Dan Sperber
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 124973 |
|---|---|
| NOME | Dan Sperber |
| PRENOMES | Dan |
| SOBRENOME | Sperber |
| ASSINATURA | SPERBER D |
| AFILIAÇÕES | Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-4066-3058 |
| VERIFICADO | Sim |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 78 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 1148 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 74 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 4 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 1965 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2022 |
| ÍNDICE H | 11 |
“Manifeste du parti communiste”. Révolutionnaire
Entretien avec Dan Sperber
Dans l'entretien qu'il a accordé à ThéoRèmes, Dan Sperber revient sur la pertinence des sciences cognitives pour l'étude des religions. Il décrit le cadre naturaliste et cognitiviste qui guide ses recherches, notamment l'affirmation d'une unité de la causalité qui oblige à une méthodologie strictement naturaliste, y compris en sciences sociales. Il revient sur les processus cognitifs qui permettent de sélectionner des croyances religieuses qui se…
Bounded reason in a social world
Standard dual process theories see reason (System 2) as an individual cognitive mechanism able to correct the mistake of intuition (System 1) and to perform as classical rational system, imperfect but not bounded in Simon’s sense. This chapter suggests instead that reason is another intuitive cognitive mechanism, with a specific domain—reasons—and specific functions—to produce and evaluate justifications and arguments in social settings. In this …
Questões Sobre Linguagem E Cognição
Entrevista com Dan Sperber supervisionada por Elena Godoy
Why a modular approach to reason
In their reviews, Chater and Oaksford, Dutilh Novaes, and Sterelny are critical of our modularist approach to reason. In this response, we clarify our claim that reason is one of many cognitive modules that produce intuitive inferences each in its domain; the reason module producing intuitions about reasons. We argue that in‐principle objections to the idea of massive modularity based on Fodor's peculiar approach are not effective against other i…
Convergent transformation and selection in cultural evolution
Cutting culture at the joints
In his thought-provoking reflections on the evolution of religion, Kim Sterelny notes that “religions ... are so variable from culture to culture that one might reasonably wonder whether there really
The Enigma of Reason
Optimistic expectations about communication explain children's difficulties in hiding, lying, and mistrusting liars
We suggest that preschoolers’ frequent obliviousness to the risks and opportunities of deception comes from a trusting stance supporting verbal communication. Three studies ( N = 125) confirm this hypothesis. Three-year-olds can hide information from others (Study 1) and they can lie (Study 2) in simple settings. Yet when one introduces the possibility of informing others in the very same settings, three-year-olds tend to be honest (Studies 1 and…
How Darwinian is cultural evolution?
Darwin-inspired population thinking suggests approaching culture as a population of items of different types, whose relative frequencies may change over time. Three nested subtypes of populational models can be distinguished: evolutionary, selectional and replicative. Substantial progress has been made in the study of cultural evolution by modelling it within the selectional frame. This progress has involved idealizing away from phenomena that ma…
Morale et réputation dans une perspective évolutionniste
Pourquoi les êtres humains se comportent-ils de manière morale ? Les théories évolutionnistes de la morale se partagent habituellement en deux camps, le camp altruiste selon lequel la morale a évolué pour le bien du groupe et dispose les individus à se sacrifier pour la collectivité, et le camp mutualiste selon lequel la morale a été sélectionnée parce qu’elle dispose les individus à respecter les intérêts des autres et ainsi à coopérer avec eux …
Meaning and Relevance
When people speak, their words never fully encode what they mean, and the context is always compatible with a variety of interpretations. How can comprehension ever be achieved? Wilson and Sperber argue that comprehension is a process of inference guided by precise expectations of relevance. What are the relations between the linguistically encoded meanings studied in semantics and the thoughts that humans are capable of entertaining and conveyin…
Moral Reputation
From an evolutionary point of view, the function of moral behaviour may be to secure a good reputation as a co‐operator. The best way to do so may be to obey genuine moral motivations. Still, one's moral reputation maybe something too important to be entrusted just to one's moral sense. A robust concern for one's reputation is likely to have evolved too. Here we explore some of the complex relationships between morality and reputation both from a…
Why do humans reason? Arguments for an argumentative theory
Reasoning is generally seen as a means to improve knowledge and make better decisions. However, much evidence shows that reasoning often leads to epistemic distortions and poor decisions. This suggests that the function of reasoning should be rethought. Our hypothesis is that the function of reasoning is argumentative. It is to devise and evaluate arguments intended to persuade. Reasoning so conceived is adaptive given the exceptional dependence …
Analytical Sociology and Social Mechanisms
