The epidemiology of beliefs

Abstract I would like to bring together two sets of speculations: anthropological speculations on cultural representations, and psychological speculations on the cognitive organization of beliefs, and to put forward, as a result, fragments of a possible answer to the question ‘How do beliefs become cultural?’ I will not apologize for the speculative character of the attempt. At this stage, either the question is answered in a vague, fragmentary, and tentative way, or it must be left alone: there just is not enough sound theorizing and well-regimented evidence in the domain to do otherwise.