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7Apparently irrational beliefsIn Martin Hollis & Steven Lukes (eds.), Rationality and relativism, Mit Press. pp. 149--180. 1982.
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6806On Anthropological KnowledgeCambridge University Press. 1985.What can be understood of other cultures? And what can we learn about people in general from the study of other cultures? In the three closely related essays that constitute this book and which have already created considerable controversy in their original French versions, and been rewritten and expanded for this edition, Dan Sperber discusses these fundamental issues of anthropology. In the first essay he analyses the way in which anthropology is written and read. In the second, he offers a no…Read more
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269Linguistic Form and RelevanceLingua 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
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77Inept reasoners or pragmatic virtuosos? Relevance and the deontic selection taskCognition 81 (2). 2001.
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La contagion des idées. Théorie naturaliste de la cultureRevue Philosophique de la France Et de l'Etranger 187 (1): 116-117. 1997.
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155Use or misuse of the selection task? Rejoinder to Fiddick, Cosmides, and ToobyCognition 85 (3): 277-290. 2002.
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145Evolutionary psychology—in its ambitious version well formulated by Cosmides and Tooby (e.g., Cosmides & Tooby 1987, Tooby & Cosmides 1992) —will succeed to the extent that it causes cognitive psychologists to rethink central aspects of human cognition in an evolutionary perspective, to the extent, that is, that psychology in general becomes evolutionary. The human species is exceptional by its massive investment in cognition, and in forms of cognitive activity—language, metarepresentation, abst…Read more
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78Twenty-four centuries of literary studies recapitulated in ten years of cognitive science: And Now What?Behavioral and Brain Sciences 6 (4): 610-611. 1983.
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120Agency, religion, and magicBehavioral and Brain Sciences 27 (6): 750-751. 2004.Atran & Norenzayan (A&N) ask: “Why do agent concepts predominate in religion?” This question presupposes that we have a notion of religion that is (1) well enough defined, and (2) characterized independently of that of supernatural agents. I question these two presuppositions. I argue that “religion” is a family resemblance notion built around the idea of supernatural agency.
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598Pragmatics, Modularity and Mind‐readingMind and Language 17 (1-2). 2002.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 consist in applying general mind-reading abilities to…Read more
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424Truthfulness and relevanceMind 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
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440A deflationary account of metaphorIn Gibbs Ray (ed.), The Cambridge Handbook of Metaphor and Thought, Oxford University Press. pp. 84-105. 2008.On the relevance-theoretic approach outlined in this paper, linguistic metaphors are not a natural kind, and ―metaphor‖ is not a theoretically important notion in the study of verbal communication. Metaphorical interpretations are arrived at in exactly the same way as literal, loose and hyperbolic interpretations: there is no mechanism specific to metaphors, and no interesting generalisation that applies only to them. In this paper, we defend this approach in detail by showing how the same infer…Read more
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Le symbolisme en général, coll. « Savoir »Revue Philosophique de la France Et de l'Etranger 165 (2): 183-183. 1975.
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91not 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..
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1MetarepresentationIn Dan Sperber (ed.), Metarepresentations: A Multidisciplinary Perspective, Oxford University Press Usa. pp. 53. 2000.
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304Intuitive and Reflective BeliefsMind 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
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176The moral, epistemic, and mindreading components of children’s vigilance towards deceptionCognition 112 (3): 367-380. 2009.
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91This is the text of the Radcliffe-Brown Lecture in Social Anthopology 1999 (To appear in the Proceedings of the British Academy). In it, I argue that to approach society and culture in a naturalistic way, the domain of the social sciences must be reconceptualised by recognising only entities and processes of which we have a naturalistic understanding. These are mental representations and public productions, the processes that causally link them, the causal chains that bond these links, and the c…Read more
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226Seedless grapes: Nature and cultureIn Eric Margolis & Stephen Laurence (eds.), Creations of the Mind: Theories of Artifacts and Their Representaion, Oxford University Press. pp. 124--137. 2007.
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85A naturalistic ontology for mechanistic explanations in the social sciencesIn Pierre Demeulenaere (ed.), Analytical Sociology and Social Mechanisms, Cambridge University Press. pp. 64--77. 2011.
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107Groups 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
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1PragmaticsIn Frank Jackson & Michael Smith (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Philosophy, Oxford University Press Uk. 2007.
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179Meaning 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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128When is a conclusion worth deriving? A relevance-based analysis of indeterminate relational problemsThinking 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
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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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63This 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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274Explaining Culture: A Naturalistic ApproachOxford: Basil Blackwell. 1996.Ideas, Dan Sperber argues, may be contagious. They may invade whole populations. In the process, the people, their environment, and the ideas themselves are being transformed. To explain culture is to describe the causes and the effects of this contagion of ideas. This book will be read by all those with an interest in the impact of the cognitive revolution on our understanding of culture.