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La pertinence, communication et cognitionRevue Philosophique de la France Et de l'Etranger 182 (2): 256-257. 1992.
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81The moral, epistemic, and mindreading components of children’s vigilance towards deceptionCognition 112 (3): 367-380. 2009.
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39The 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
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188Fodor'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 Fodors frame problem too seriously. Fodors concerns, on the other hand, even though they are wrongly framed, are worth addressing. We argue that Relevance thoery helps address them.
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19Salvaging parts of the “classical theory” of categorizationBehavioral and Brain Sciences 9 (4): 668-668. 1986.
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63Culture and modularityIn Peter Carruthers, Stephen Laurence & Stephen P. Stich (eds.), The Innate Mind: Structure and Contents, Oxford University Press Usa. 2005.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 behav…Read more
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68Rhetoric and RelevanceIn J. Bender & D. Wellbery (eds.), The Ends of Rhetoric: History, Theory, Practice, Stanford University Press. pp. 140-56. 1990.
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23Are folk taxonomies “memes”?Behavioral and Brain Sciences 21 (4): 589-590. 1998.This commentary stresses the importance of Atran's work for the development of a new cognitive anthropology, but questions both his particular use of Dawkins's “meme” model and the general usefulness of the meme model for understanding folk-taxonomies as cultural phenomena.
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59Experimental 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 e…Read more
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141Meaning and relevanceCambridge University Press. 2012.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, approximat…Read more
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33Metarepresentations: A Multidisciplinary Perspective (edited book)Oxford University Press USA. 2000.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 …Read more
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24This 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…Read more
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6In defense of massive modularityIn Emmanuel Dupoux (ed.), Language, Brain and Cognitive Development: Essays in Honor of Jacques Mehler, Mit Press. 2001.
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22The evolution of the language faculty: A paradox and its solutionBehavioral and Brain Sciences 13 (4): 756-758. 1990.
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154Defining and explaining culture (comments on Richerson and Boyd, not by genes alone)Biology and Philosophy 23 (2): 283-292. 2008.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 classifi…Read more
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196An objection to the memetic approach to cultureIn Robert Aunger (ed.), Darwinizing Culture, . 2001.This chapter determines a major empirical hurdle for any future discipline of memetics. It mainly shows that one can find very similar copies of some cultural item, link these copies through a causal chain of events which faithfully reproduced those items, and nevertheless not have an example of memetic inheritance. In addition, the stability of cultural patterns is proof that fidelity in copying is high despite individual variations. It is also believed that what is offered as an explanation is…Read more
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90Précis of Relevance: Communication and CognitionBehavioral and Brain Sciences 10 (4): 697. 1987.
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322Why do humans reason? Arguments for an argumentative theoryBehavioral and Brain Sciences 34 (2): 57. 2011.Short abstract (98 words). 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 humans’ exceptional dependence on communication an…Read more
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La Pertinence, communication et cognition, collection « Propositions »Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale 96 (3): 430-432. 1991.
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58Social learning mechanisms are usually assumed to explain both the spread and the persistence of cultural behaviour. In a recent article, we showed that the fidelity of social learning commonly found in transmission chain experiments is not high enough to explain cultural stability. Here we want to both enrich and qualify this conclusion by looking at the case of song transmission in song birds, which can be faithful to the point of being true replication. We argue that this high fidelity result…Read more
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63This 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 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…Read more
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79Communicate. We humans do it all the time, and most of the time we do it as a matter of course, without thinking about it. We talk, we listen, we write, we read - as you are doing now - or we draw, we mimic, we nod, we point, we shrug, and, somehow, we manage to make our thoughts known to one another. Of course, there are times when we view communication as something difficult or even impossible to achieve. Yet, compared to other living kinds, we are amazingly good at it. Other species, if they …Read more
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216The cognitive foundations of cultural stability and diversityTrends in Cognitive Sciences 8 (1): 40-46. 2004.
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44Causal Cognition: A Multidisciplinary Debate (edited book)Oxford University Press UK. 1995.An understanding of cause--effect relationships is fundamental to the study of cognition. In this book, outstanding specialists from comparative psychology, social psychology, developmental psychology, anthropology, and philosophy present the newest developments in the study of causal cognition and discuss their different perspectives. They reflect on the role and forms of causal knowledge, both in animal and human cognition, on the development of human causal cognition from infancy, and on the …Read more
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7Apparently irrational beliefsIn Martin Hollis & Steven Lukes (eds.), Rationality and Relativism, Mit Press. pp. 149--180. 1982.