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Dan Sperber (1942–)

Sperber argued that culture does not spread the way genes do — by high-fidelity replication — but the way diseases do: through chains of transmission in which what is transmitted is transformed at every step. The epidemiology of representations, developed across Rethinking Symbolism (1975), Explaining Culture: A Naturalistic Approach (1996), and subsequent work, replaces the meme model (discrete cultural units copied from brain to brain) with an account in which mental representations are produced anew in each individual, guided by cognitive attractors that make some representations more likely to be reconstructed than others. The critique struck at the foundations of Dawkins’ meme concept and Dennett’s universal Darwinism: if cultural transmission is not replication, then culture is not Darwinian in the gene-analogy sense. Sperber is also, with Deirdre Wilson, the co-developer of relevance theory — a pragmatic theory of communication that has reshaped the study of how utterances are understood.

Life

Born 20 June 1942 in Cagnes-sur-Mer, France. His father was the surrealist writer Manès Sperber. Studied philosophy at the Sorbonne, then anthropology. Early fieldwork among the Dorze people of Ethiopia, which produced Le symbolisme en général (Rethinking Symbolism, 1975) — a book that argued against the semiotic approach to symbolic interpretation (symbols do not “mean” in the way that words mean) and for a cognitive approach (symbolic representations trigger cognitive processes rather than encoding messages).

Directeur de recherche at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) in Paris, then at the Jean Nicod Institute (Institut Jean Nicod), the interdisciplinary cognitive-science centre he co-founded. Also affiliated with the Department of Cognitive Science at Central European University in Budapest. Sperber’s institutional home has consistently been at the intersection of anthropology, cognitive science, and philosophy — a position that gives his work its distinctive cross-disciplinary character.

The epidemiology of representations

Explaining Culture (1996) develops the central framework. Culture is not a body of information passed from generation to generation; it is a population of mental representations, distributed across individuals, that are produced and reproduced through chains of communication and inference. The analogy is epidemiological: a cultural item (a belief, a recipe, a ritual form, a narrative) spreads through a population the way a disease does — through contact, with each host reconstructing the item rather than copying it.

Transformation, not replication. When you tell me a story, I do not copy your neural representation into my brain. I construct my own representation, guided by what you said but shaped by my own cognitive resources, background knowledge, and context. The resulting representation is similar to yours — otherwise communication would be impossible — but it is not a copy. Cultural transmission is reconstructive, not replicative. This is the central objection to the meme concept: there is no cultural replicator in the sense that DNA is a biological replicator.

Cultural attractors. If transmission is transformative, why does culture exhibit stability? Why do myths, recipes, and religious beliefs persist across generations if each transmission introduces variation? Sperber’s answer: cognitive attractors. Some representations are easier to remember, easier to communicate, easier to reconstruct than others — because they fit the structure of human cognition. Round numbers are attractors (we remember “about 100” rather than “about 97”). Minimally counterintuitive concepts — agents with one supernatural property and otherwise normal characteristics (a ghost that can walk through walls but otherwise behaves like a person) — are attractors for religious concepts. Attractors explain cultural stability without requiring replicative fidelity.

The relationship to evolutionary psychology. Sperber is unusual in combining a critique of memetics with a defence of evolved cognitive modules. He argues for a “massive modularity” thesis — the mind contains many specialised cognitive systems, evolved to handle specific domains — but draws a different conclusion from it than the evolutionary psychologists do. For Sperber, the modules are not adaptations for specific ancestral problems (as Cosmides and Tooby argue) but cognitive filters that shape what representations are easy or hard to acquire, which in turn shapes what culture looks like. The modules explain the attractors; the attractors explain cultural stability.

Relevance theory

Relevance: Communication and Cognition (1986, with Deirdre Wilson; 2nd ed. 1995) proposes that human communication works not by encoding and decoding messages but through inference guided by the principle of relevance: every utterance carries a presumption that it is worth processing — that the cognitive effects it produces (new information, confirmation, contradiction) justify the processing effort required. The hearer does not decode the speaker’s meaning; the hearer constructs an interpretation that is relevant enough to be worth the effort, using the utterance as evidence for the speaker’s intention.

The theory extends Paul Grice’s pragmatics (meaning as speaker’s intention, inferred by the hearer) and replaces Grice’s multiple maxims (quantity, quality, relation, manner) with a single principle: relevance. The framework has been applied across linguistics, pragmatics, philosophy of language, and experimental cognitive science. It is one of the most widely cited theoretical frameworks in pragmatics.

Where Sperber stops

The epidemiology-of-representations framework replaces the gene-culture analogy with the disease-culture analogy, but the second analogy has its own limitations. In epidemiology, the pathogen is a discrete, identifiable entity whose transmission can be tracked. In culture, the “representation” being transmitted is not always discrete — it may be a disposition, a skill, a way of attending to things rather than a proposition or an image. Whether the epidemiological model can handle non-propositional culture (craft skills, musical traditions, embodied practices) as well as it handles beliefs and narratives is unclear. Sperber has acknowledged the extension is needed but has not fully developed it.

The cultural-attractor model explains why certain representations are stable across transmissions, but the attractors are specified after the fact. Given any stable cultural item, a cognitive explanation can be constructed for why it is attractive — but the framework does not generate strong predictions about which new representations will become attractors. Olivier Morin and others in the Sperber tradition have attempted to make the framework more predictive, with partial success. The risk of post-hoc explanation — identifying attractors after observing stability — is analogous to the adaptationist “just-so story” problem that Gould and Lewontin identified in evolutionary psychology.

Sperber’s defence of massive modularity places him in an unusual position: he shares the modular architecture with the evolutionary psychologists he criticises on the cultural-transmission side. Fodor — who attacked massive modularity from the other direction — argued that central cognition is not modular, and that the interesting cognitive work happens in the unmodular centre. Whether Sperber’s version of massive modularity (modules as cognitive filters shaping cultural attractors) avoids Fodor’s objections or inherits them is debated within cognitive science.

Key works

See also: Dawkins · Hull · Fodor · Darwinism