Dan Sperber
French anthropologist and cognitive scientist, co-developer (with Deirdre Wilson) of Relevance Theory and a leading proponent of the epidemiology of culture; author of works such as Rethinking Symbolism, Explaining Culture, and (with Hugo Mercier) The Enigma of Reason.
Books
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1. Explaining Culture
A Naturalistic Approach
This work advances a naturalistic account of culture as the distribution and transformation of mental and public representations shaped by human cognitive capacities and environmental contexts. It rejects holistic or purely symbolic explanations, proposing an “epidemiology of representations” to explain how ideas spread, stabilize, and change through recurrent cognitive biases and cultural attractors. By integrating insights from cognitive science and anthropology, it reframes traditions, norms, and symbols as outcomes of many small inferential processes rather than autonomous collective entities.
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