 1, the supernatural arose because the mind-reading module could be satisfied by inputs behind which there was no obvious embodied agency, but which could nevertheless be understood as caused by some kind of mind. So supernatural entities arise spontaneously from the way mind-reading construes input. The aim of this chapter is to work out this idea and its implications for normativity and rationalization.

The manifest understanding of mind-reading

Mind-reading is part of a scientific psychology. But it is revealing to first analyse this capacity within the manifest image of humanity. In the everyday scheme of things, mind-reading manifests itself in how we grasp and express our understanding of each other. This intentional language attributes to people mental states not directly perceptible by the senses. Our first step is to enlarge upon Daniel Dennett's idea of the intentional stance and its context in philosophy (Dennett: 1976, 1978, 1987, 1996). This stance is the phenomenology of mind-reading. This is relevant, because religion too is a phenomenon of the conscious manifest image, however unconscious its underlying processes.

But why the term “stance”? In the first instance, it denotes an explanatory strategy with respect to the prediction of the behaviour of some object – human beings are the prototypical instance. The strategy treats this behaviour as the result of rational agency.