Causal Thinking and Its Anthropological Misrepresentation

The study of causal inferences is an essential part of the study of other cultures. It is therefore crucial to describe the cognitive mechanisms whereby subjects are led to find specific causal explanations plausible and “natural.” In the anthropological literature, specific causal connections are described as the result produced by applying a general “conception of causation” or some general “theories” to specific events; the essay aims to show that these answers are either trivial or false. The “naturalness” of explanations must be examined in the context of concept acquisition and belief-fixation. On the basis of an ethnographic example, it is possible to show how certain presumptions (e.g., about the use of certain categories as natural kind terms) can be involved in the processes whereby certain explanations are made cognitively salient.