Dan Sperber

This article is about the French social and cognitive scientist. For the Israeli rabbi, seeDaniel Sperber.

Dan Sperber
Sperber in Paris, December 2012
Born	Dan Sperber (1942-06-20)20 June 1942 Cagnes-sur-Mer,France
Alma mater	Sorbonne University of Oxford
Known for	Relevance theory,epidemiology of representations,cultural attraction theory, argumentative theory of reasoning
Scientific career
Fields	Cognitive anthropology,cognitive psychology,pragmatics,philosophy

Dan Sperber(born 20 June 1942 inCagnes-sur-Mer) is a Frenchsocialandcognitive scientist,anthropologist and philosopher. His most influential work has been in the fields ofcognitive anthropology,linguisticpragmatics,psychology of reasoning, and philosophy of the social sciences. He has developed: an approach tocultural evolutionknown as theepidemiology of representationsor cultural attraction theory as part of a naturalistic reconceptualization of the social; (with British philosopher and linguistDeirdre Wilson)relevance theory;(with French psychologist Hugo Mercier) the argumentative theory of reasoning. Sperber formerlyDirecteur de Rechercheat theCentre National de la Recherche Scientifiqueis Professor in the Departments of Cognitive Science and of Philosophy at the Central European University in Budapest.

Background

Sperber is the son of Austrian-French novelistManès Sperber.He was born in France and raised anatheistbut his parents, both non-religiousAshkenazi Jews,imparted to the young Sperber a "respect for my Rabbinic ancestors and for religious thinkers of any persuasion more generally".He became interested inanthropologyas a means of explaining how rational people come to hold mistaken religious beliefs about the supernatural.

Career

Sperber was trained in anthropology at theSorbonneand theUniversity of Oxford.In 1965 he joined theCentre National de la Recherche Scientifique(CNRS) as a researcher, initially in theLaboratoire d'Études Africaines(African studieslaboratory). Later he moved to theLaboratoire d'ethnologie et de sociologie comparative(EthnologyandComparative Sociology), theCentre de Recherche en Epistémologie Appliquéeand finally, from 2001, theInstitut Jean Nicod.Sperber's early work was on theanthropology of religion,and he conductedethnographic fieldworkamong theDorze peopleofEthiopia.

Sperber was initially attracted tostructural anthropology,having been introduced to it byRodney Needhamat Oxford.He attended the seminar ofClaude Lévi-Strauss,credited as the founder of structuralism, who encouraged Sperber's "untypical theoretical musings".Sperber, however, soon developed a more critical attitude to structuralismand objected to the use ofinterpretiveethnographic data as if it were an objective record,and for its lack of explanatory power.Nevertheless, Sperber has persistently defended the legacy of Lévi-Strauss' work as opening the door for naturalistic social science, and as an important precursor tocognitive anthropology.

After moving away from structuralism, Sperber sought an alternative naturalistic approach to the study of culture. His 1975 bookRethinking Symbolism,outlined a theory ofsymbolismusing concepts from the burgeoning field ofcognitive psychology.It was formulated as a reply tosemiologicaltheories which were becoming widespread in anthropology through the works ofVictor TurnerandClifford Geertz(which formed the basis of what come to be known assymbolic anthropology).Sperber's later work has continued to argue for the importance of cognitive processes understood through psychology in understanding cultural phenomena and, in particular,cultural transmission.His 'epidemiology of representations'is an approach tocultural evolutioninspired by the field ofepidemiology.It proposes that the distribution of cultural representations (ideas about the world held by multiple individuals) within a population should be explained with reference to biases in transmission (illuminated by cognitive andevolutionary psychology) and the "ecology" of the individual minds they inhabit. Sperber's approach is broadlyDarwinist—it explains the macro-distribution of a trait in a population in terms of the cumulative effect micro-processes acting over time—but departs frommemeticsbecause he does not see representations as replicators except for in a few special circumstances (such aschain letters).The cognitive and epidemiological approach to cultural evolution has been influential, and has been described by the philosopher Kim Sterelny as "the Paris School" contrasted to the "California School" of Rob Boyd and Peter RichersonHis latest work, published with cognitive scientist Hugo Mercier, has developed their argumentative theory of reasoning into a more general interactionist approach toreason. His most influential work is arguably inlinguisticsandphilosophy:with the British linguist and philosopherDeirdre Wilsonhe has developed an innovative approach to linguistic interpretation known asrelevance theorywhich as of 2010has become mainstream in the area ofpragmatics,linguistics,artificial intelligenceandcognitive psychology.He argues that cognitive processes are geared toward the maximisation of relevance, that is, a search for an optimal balance between cognitive efforts and cognitive effects.

As well as his emeritus position at the CNRS, Sperber is currently professor in the departments of Cognitive Science and of Philosophy atCentral European University.He is also the Director of the International Cognition and Culture Institute, a scientific discussion and research website.He has been visiting professor in philosophy at Princeton (1989, 1990, 1992, 1993), the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor (1994, 1997), the University of Hong Kong (1997), the University of Chicago (2010); in anthropology at the London School of Economics (1988, 1998, 200, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006); in linguistics at University College London (1992, 2007–2008); in communication at the Università di Bologna (1998). He is a Corresponding Fellow of theBritish Academy.). He has been awarded Rivers Memorial Medal, Royal Anthropological Institute, London in 1991, the Silver Medal of the CNRS in 2002 and in 2009 was awarded the inaugural Claude Lévi-Strauss Prize for excellence of French research in the humanities and social sciences.His named lectures include the Malinowski Memorial Lecture, London School of Economics, 1984; the Mircea Eliade Lectures on Religion, Western Michigan University, 1992; the Henry Sweet Lecture Linguistics Association of Great Britain, 1998; the Radcliffe-Brown Lecture, British Academy, 1999; the Robert Hertz lecture, EHESS, Paris, 2005, the Lurcy Lecture, University of Chicago, 2010; (With Hugo Mercier) the Chandaria Lectures, Institute of Philosophy, University of London, 2011; the Carl Hempel Lectures, Princeton University, Department of Philosophy, 2017.

Bibliography

• Le structuralisme en anthropologie(Éditions du Seuil,1973)
• Rethinking Symbolism(Cambridge University Press,1975)
• On Anthropological Knowledge(Cambridge University Press, 1985)
• (with Deirdre Wilson)Relevance. Communication and Cognition(Blackwell,1986)
• (with David Premack & Ann James Premack, eds.)Causal Cognition: A multidisciplinary debate.(Oxford University Press,1995)
• Explaining Culture(Blackwell, 1996)
• (Ed.)Metarepresentations: A multidisciplinary perspective(Oxford University Press, 2000)
• (With Ira Noveck, eds.)Experimental Pragmatics(Palgrave,2004)
• (with Deirdre Wilson),Meaning and Relevance(Cambridge University Press,2012)
• (with Hugo Mercier),The Enigma of Reason(Harvard University Press,2017),ISBN9780674368309

Awards

• Prix Claude-Lévi-Strauss 2009 (Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques, Paris – First laureate)
• Mind and Brain Prize 2009 (Università degli studi di Torino)
• Silver Medal, CNRS, 2002
• Rivers Memorial Medal, Royal Anthropological Institute, London, 1991.

See also

• Scott Atran
• Maurice Bloch
• Pascal Boyer

External links

• Official page
• Blogat the International Cognition and Culture Institute
• InterviewinEdge