Mechanisms are very much a part of social life. For example, we can see that inequality has tended to increase over time, and that cities can become segregated. But how do such mechanisms work? Analytical sociology is an influential approach to sociology which holds that explanations of social phenomena should focus on the social mechanisms that bring them about. This book evaluates the major features of this approach, focusing on the significanc…
The Evolution of Human Language
The way language as a human faculty has evolved is a question that preoccupies researchers from a wide spread of disciplines. In this book, a team of writers has been brought together to examine the evolution of language from a variety of such standpoints, including language's genetic basis, the anthropological context of its appearance, its formal structure, its relation to systems of cognition and thought, as well as its possible evolutionary a…
Epistemic Vigilance
Humans massively depend on communication with others, but this leaves them open to the risk of being accidentally or intentionally misinformed. To ensure that, despite this risk, communication remains advantageous, humans have, we claim, a suite of cognitive mechanisms for epistemic vigilance. Here we outline this claim and consider some of the ways in which epistemic vigilance works in mental and social life by surveying issues, research and the…
The Guru Effect
The moral, epistemic, and mindreading components of children’s vigilance towards deception
A Deflationary Account of Metaphors
Introduction Are metaphors departures from a norm of literalness? According to classical rhetoric and most later theories, including Gricean pragmatics, they are. No, metaphors are wholly normal, say the Romantic critics of classical rhetoric and a variety of modern scholars ranging from hard-nosed cognitive scientists to postmodern critical theorists. On the metaphor-as-normal side, there is a broad contrast between those, like the cognitive lin…
Claude Lévi-Strauss, a precursor
This short article examines Claude Lévi-Strauss's structuralist approach to anthropology and assesses whether he can be considered a precursor to contemporary cognitive science. Sperber argues that while Lévi-Strauss's focus on underlying mental structures anticipates some aspects of cognitive science, his commitment to a specific type of structuralism and his rejection of certain psychological concepts ultimately limit the extent to which he can…
Pragmatics
Pragmatics is often described as the study of language use, and contrasted with the study of language structure. In this broad sense, it covers a range of loosely related research programmes from formal studies of deictic expressions to sociological studies of ethnic verbal stereotypes. In a more focused sense (the one used here), pragmatics contrasts with semantics, the study of linguistic meaning, and is the study of how contextual factors inte…
Attribution of Beliefs by 13-Month-Old Infants
In two experiments, we investigated whether 13-month-old infants expect agents to behave in a way that is consistent with information to which they have been exposed. Infants watched animations in which an animal was either provided information or prevented from gathering information about the actual location of an object. The animal then searched successfully or failed to retrieve the object. Infants' looking times suggest that they expected sea…
The role of attraction in cultural evolution
Henrich and Boyd (2002) were the first to propose a formal model of the role of attraction in cultural evolution. They came to the surprising conclusion that, when both attraction and selection are at work, final outcomes are determined by selection alone. This result is based on a determistic view of cultural attraction, different from the probabilistic view introduced in Sperber (1996). We defend this probabilistic view, show how to model it, a…
La pertinence
Explaining culture
Anthropology and Psychology
L'A. soutient que les phenomenes culturels sont des distributions de representations dans une population humaine, en quelque sorte des modeles ecologiques de faits psychologiques. Pour expliquer ces phenomenes culturels, il faut, en consequence, developper une epidemiologie des representations ancree dans l'individu. L'A. discute ensuite de la pertinence de cette approche pour plusieurs domaines anthropologiques: croyances populaires, croyances r…
Linguistic form and relevance
Pragmatics, Modularity and Mind-reading
The central problem for pragmatics is that sentence meaning vastly underdetermines speaker's meaning. The goal of pragmatics is to explain how the gap between sentence meaning and speaker's meaning is bridged. This paper defends the broadly Gricean view that pragmatic interpretation is ultimately an exercise in mind-reading, involving the inferential attribution of intentions. We argue, however, that the interpretation process does not simply con…
On verbal irony
Right and Left
The Interpretation of Symbolism
Pourquoi les animaux parfaits, les hybrides et les monstres sont-ils bons à penser symboliquement
Sperber Dan. Pourquoi les animaux parfaits, les hybrides et les monstres sont-ils bons à penser symboliquement ?. In: L'Homme, 1975, tome 15 n°2. pp. 5-34
Kinship and Evolved Psychological Dispositions
This article revisits the old controversy concerning the relation of the mothers brother and sisters son in patrilineal societies in the light both of anthropological criticisms of the very notion of kinship and of evolutionary and epidemiological approaches to culture. It argues that the ritualized patterns of behavior discussed by RadcliffeBrown, Goody, and others are to be explained in terms of the interaction of a variety of factors, some loc…
