Dan Sperber’s philosophy of culture

Abstract

This article is a general preliminary sketch of the philosophy of culture of the French philosopher Dan Sperber (b. 1942). At the center of our analysis is his monograph “Explaining Culture: A Naturalistic Approach” (1996). Sperber develops a materialistic approach to culture, based on the Darwinian model and on the achievements of contemporary cognitive psychology. He argues that cultural epidemiology (epidemiology of representations) must study culture. Sperber distinguishes between two types of representations: mental and public. These representations form causal chains. Sperber’s task is to understand why some representations are stable and widespread, unlike others. Sperber distances himself from memetics, emphasizing that in the process of cultural translation, representations are constantly changing, and their changes occur in the direction of cultural attractiveness. Sperber argues with Jerry Fodor about the modularity of consciousness: unlike Fodor, he argues that conceptual processes, that is, thinking itself, can also be modular. Sperber expands the sphere of rationality, introducing into it the half-understandable, doubtful and mysterious. Sperber sets himself the task of combining together a modular view of conceptual thinking and a naturalistic (materialistic) view of human culture, which he develops under the name “epidemiology of representations”.