ABSTRACT

Social science works within the Verstehen bubble to account for such things as markets, institutions, organizations, movements, cultures, states and political orders, and so forth. The processes themselves are not influenced by external causes, and it would not make sense if they were: the main tasks of the brain involve coding and transformations of coded chunks, complex processes that in themselves do not allow for variation. The sheer elasticity of the standard model, especially its tendency to add hypothetical cognitive capacities to account for anything that is in need of explanation, seems to make it impervious to empirical refutation, and potentially consistent with any possible social theory. Religion seems to present another problem, beyond money: it involves mysterious powers, beings, forces, and so forth. Error, pattern over-recognition, mismatches between proper domain of modules and actual domains of application fit with some of the alternatives to the standard approach to cognition.