Le Symbolisme en general
This article critiques the traditional anthropological approach to symbolism, arguing that it often relies on vague and imprecise notions. Bloch and Sperber propose a more rigorous framework for understanding symbolic thought, emphasizing the importance of considering the specific contexts in which symbols are used and interpreted. They challenge the idea that symbols have fixed meanings, suggesting instead that their significance is generated th…
The role of attraction in cultural evolution
Henrich and Boyd (2002) were the first to propose a formal model of the role of attraction in cultural evolution. They came to the surprising conclusion that, when both attraction and selection are at work, final outcomes are determined by selection alone. This result is based on a determistic view of cultural attraction, different from the probabilistic view introduced in Sperber (1996). We defend this probabilistic view, show how to model it, a…
Why are perfect animals, hybrids, and monsters food for symbolic thought
Work on animal symbolism, in particular that of Mary Douglas, suggests that the symbolic value of some animals is grounded in taxonomic anomaly. Yet the work of ethnozoologists tends to show that folk taxonomies are consistent and devoid of true anomalies. This raises a first problem. Moreover, not only anomalous animals, but also exemplary animals often take on a symbolic value, thus raising a second problem. A solution to both problems is sugge…
On Anthropological Knowledge
Remarks on relevance theory and the social sciences
Most relevance-theoretic work so far has been carried out at a fairly abstract level (where some interesting generalizations could be developed). It has in general ignored most of the social intricacies of communication. At the same time, as a theory of communication, relevance theory is a theory of a type of social phenomenon, the most ubiquitous of all. It analyzes communication as an inferential process, and thus provides a more realistic mode…
Le savoir des anthropologues
Pragmatique et temps
This paper is a radical criticism of formal semantic approaches to the sequencing problem in temporal reference assignment. The authors show that the main problem for the calculation of temporal reference is not the sequencing one, but the interval and causality problems, and that a pragmatic criterion (the criterion of consistency with the Principle of Relevance) explains the assignment of temporal reference
Les sciences cognitives, les sciences sociales et le matérialisme
Neste artigo, Dan Sperber examina a complexa relação entre as ciências cognitivas, as ciências sociais e o materialismo. Ele argumenta que, embora as ciências cognitivas ofereçam ferramentas poderosas para entender a mente humana, elas não devem ser vistas como uma forma de reduzir as ciências sociais a uma base puramente materialista. Sperber defende uma abordagem mais matizada, reconhecendo a importância dos fatores sociais e culturais na forma…
L'Interprétation en anthropologie
A partir du constat que l'ethnographie est essentiellement interpretative, et que l'interpretation ethnographique a entraine le developpement d'une terminologie et d'un ensemble de construction interpretatives, l'A. estime que le fait que ces instruments d'interpretation aient ete pris pour des concepts theoriques, a entrave le developpement de l'anthropologie theorique
L'interprétation des énoncés
Wilson Deirdre, Sperber Dan. L'interprétation des énoncés. In: Communications, 30, 1979. La conversation. pp. 80-94
Rudiments of Cognitive Rhetoric∗
I am honored and flattered that this old text of mine should have been deemed worth translating and publishing in the Rhetoric Society Quarterly. It was initially intended as a chapter of my book Le symbolisme en général (Hermann, 1974; translated as Rethinking Symbolism by Alice L. Morton, for Cambridge University Press, 1975). But, under the encouragement of Tzetan Todorov, it developed beyond what I had planned and was taken out of the draft o…
I Don't Think So
Relevance, Contextual Effects and Least Effort
The Female Lingam
The main purpose of the paper is to refute the rigid psychoanalytic determinism which holds that we cannot help attributing an exclusively male or female meaning to certain sexual symbols. Simultaneously it attempts to show that symbols are not as context-bound as structuralists are inclined to think, since the reversals of meanings discussed mostly refer to the individual symbol without affecting the context. A series of iconographic symbols and…
Claude Lévi-Strauss, a precursor
This short article examines Claude Lévi-Strauss's structuralist approach to anthropology and assesses whether he can be considered a precursor to contemporary cognitive science. Sperber argues that while Lévi-Strauss's focus on underlying mental structures anticipates some aspects of cognitive science, his commitment to a specific type of structuralism and his rejection of certain psychological concepts ultimately limit the extent to which he can…
La morale
Plus encore que la diversité des pratiques et des croyances d’une société à l’autre, c’est la diversité des valeurs morales qui jadis rendait si fascinants les récits des voyageurs et qui, dans le monde de confrontations interculturelles où nous vivons aujourd’hui, rend si pertinente l’anthropologie. La dimension morale est omniprésente, et dans la vie sociale, et dans les travaux qui la décrivent. Paradoxalement, cette omniprésence rend la moral…
