Dan Sperber

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This article is about the French social and cognitive scientist. For the Israeli rabbi, see Daniel Sperber.
Dan Sperber
Sperber in Paris, December 2012
Born
Dan Sperber

(1942-06-20) 20 June 1942 (age 81)
Cagnes-sur-Mer, France
Alma materSorbonne
University of Oxford
Known forRelevance theory, epidemiology of representations, cultural attraction theory, argumentative theory of reasoning
Scientific career
FieldsCognitive anthropology, cognitive psychology, pragmatics, philosophy
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Dan Sperber (born 20 June 1942 in Cagnes-sur-Mer) is a French social and cognitive scientist and philosopher. His most influential work has been in the fields of cognitive anthropology, linguistic pragmatics, psychology of reasoning, and philosophy of the social sciences. He has developed: an approach to cultural evolution known as the epidemiology of representations or cultural attraction theory as part of a naturalistic reconceptualization of the social; (with British philosopher and linguist Deirdre Wilson) relevance theory; (with French psychologist Hugo Mercier) the argumentative theory of reasoning. Sperber formerly Directeur de Recherche at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique is 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 novelist Manès Sperber. He was born in France and raised an atheist but his parents, both non-religious Ashkenazi Jews, imparted to the young Sperber a "respect for my Rabbinic ancestors and for religious thinkers of any persuasion more generally".[1] He became interested in anthropology as a means of explaining how rational people come to hold mistaken religious beliefs about the supernatural.[2]

Career

Sperber was trained in anthropology at the

Comparative Sociology), the Centre de Recherche en Epistémologie Appliquée and finally, from 2001, the Institut Jean Nicod.[3] Sperber's early work was on the anthropology of religion,[2] and he conducted ethnographic fieldwork among the Dorze people of Ethiopia.[4]

Sperber was initially attracted to

interpretive ethnographic data as if it were an objective record,[9] and for its lack of explanatory power.[10] Nevertheless, Sperber has persistently defended the legacy of Lévi-Strauss' work as opening the door for naturalistic social science, and as an important precursor to cognitive anthropology.[6][11]

After moving away from structuralism, Sperber sought an alternative naturalistic approach to the study of culture. His 1975 book Rethinking Symbolism,

chain letters).[15] 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 Richerson [16][17][18] His latest work, published with cognitive scientist Hugo Mercier, has developed their argumentative theory of reasoning into a more general interactionist approach to reason.[19][20]
His most influential work is arguably in linguistics and philosophy: with the British linguist and philosopher Deirdre Wilson he has developed an innovative approach to linguistic interpretation known as relevance theory which as of 2010 has become mainstream in the area of pragmatics, linguistics, artificial intelligence and cognitive 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 at Central European University. He is also the Director of the International Cognition and Culture Institute, a scientific discussion and research website.[21] 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 the British Academy.[22] ). 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.[23] 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 (
    ISBN 9780674368309

See also

References

  1. ^ Khan, Razib (17 December 2005). "10 questions for Dan Sperber". Gene Expression. Retrieved 3 March 2011.
  2. ^ a b "Edge: AN EPIDEMIOLOGY OF REPRESENTATIONS: A Talk with Dan Sperber". Edge. Retrieved 3 March 2011.
  3. ^ "Dan Sperber — Biography". Retrieved 3 March 2011.
  4. ^
    ISBN 978-0-521-09967-7
    .
  5. ISBN 978-0-8166-2241-2
    .
  6. ^
    S2CID 170926805
    .
  7. ^ Sperber, Dan (1973). Le Structuralisme en Anthropologie. Paris: Editions du Seuil.
  8. S2CID 143554936
    .
  9. ^
    ISBN 978-0-521-26748-9
    .
  10. ^
    ISBN 978-0-631-20045-1
    .
  11. ^ Sperber, Dan (28 November 2008). "Claude Lévi-Strauss at 100: echo of the future". openDemocracy.net. Retrieved 3 March 2011.
  12. S2CID 143504500
    .
  13. S2CID 189853660
    .
  14. ^ Sperber, Dan (2011). "A naturalistic ontology for mechanistic explanations in the social sciences". In Pierre Demeulenaere (ed.). Analytical sociology and social mechanisms. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  15. ^ Sperber, Dan (2000). "An objection to the memetic approach to culture". In Robert Aunger (ed.). Darwinizing Culture: The Status of Memetics as a Science. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 163–173.
  16. ISBN 978-0-226-71284-0
    .
  17. doi:10.1016/j.shpsc.2016.12.005
    .
  18. ISBN 978-0-415-11895-8
    .
  19. S2CID 5669039
    .
  20. ISBN 978-0-674-36830-9
    .
  21. ^ "ICCI - The Institute". International Cognition and Culture Institute. Archived from the original on 13 December 2010. Retrieved 3 March 2011.
  22. ^ "British Academy - Fellowship Directory". Archived from the original on 6 June 2011. Retrieved 3 March 2011.
  23. ^ "Dan Sperber, 1er lauréat du Prix Claude Levi-Strauss". Ministère de l'Enseignement supérieur et de la Recherche (MESR). Retrieved 3 March 2011.

External links

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