The dissemination of divination in roman republican times

are necessary to facilitate the cognitive representation of a communicative interaction with a
counterintuitive agent: motivation, sign production and interpretation.
In the case of impetrative divination there are five empirical components: the motivation of the
questioner, the operator, the technique he performs, the sign produced by the technique and the
interpreter of this sign. In oblative divination only sign production differs, since in this case a
salient event is the empirical component. These components are related to each other in ways
that were treated in the subsequent chapters.
Chapter 4 investigated the different elements of impetrative divination. It was argued that
motivation is ultimately derived from emotion, which in turn represents the central mechanism in
an organism’s homeostatic system. Cognitive experiments have demonstrated the existence of an
idealized life model in humans, which guides expectations about life and therefore functions as a
set-point for motivation. This model has universally common elements in addition to some
culturally specific ones. In cases where one’s life deviates from the life model, it will provoke a
negative emotion which motivates correctional action. Divination is an example of such
correctional action. This was supported by an analysis of actual motivations for divination in
four different cultures. In general motivation for divination can be described as a perception of
actual or potential misfortune or lack of fortune.
The sign production consists of an operator performing a technique. In order to be successful
the action has to be ritualized. Ritualized action is according to contemporary cognitive theories
of ritual distinguished by a displacement of intentionality. This displacement is characterized by
the fact that the human cognitive system will tend to repair gaps in action sequences, such as the
lack of a clear performing agent. In this case, the action is repaired by the replacement of the
original incomplete intention with that of a counterintuitive agent. In divination the effect of
ritualization is that the counterintuitive agent and not the operator comes to be represented as the
author of the sign produced by the divination technique. Counterintuitive agents are cognitively
represented without the epistemic restrictions that characterize normal humans; they have perfect
access to reality. This is why the divinatory sign is considered able to give information about
matters not otherwise available to human perception or reason. By using an experimental method
from cognitive science the thesis was investigated. The results of this experiment showed that
ritualized action was considered significantly more credible than other comparable types of
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