Dan Sperber (born June 20, 1942, Cagnes-sur-Mer) is a French social and cognitiv e scientist.

His most influential work has been in the fields of cognitive anthr opology and linguistic pragmatics: developing, with British psychologist Deirdre Wilson, relevance theory in the latter; and an approach to cultural evolution k nown as the 'epidemiology of representations' in the former. Sperber currently h olds the positions of Directeur de Recherche ?m?rite at the Centre National de l a Recherche Scientifique and Director of the International Cognition and Culture Institute. Contents 1 2 3 4 5 6 Background Career Bibliography See also References External links

Background Sperber is the son of Austrian-French novelist Man?s Sperber. He was born in Fra nce and raised an atheist but his parents, both non-religious Ashkenazi Jews, im parted on the young Sperber a "respect for my Rabbinic ancestors and for religio us thinkers of any persuasion more generally".[1] He became interested in anthro pology as a means of explaining how rational people come to hold mistaken religi ous beliefs about the supernatural.[2] Career Sperber was trained in anthropology at the Sorbonne and the University of Oxford . In 1965 he joined the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) as a researcher, initially in the Laboratoire d'?tudes Africaines (French: African s tudies laboratory). Later he moved to the Laboratoire d'ethnologie et de sociolo gie comparative (Ethnology and Comparative Sociology), the Centre de Recherche e n Epist?melogie Appliqu?e and finally, from 2001, the Institut Jean Nicod.[3] Sp erber's early work was on the anthropology of religion,[2] and he conducted ethn ographic fieldwork among the Dorze people of Ethiopia.[4] Sperber was an early proponent of structural anthropology, having been introduce d to it by Rodney Needham at Oxford, and helped popularise it in British social anthropology.[5] At the CNRS he studied under Claude L?vi-Strauss, credited as t he founder of structuralism, who encouraged Sperber's "untypical theoretical mus ings".[6] In the 1970s, however, Sperber came to be identified with post-structu ralism in French anthropology,[7][8] and criticised the theories of L?vi-Strauss and other structuralists for using interpretive ethnographic data as if it were an objective record,[9] and for its lack of explanatory power.[10] Nevertheless Sperber has persistently defended the legacy of L?vi-Strauss' work as opening t he door for naturalistic social science, and as an important precursor to cognit ive anthropology.[6][11] After moving away from structuralism, Sperber sought an alternative naturalistic approach to the study of culture. His 1975 book Rethinking Symbolism,[4] outlin ed a theory of symbolism using concepts from the burgeoning field of cognitive p sychology. It was formulated as a reply to semiological theories which were beco ming widespread in anthropology through the works of Victor Turner and Clifford Geertz (which formed the basis of what come to be known as symbolic anthropology ).[12][13] Sperber's later work has continued to argue for the importance of cog nitive processes understood through psychology in understanding cultural phenome na and, in particular, cultural transmission. His 'epidemiology of representatio ns'[9][10][14] is an approach to cultural evolution inspired by the field of epi demiology. It proposes that the distribution of cultural representations (ideas about the world held by multiple individuals) within a population should be expl

