Dan Sperber
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Dan Sperber is a French anthropologist, linguist and cognitive scientist, currently a Research Director at the Jean Nicod Institute, CNRS. He is known, amongst other things, for his work on pragmatics and in particular relevance theory; and also for his theory on “epidemiology of representations”. In the early Seventies, Sperber was one of the critics of the French structuralism in anthropology. His work on symbolism was a “cognitive turn” in the study of symbolism in which he stressed the role of cognition in the spreading of culture, particularly on the cognitive constraints that bias the distribution of cultural representations. Sperber's work on symbolism has been very influential in cognitive anthropology, literary critics, history of art.
His most influential work is in linguistics and philosophy: with the British linguist and philosopher Deirdre Wilson he has developed an innovative approach to linguistic interpretation known as relevance theory which is now mainstream in the area of pragmatics, linguistics, artificial intelligence and cognitive psychology. He argues that cognitive processes are geared toward the maximisation of relevance, that is, a search for an optimal balance between cognitive efforts and cognitive effects.
[edit] Works
- Le structuralisme en anthropologie (Paris, Seuil 1973)
- Rethinking Symbolism (Cambridge UP 1975)
- On Anthropological Knowledge (Cambridge UP 1985)
- Relevance. Communication and Cognition (with Deirdre Wilson, Blackwell 1986)
- Explaining Culture (Blackwell 1996)
