Counterintuitive Notions and the Problem of Transmission: The Relevance of Cognitive Science for the Study of History

them, invisible beings fly through the air on banana leaves, diviners read the future, prophets declare the end of the world. Such claims seem to violate our views of what the world is like, a world in which animals don't speak, dead people stay dead, and only news commentators predict future trends. Having studied such notions in their cultural context, many anthropologists have noted that such claims are taken to be counterintuitive not merely by the anthropologist in the field, but even by the people who hold them. Philosophers and comparative religionists have also revealed their puzzlement about the nature of such claims, and many have committed their intellectual lives to projects designed to plumb their semantic depths. The presence of such notions not only in societies where oral traditions predominate but also in literate societies continues to precipitate vigorous debates in the social sciences and humanities. How are we to interpret them? How to explain their origin, describe their