Dan Sperber

The idea that cultural evolution exhibits variation, competition, and inheritance and therefore can be studied by adjusting the Darwinian theory of evolution by natural selection is an attractive one. It has been argued by a number of authors (e.g., Campbell 1960; Monod 1970; Dawkins 1976; Cavalli-Sforza and Feldman 1981; Boyd and Richerson 1985; Durham 1991; Aunger 2002; Mesoudi et al. 2004) and pursued in a variety of ways, some (Dawkins and memeticists) staying close to the Darwinian model, others (e.g., Boyd, Richerson, and their collaborators) being more innovative. We agree that there are relevant analogies between biological and cultural evolution and, in particular, that cultural items do exhibit variation, competition, and cumulative modification. On the other hand, we believe that a proper understanding of the mechanisms of cultural propagation drawing on the work of cognitive and social scientists (see Sperber and Hirschfeld 1999 for a review) contradicts the idea that culture exhibits inheritance in the strict sense needed for the theory of evolution by natural selection to apply straightforwardly to it. If so, it will take more than adjusting the Darwinian model to be faithful to the Darwinian inspiration.

Humans have two kinds of beliefs, intuitive beliefs and reflective beliefs. Intuitive beliefs are a fundamental category of cognition, defined in the architecture of the mind. They are formulated in an intuitive mental lexicon. Humans are also capable of entertaining an indefinite variety of higher‐order or‘reflective’propositional attitudes, many of which are of a credat sort. Reasons to hold reflective beliefs are provided by other beliefs that describe the source of the reflective belief as reliable, or that provide an explicit argument in favour of the reflective belief. The mental lexicon of reflective beliefs includes not only intuitive, but also reflective concepts.

This paper questions the widespread view that verbal communication is governed by a maxim, norm or convention of truthfulness which applies at the level of what is literally meant, or what is said. Pragmatic frameworks based on this view must explain the frequent occurrence and acceptability of loose and figurative uses of language. We argue against existing explanations of these phenomena and provide an alternative account, based on the assumption that verbal communication is governed not by expectations of truthfulness but by expectations of relevance, raised by literal, loose and figurative uses alike. Sample analyses are provided, and some consequences of this alternative account are explored. In particular, we argue that the notions of ‘literal meaning’ and ‘what is said’ play no useful theoretical role in the study of language use, and that the nature of explicit communication will have to be rethought.

In two experiments, we investigated whether 13-month-old infants expect agents to behave in a way 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 it. Infants’ looking times suggest that they expected searches to be effective when—and only when—the agent had had access to the relevant information. This result supports the view that infants’ possess an incipient metarepresentational ability that permits them to attribute beliefs to agents. We discuss the viability of more conservative explanations and the relationship between this early ability and later forms of ‘theory of mind’ that appear only after children have become experienced verbal communicators.

The article revisits the old controversy concerning the relation of the mother's brother and sister's 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 that had been discussed by Radcliffe-Brown, Goody and others are to be explained in terms of the interaction of a variety of factors, some local and historical, others pertaining to general human dispositions. In particular, an evolved disposition to favor relatives can contribute to the development and stabilization of these behaviors, not by directly generating them, but by making them particularly "catchy" and resilient. In this way, it is possible to recognize both that cultural representations and practices are specific to a community at a time in its history (rather than mere tokens of a general type), and that they are, in essential respects, grounded in the common evolved psychology of human beings.

Members of a human group are bound with one another by multiple flows of information. (Here we use “information” in a broad sense that includes not only the content of people’s knowledge, but also that of their beliefs, assumptions, fictions, rules, norms, skills, maps, images, and so on.) This information is materially realized in the mental representations of the people, and in their public productions, that is, their cognitively guided behaviors and the enduring material traces of these behaviors. Mentally represented information is transmitted from individuals to individuals through public productions. Public representations such as speech, gestures, writing, or pictures are a special type of public productions, the function of which is to communicate a content. Public representations play a major role in information transmission. Much information, however, is communicated implicitly, that is, without being publicly represented. Information can also be transmitted without being properly speaking communicated, not even implicitly, as when one individual acquires a skill by observing and imitating the behavior of others. Most information transmitted among humans is about local and transient circumstances, and is not transmitted beyond these. Some information of more general relevance, however, is repeatedly transmitted, and propagates throughout the group. Talk of “culture” (whatever the preferred definition or theory of culture) is about this widely distributed information and about its material realizations inside people’s mind and in their common environment (see Sperber 1996). One can study cultural phenomena in two main ways. One can interpret them, that is, try and make their contents intelligible to people of another culture, or more intelligible to members of the culture in which these phenomena occurs, as do anthropologists and historians. One may also try and explain causally how these cultural phenomena emerge, stabilize and evolve..

