Placebos are typically seen as ineffective treatments because they lack a known mechanism linking their properties to the condition being treated, yet they can produce substantial therapeutic effects. This puzzle arises from the relationship between culturally meaningful entities like treatments, our intentional attitudes such as beliefs about healing, and bodily placebo responses. An enactive conception of cognition, which views an organism's adaptive bodily processes, its intentional directedness, and meaningful environmental properties as co-emergent aspects of a single dynamic system, accommodates and demystifies placebo effects by explaining the interrelations between mind, body, and world.
The author argues that Singh's subjective functionalism, while a valuable synthesis, fails to account for the holistic nature of human culture. Unlike structuralist approaches in anthropology, which treat cultural elements as interconnected within systems, Singh's view isolates them. Using shamanism as an example, the author contends that cultural features are defined by their relationships to other features, not as standalone packages.