•  115
    Humans are expert users of metarepresentations. How has this human metarepresentational capacity evolved? In order to contribute to the ongoing debate on this question, the chapter focuses on three more specific issues: i. How do humans metarepresent representations? ii. What came first: language, or metarepresentations? iii. Do humans have more than one metarepresentational ability?
  •  154
    Why a deep understanding of cultural evolution is incompatible with shallow psychology
    In Nicholas J. Enfield & Stephen C. Levinson (eds.), Roots of Human Sociality, Berg Publishers. pp. 431-449. 2006.
    Human, cognition, interaction, and culture are thoroughly intertwined. Without cognition and interaction, there would be no culture. Without culture, cognition and interaction would be very different affairs, as they are among other social species. The effect of culture on mental life has always been a main concern of the social sciences and, after a long period of almost total neglect, it is more and more taken into consideration in cognitive psychology. The effect of cognition, and in particul…Read more
  •  61
    When is a conclusion worth deriving? A relevance-based analysis of indeterminate relational problems
    with Jean-Baptiste Van Der Henst, Dan Sperber, and Guy Politzer
    Thinking and Reasoning 8 (1): 1-20. 2002.
    When is a conclusion worth deriving? We claim that a conclusion is worth deriving to the extent that it is relevant in the sense of relevance theory (Sperber & Wilson, 1995). To support this hypothesis, we experiment with ''indeterminate relational problems'' where we ask participants what, if anything, follows from premises such as A is taller than B, A is taller than C . With such problems, the indeterminate response that nothing follows is common, and we explain why. We distinguish several ty…Read more
  •  133
    The mapping between the mental and the public lexicon
    In Peter Carruthers & Jill Boucher (eds.), [Book Chapter], Cambridge University Press. pp. 184-200. 1998.
    We argue that the presence of a word in an utterance serves as starting point for a relevance guided inferential process that results in the construction of a contextually appropriate sense. The linguistically encoded sense of a word does not serve as its default interpretation. The cases where the contextually appropriate sense happens to be identical to this linguistic sense have no particular theoretical significance. We explore some of the consequences of this view. One of these consequences…Read more
  • La contagion des idées. Théorie naturaliste de la culture
    Revue Philosophique de la France Et de l'Etranger 187 (1): 116-117. 1997.
  •  110
    Seedless grapes: Nature and culture
    In Eric Margolis & Stephen Laurence (eds.), Creations of the Mind: Theories of Artifacts and Their Representaion, Oxford University Press. pp. 124--137. 2007.
  •  61
    Groups do better at reasoning tasks than individuals, and, in some cases, do even better than any of their individual members. Here is an illustration. In the standard version of Wason selection task (Wason, 1966), the most commonly studied problem in the psychology of reasoning, only about 10% of participants give the correct solution, even though it can be arrived at by elementary deductive reasoning.1 Such poor performance begs for an explanation, and a great many have been offered. What make…Read more
  •  120
    Beyond Speaker’s Meaning
    Croatian Journal of Philosophy 15 (2): 117-149. 2015.
    Our main aim in this paper is to show that constructing an adequate theory of communication involves going beyond Grice’s notion of speaker’s meaning. After considering some of the difficulties raised by Grice’s three-clause definition of speaker’s meaning, we argue that the characterisation of ostensive communication introduced in relevance theory can provide a conceptually unified explanation of a much wider range of communicative acts than Grice was concerned with, including cases of both ‘sh…Read more
  •  1
    Pragmatics
    with Deirder Wilson
    In Frank Jackson & Michael Smith (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Philosophy, Oxford University Press. 2005.
  •  156
    Linguistic Form and Relevance
    Lingua 90 1-25. 1993.
    Our book Relevance (Sperber and Wilson 1986) treats utterance interpretation as a two-phase process: a modular decoding phase is seen as providing input to a central inferential phase in which a linguistically encoded logical form is contextually enriched and used to construct a hypothesis about the speaker's informative intention. Relevance was mainly concerned with the inferential phase of comprehension: we had to answer Fodor's challenge that while decoding processes are quite well understood…Read more
  • Le symbolisme en général, coll. « Savoir »
    Revue Philosophique de la France Et de l'Etranger 165 (2): 183-183. 1975.
  •  66
    Why Modeling Cultural Evolution Is Still Such a Challenge
    with Nicolas Claidière
    Biological Theory 1 (1): 20-22. 2006.
    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, o…Read more
  •  30
    Intuitive and Reflective Beliefs
    Mind and Language 12 (1): 67-83. 1997.
    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 r…Read more
  •  66
    In Kourken Michaelian questions the basic tenets of our article (Sperber et al. 2010). Here I defend against Michaelian's criticisms the view that epistemic vigilance plays a major role in explaining the evolutionary stability of communication and that the honesty of speakers and the reliability of their testimony are, to a large extent, an effect of hearers' vigilance
  •  45
    Culturally transmitted misbeliefs
    with Ryan T. McKay and Daniel C. Dennett
    Behavioral and Brain Sciences 32 (6): 534-535. 2009.
    Most human beliefs are acquired through communication, and so are most misbeliefs. Just like the misbeliefs discussed by McKay & Dennett (M&D), culturally transmitted misbeliefs tend to result from limitations rather than malfunctions of the mechanisms that produce them, and few if any can be argued to be adaptations. However, the mechanisms involved, the contents, and the hypothetical adaptive value tend to be specific to the cultural case.
  •  223
    Truthfulness and relevance
    Mind 111 (443): 583-632. 2002.
    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 ex…Read more
  •  59
    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 …Read more
  •  60
    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 suggested, based on an examination of the cognitive..
  • ELIZABETH S. SPELKE (MIT) Children's use of geometry and landmarks to reorient in an open space, 119±148 JENNY R. SAFFRAN (University of Wisconsin±Madison) Words in a sea of sounds: the output of infant statistical learning, 149±169 Brief articles (review)
    with Marc Pomplun, Eyal M. Reingold, Jiye Shen, Vittorio Girotto, Markus Kemmelmeier, Jean-Baptiste van der Henst, Edward Munnich, Barbara Landau, and Barbara Anne Dosher
    Cognition 81 (249): 249-251. 2001.
  •  39
    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 pertainin…Read more
  • La pertinence, communication et cognition
    with Deirdre Wilson and A. Gershenfeld
    Revue Philosophique de la France Et de l'Etranger 182 (2): 256-257. 1992.
  •  193
    Fodor's frame problem and relevance theory (reply to chiappe & kukla)
    Behavioral and Brain Sciences 19 (3): 530-532. 1996.
    Chiappe and Kukla argue that relevance theory fails to solve the frame problem as defined by Fodor. They are right. They are wrong, however, to take Fodor’s frame problem too seriously. Fodor’s concerns, on the other hand, even though they are wrongly framed, are worth addressing. We argue that Relevance thoery helps address them.