Experimental evidence on reasoning and decision making has been used to argue both that human rationality is adequate and that it is defective. The idea that reasoning involves not one but two mental systems (see Evans and Over, 1996; Sloman, 1996; Stanovich, 2004 for reasoning, and Kahneman and Frederick, 2005 for decision making) makes better sense of this evidence. ‘System 1’ reasoning is fast, automatic, and mostly unconscious; it relies on ‘fast and frugal’ heuristics (to use Gigerenzer’s expression (Gigerenzer et al., 1999)) offering seemingly effortless conclusions that are generally appropriate in most settings, but may be faulty, for instance in experimental situations devised to test the limits of human reasoning abilities. ‘System 2’ reasoning is slow, consciously controlled and effortful, but makes it possible to follow normative rules and to overcome the shortcomings of system 1 (Evans and Over, 1996). The occurrence of both sound and unsound inferences in reasoning experiments and more generally in everyday human thinking can be explained by the roles played by these two kinds of processes. Depending on the problem, the context, and the person (the ability for system 2 reasoning is usually seen as varying widely between individuals, see Stanovich and West (2000)) either system 1 or system 2 reasoning is more likely to be activated, with different consequences for people’s ability to reach the normatively correct solution (Evans, 2006). The two systems can even compete: system 1 suggests an intuitively appealing response while system 2 tries to inhibit this response and to impose its own norm-guided one. Much evidence has accumulated in favour of such a dual view of reasoning (Evans, 2003, in press; for arguments against, see Osman, 2004). There is, however, some vagueness in the way the two systems are characterized. Instead of a principled distinction, we are presented with a bundle of contrasting features—slow/fast, automatic/controlled, explicit/implicit, associationist/rule based, modular/central— which, depending on the specific dual process theory, are attributed more or less exclusively to one of the two systems..

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 an inference process 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 conveying? How should we analyse literal meaning, approximations, metaphors and ironies? Is the ability to understand speakers' meanings rooted in a more general human ability to understand other minds? How do these abilities interact in evolution and in cognitive development? MEANING AND RELEVANCE sets out to answer these and other questions, enriching and updating relevance theory and exploring its implications for linguistics, philosophy, cognitive science and literary studies

This work examines how people interpret the sentential connective “or”, which can be viewed either inclusively (A or B or both) or exclusively (A or B but not both). Following up on prior work concerning quantifiers (Noveck, 2001; Noveck & Posada, 2003; Bott & Noveck, 2004) which shows that the common pragmatic interpretation of “some,” some but not all, is conveyed as part of an effortful step, we investigate how extra effort applied to disjunctive statements leads to a pragmatic interpretation of “or”, or but not both. Experiment 1 compelled participants to wait for three seconds before answering, hence giving them the opportunity to process the utterance more deeply. Experiments 2 and 3 emphasized “or”, either by visual means (“OR”) or by prosodic means (contrastive stress) as another way to encourage participants to apply more effort. Following a relevance-theoretic line of argument, we hypothesized that conditions encouraging more processing effort would give rise to more pragmatic inferences and hence to more exclusive interpretations of the disjunction. This prediction was confirmed in the three experiments.

This the tenth volume in the Vancouver Studies in Cogntive Science series. It concerns metarepresentation: the construction and use of representations that represent other representations. Metarepresentations are ubiquitous among human beings, whenever we think or talk about mental states or linguistic acts, or theorize about the mind or language. It is crucial to the unconscious process we use to divine the mental states of others, and ultimately to any workable theory of the mind. This volume collects previously unpublished studies on the subject by an interdisciplinary group of contributors, including: Daniel Dennett, Alvin Goldman, Keith Lehrer, Leda Cosmides and John Tooby

We argue that there is a continuum of cases without any demarcation between more individual and more cultural information, and that therefore “culture” should be viewed as a property that human mental representations and practices exhibit to a varying degree rather than as a type or a subclass of these representations and practices (or of “information”). We discuss the relative role of preservative and constructive processes in transmission. We suggest a revision of Richerson and Boyd’s classification of the forces of cultural evloution.