A motley of attitudes: belief, insincerity, and non-doxastic commitment in magical practice

Magic is frequently employed in high-stakes contexts such as healing and divination, which suggests that its users take it to be efficacious. This poses a puzzle: why would broadly rational agents persist in practices that are, by their ostensible aims, ineffective? Existing accounts divide between intellectualist views, which hold that practitioners genuinely believe in the efficacy of magic, and non-intellectualist views, which argue that magical practices are accompanied by non-doxastic attitudes such as imagination, symbolism, or make-believe. We argue that both positions capture part of the truth. Drawing on ethnography, cognitive science, political psychology, and philosophy, we defend a mixed-attitude account according to which individuals within the same culture—and even the same individual over time—can relate to different magical practices with a range of attitudes, from genuine belief to scepticism, expressive endorsement, or mistaken self-ascription of belief. This framework reconciles evidence cited by both intellectualists and their critics and suggests that belief reports about magic, as well as those concerning conspiracy theories and magic in WEIRD societies, should not be assumed to reflect a single, uniform cognitive attitude.