ained with reference to biases in transmission (illuminated by cognitive and evo lutionary psychology) and the "ecology" of the individual minds they inhabit. Sp erber's approach is broadly Darwinist it explains the macro-distribution of a trai t in a population in terms of the cumulative effect micro-processes acting over time but departs from memetics because he does not see representations as replicat ors except for in a few special circumstances (such as chain letters).[15] The c ognitive and epidemiological approach to cultural evolution has been influential ,[16] but as a means of explaining culture more generally it is pursued by only a small minority of scholars.[17] His most influential work is arguably in linguistics and philosophy: with the Br itish linguist and philosopher Deirdre Wilson he has developed an innovative app roach to linguistic interpretation known as relevance theory which as of 2010 ha s become mainstream in the area of pragmatics, linguistics, artificial intellige nce and cognitive psychology. He argues that cognitive processes are geared towa rd the maximisation of relevance, that is, a search for an optimal balance betwe en cognitive efforts and cognitive effects. As well as his emeritus position at the CNRS, Sperber is currently the Director of the International Cognition and Culture Institute, a cross-disciplinary resea rch institution based at the London School of Economics and Institut Jean Nicod. [18] He is a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy[19] and in 2009 was awa rded the inaugural Claude L?vi-Strauss Prize for excellence of French research i n the humanities and social sciences.[20] In 2011 he gave a Turku Agora Lecture. [21] Bibliography Le structuralisme en anthropologie (?ditions du Seuil, 1973) Rethinking Symbolism (Cambridge University Press, 1975) On Anthropological Knowledge (Cambridge University Press, 1985) (with Deirdre Wilson) Relevance. Communication and Cognition (Blackwell, 198 6) (with David Premack & Ann James Premack, eds.) Causal cognition: A multidisc iplinary debate. (Oxford University Press, 1995) Explaining Culture (Blackwell, 1996) (Ed.) Metarepresentations: A mutidisciplinary perspective (Oxford University Press, 2000) (With Ira Noveck, eds.) Experimental pragmatics (Palgrave, 2004) See also Scott Atran Maurice Bloch Pascal Boyer References ^ Khan, Razib (17 December 2005). "10 questions for Dan Sperber". Gene Expre ssion. Retrieved 3 March 2011. ^ a b "Edge: AN EPIDEMIOLOGY OF REPRESENTATIONS: A Talk with Dan Sperber". E dge. Retrieved 3 March 2011. ^ "Dan Sperber Biography". Retrieved 3 March 2011. ^ a b Sperber, Dan (1975). Rethinking Symbolism. Cambridge: Cambridge Univer sity Press. ISBN 978-0-521-09967-7. ^ Dosse, Fran?ois (1997). History of Structuralism: The rising sign, 1945-19 66 volume 1. University of Minnesota Press. ISBN 978-0-8166-2241-2. ^ a b Sperber, Dan (2009). "Claude L?vi-Strauss, a precursor?". European Jou rnal of Sociology 49 (02): 309. doi:10.1017/S0003975608000118. edit ^ Sperber, Dan (1973). Le Structuralisme en Anthropologie. Paris: Editions d u Seuil.

^ David Berliner (2010). "L?vi-Strauss and Beyond (review)". Anthropological Quarterly 83 (3): 679 689. doi:10.1353/anq.2010.0012. edit ^ a b Sperber, Dan (1985). On Anthropological Knowledge. Cambridge: Cambridg e University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-26748-9. ^ a b Sperber, Dan (1998). Explaining culture: a naturalistic approach. Oxfo rd: Blackwell. ISBN 0-631-20045-2. ^ Sperber, Dan (28 November 2008). "Claude L?vi-Strauss at 100: echo of the future". openDemocracy.net. Retrieved 3 March 2011. ^ Basso, Keith H. (1976). "Review: Rethinking Symbolism". Language in Societ y 5 (2). ^ Hurtig, Richard (1977). "Book Reviews: Rethinking Symbolism". Journal of P sycholinguistic Research 6 (1). ^ Sperber, Dan (2011). "A naturalistic ontology for mechanistic explanations in the social sciences". In Pierre Demeulenaere. Analytical sociology and socia l mechanisms. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ^ Sperber, Dan (2000). "An objection to the memetic approach to culture". In Robert Aunger. Darwinizing Culture: The Status of Memetics as a Science. Oxford : Oxford University Press. pp. 163 173. ^ Richerson, Peter J.; Boyd, Robert (2008). Not by genes alone: how culture transformed human evolution. Chicago, Il.: University of Chicago Press. ISBN 978 -0-226-71284-0. ^ Kuper, Adam (1996). Anthropology and anthropologists: the modern British s chool. London: Routledge. ISBN 0-415-11895-6. ^ "ICCI - The Institute". International Cognition and Culture Institute. Ret rieved 3 March 2011. ^ "British Academy - Fellowship Directory". Retrieved 3 March 2011. ^ "Dan Sperber, 1er laur?at du Prix Claude Levi-Strauss". Minist?re de l'Ens eignement sup?rieur et de la Recherche (MESR). Retrieved 3 March 2011. ^ http://aboagora.wordpress.com/2011/11/14/agora-lecture-%E2%80%93-dan-sperb er-culture-and-minds/