As I have defined it, religion is dependent on language and communication. Religious language is language about or related to superhuman agents, and religious practice concerns interaction with superhuman agents. These practices are communal in the sense that they involve not just interaction with superhuman agents, but also a great deal of interaction with human agents. While this chapter deals mostly with the attribution of propositional attitudes and how such attribution changes in the context of literacy, Chapter 4 concerns communality and how it changes in the context of literacy. Superhuman agents, and their names, I treat in Chapters 5 and 6.

Religion involves the attribution of propositional attitudes; that is, it involves the attribution of representational content. One of the best glosses on the notion of content comes from Bruner (1986: 22) who describes it as “the juxtaposition of a comment on a topic”. A great deal of ink has been spilled trying to formulate theories of content without lapsing into naÏve forms of representationalism that often characterize the standard model of CSR. It is difficult not to lapse because we are constantly faced with the question of what gets communicated when people communicate (i.e. Bruner's “comment”). Clearly some sort of exchange takes place. But characterizing the exchange without burdensome metaphysical concepts is difficult. Thus, to account for religion we need a theory of language and mind that integrates action and belief.