Top 3 Quotes & Sayings by Dan Sperber

Explore popular quotes and sayings by a French scientist Dan Sperber.

Last updated on April 20, 2025.

Dan Sperber is a French social and cognitive scientist and philosopher. His most influential work has been in the fields of cognitive anthropology, linguistic pragmatics, psychology of reasoning, and philosophy of the social sciences. He has developed: an approach to cultural evolution known as the epidemiology of representations or cultural attraction theory as part of a naturalistic reconceptualization of the social; relevance theory; the argumentative theory of reasoning. Sperber formerly Directeur de Recherche at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique is Professor in the Departments of Cognitive Science and of Philosophy at the Central European University in Budapest.

French - Scientist | Born: June 20, 1942

Source: Wikipedia

For memetics to be a reasonable research programme, it should be the case that copying, and differential success in causing the multiplication of copies, overwhelmingly plays the major role in shaping all or at least most of the contents of culture. Evolved domain-specific psychological dispositions, if there are any, should be at most a relatively minor factor that could be considered part of background conditions.

Dan Sperber

Memeticists have to give empirical evidence to support the claim that, in the micro-processes of cultural transmission, elements of culture inherit all or nearly all their relevant properties from other elements of culture that they replicate.

Dan Sperber