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| The Epidemiology of Ideas | |
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| THE MONIST An International Quarterly Journal of General Philosophical Inquiry Edited by Barry Smith http://wings.buffalo.edu/philosophy/Publications |
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Deadline: July 2000 |
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Send to: mailto:sperber@poly.polytechnique.fr |
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| Advisory Editor: Dan Sperber (CREA, Paris) mailto:sperber@poly.polytechnique.fr |
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More Details: |
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| Both in the psychological and in the social sciences, the
notion of representation plays a major role. But how are the psychological notion of a
mental representation and the sociological notion of a collective or cultural
representation related? While there has been a naturalistic turn in cognitive science,
proposals for the naturalization of mental representations have had little or no impact on
the social sciences. This may be due in part to the fact that these naturalistic proposals
typically focus on the individual cognizer. Yet, a large proportion of the mental representations of a human individual are, in fact, mere individual versions of representations widely distributed in human groups. By embracing the hypothesis that populations of representations (somewhat like populations of bacteria or viruses) are hosted by human populations, it becomes possible to apply to the distribution and evolution of mental representations models derived from epidemiology, population genetics, and evolutionary theory. Cultural representations are then seen as strains of mental representations of very similar content widely distributed across a population. To approach cultural representations in this way is to look for the causal explanation of macro-scale cultural phenomena in the micro-processes of cognition and transmission. It is to engage in a kind of epidemiology of ideas. Philosophers, biologists, and anthropologists have developed a variety of such epidemiological or evolutionary models, with particular application to cultural diffusion and to the history and philosophy of science. Both philosophers and social scientists with a serious interest in philosophy are invited to contribute papers on these and related topics. ______________________________________ Department of Philosophy 611 Baldy Hall University at Buffalo 716 633 2041 Buffalo NY 14260 - 1010 fax: 716 645 6139 http://wings.buffalo.edu/philosophy/faculty/smith email Barry Smith: phismith@acsu.buffalo.edu |
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