A Note on Hasmonean Coin-Legends
A propos de la notion d'échange et de la grammaire generative (discussion)
Boudon Pierre, Sperber Dan. A propos de la notion d'échange et de la grammaire generative (discussion). In: L'Homme, 1968, tome 8 n°2. pp. 104-119
Angaria in Rabbinic Literature
Critique de l'anthropologie
Mythologiques de Georges Dumézil
Il est des façons de rendre hommage qui tournent à la convention, de citer au passage qui confinent à la négligence, d'évoquer une ancienne dette qui ressemblent à de l'ingratitude, à moins qu'il ne s'agisse à chaque fois d'un excès de timidité. L'œuvre de Georges Dumézil a bien de quoi intimider les anthropologues qui s'y réfèrent, mais, tout compte fait, nous préférons entrer dans le vif au risque d'être taxés de désinvolture. Nous rencontreron…
Right and Left
Pourquoi les animaux parfaits, les hybrides et les monstres sont-ils bons à penser symboliquement
Sperber Dan. Pourquoi les animaux parfaits, les hybrides et les monstres sont-ils bons à penser symboliquement ?. In: L'Homme, 1975, tome 15 n°2. pp. 5-34
Symbol and Politics in Communal Ideology
The Interpretation of Symbolism
Le Symbolisme en general
This article critiques the traditional anthropological approach to symbolism, arguing that it often relies on vague and imprecise notions. Bloch and Sperber propose a more rigorous framework for understanding symbolic thought, emphasizing the importance of considering the specific contexts in which symbols are used and interpreted. They challenge the idea that symbols have fixed meanings, suggesting instead that their significance is generated th…
Rethinking Symbolism
L'interprétation des énoncés
Wilson Deirdre, Sperber Dan. L'interprétation des énoncés. In: Communications, 30, 1979. La conversation. pp. 80-94
The Female Lingam
The main purpose of the paper is to refute the rigid psychoanalytic determinism which holds that we cannot help attributing an exclusively male or female meaning to certain sexual symbols. Simultaneously it attempts to show that symbols are not as context-bound as structuralists are inclined to think, since the reversals of meanings discussed mostly refer to the individual symbol without affecting the context. A series of iconographic symbols and…
L'Interprétation en anthropologie
A partir du constat que l'ethnographie est essentiellement interpretative, et que l'interpretation ethnographique a entraine le developpement d'une terminologie et d'un ensemble de construction interpretatives, l'A. estime que le fait que ces instruments d'interpretation aient ete pris pour des concepts theoriques, a entrave le developpement de l'anthropologie theorique
Test of the mention theory of irony.
The traditional theory of irony, which assumes that an ironist uses figurative meaning opposite to the literal meaning of the utterance, is shown to be inadequate; an alternative theory is presented, which assumes that the ironist mentions the literal meaning of the utterance and expresses an attitude toward it. Although the implications for understanding irony are difficult to test, the two theories do make testable predictions about the conditi…
Le savoir des anthropologues
Anthropology and Psychology
L'A. soutient que les phenomenes culturels sont des distributions de representations dans une population humaine, en quelque sorte des modeles ecologiques de faits psychologiques. Pour expliquer ces phenomenes culturels, il faut, en consequence, developper une epidemiologie des representations ancree dans l'individu. L'A. discute ensuite de la pertinence de cette approche pour plusieurs domaines anthropologiques: croyances populaires, croyances r…
The Self-Appointment of Seuren as Censor a Reply to Pieter Seuren
Relevance, Contextual Effects and Least Effort
Précis of Relevance
In Relevance: Communication and Cognition , we outline a new approach to the study of human communication, one based on a general view of human cognition. Attention and thought processes, we argue, automatically turn toward information that seems relevant: that is, capable of yielding cognitive effects – the more, and the more economically, the greater the relevance. We analyse both the nature ofcognitive effects and the inferential processes by …
On Anthropological Knowledge
Les sciences cognitives, les sciences sociales et le matérialisme
Neste artigo, Dan Sperber examina a complexa relação entre as ciências cognitivas, as ciências sociais e o materialismo. Ele argumenta que, embora as ciências cognitivas ofereçam ferramentas poderosas para entender a mente humana, elas não devem ser vistas como uma forma de reduzir as ciências sociais a uma base puramente materialista. Sperber defende uma abordagem mais matizada, reconhecendo a importância dos fatores sociais e culturais na forma…
As ironias como menções
É comum caracterizar-se a ironia verbal como a figura produzida quando um enunciado possui um sentido figurado oposto ao seu sentido literal. Deste modo, "que tempo bom!" dito ironicamente terá por sentido figurado: "que tempo horrível!" etc. Poder-se-ia, como outros fizeram, procurar enriquecer esta caracterização e considerar casos de ironia sem recorrer à noção do sentido figurado.Esta tentativa se insere no quadro de uma pesquisa mais ampla, …
On verbal irony
Linguistic form and relevance
Philosophy (43 obras) · Psychology (37 obras) · Epistemology (28 obras) · Computer Science (24 obras) · Sociology (21 obras) · Linguistics (18 obras) · Cognition (16 obras) · Cognitive psychology (14 obras) · Philosophy (14 obras) · Cognitive science (13 obras)