PhilSoc Next Week (11/11)

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Corey McCabe

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Nov 5, 2025, 7:59:21 PMNov 5

to 'Colin Klein' via anu-philosophy

Hi everyone,

The PhilSoc seminar next week (11/11) will be our own Kim Sterelny (and Ron Planer)! Please find the title and abstract below. As always, the seminar will be held in room 6.71 on the top floor of the RSSS from 3-4:30, and the zoom link can be found below the title and abstract.

Kind Regards,

Matt and Corey

The Rise of the Dark Shaman

In our “The Agential View of Misfortune”, Ron Planer and I argued that the widespread belief in witchcraft/sorcery was a serious and unsolved problem confronting the evolutionary human sciences. This family of beliefs is widespread, persistent, and in many social contexts, very expensive. The conflict costs can be extreme (generating persisting blood feuds) and the economic costs are far from trivial. We argued that none of the standard explanations resist sceptical analysis. At the end of the paper, we floated a few speculative suggestions that might do better.

In this paper, we develop one of those. We suggest that the agential view of misfortune — the belief that, for the most part, shit does not just happen; it is caused to happen by other humans by occult means — emerges by evolutionary bait-and-switch. We see a bait-and-switch dynamic when a social institution establishes, with robust mechanisms of intergenerational transmission, when that institution, with its intergenerational mechanics, is broadly adaptive for all parties. A paradigm is where individuals with exceptional expertise in socially valuable skills play a central role in the intergenerational transfer of those skills: they are accorded respect and deference in return for social access to their skill basis. That is the bait phase. The switch phase involves an incremental, generation by generation bias in the lore flowing across generations in ways that favour those playing a central role in this information flow, but to the detriment of others. In many traditional Australian Indigenous societies, Elders play a central role in the social transmission of the norms and lore of their community. We think it is no surprise that this lore came include norms of special sexual access for older males to young women.

We suggest a model with a similar dynamic for shamanism; shamanistic practices establish (with early shamans becoming social learning beacons) when their practice and ideology was largely benign, but gradually their lore and practice comes to emphasise the danger of hostile occult practices, and the indispensable role of shamans in shielding individuals from those dangers, and reducing their impact. Some elements of this model are undeniably speculative, so we present it as a “how-plausibly” explanation of the establishment and stability of belief in occult danger. But we argue that each element in the model is independently plausible. A “how-plausibly” explanation is worth having (we say), given the puzzling character of this phenomenon.

Zoom Link:

https://anu.zoom.us/j/82325020132?pwd=EQ32lxjAj5RPh6CkpxedvgTDpjaycJ.1