#556 Dan Sperber: Culture, Cultural Attraction Theory, Epistemic Vigilance, and Reason

The Dissenter

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Dr. Dan Sperber is a researcher at the Institut Jean Nicod, and a professor in cognitive science and philosophy at the Central European University in Budapest. He is the author of numerous articles in anthropology, linguistics, philosophy and psychology and of several books, including Meaning and Relevance (with Deirdre Wilson), Relevance: Communication and Cognition (with Deirdre Wilson), and The Enigma of Reason (with Hugo Mercier).

In this episode, we talk about cultural evolution, cultural attraction theory, epistemic vigilance, and reason. We start by talking about how human cognition is best understood in a social context, and how to think about the relationship between culture and biology. We then get into Dr. Sperber’s “epidemiology of representations”, and into cultural attraction theory, and how it related to Robert Boyd’s and Peter Richerson’s approach to cultural evolution. We discuss the limitations of memetics, and if we can say that cultural evolution is Darwinian. We talk about epistemic vigilance, and the argumentative theory of reasoning. Finally, Dr. Sperber tells us about his take on massive modularity of the human mind, and why reason is modular.

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