The dissemination of divination in roman republican times

Summary
The thesis of this chapter was that in divinatory sign-production ritualized action serves to
produce a displacement of intention. This leads to a deficiency in the representation of the
intentional structure of the action. By a process of repair a secondary hidden or
counterintuitive agent is introduced to make sense of the action. This counterintuitive agent is
not represented to have the same epistemic limitations as normal human agents. This makes it
possible to represent the counterintuitive agent as having accurate credible knowledge of the
hidden matter sought after. Experiment one showed that Danish high-school students, who
have no great knowledge of or belief in divination still had a strong intuition that ritualized
action produced more credible information than normal intentional action. This is consistent
with the thesis presented.
There also seemed to be a difference based on the technique employed. Techniques
activating assumption associated with intuitive psychology domain were more likely to be
chosen than techniques activating intuitive biology or intuitive physics. It therefore seems
that there is a cognitive bias towards techniques activating intuitive psychology assumptions.
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