David Bourget (Western Ontario)
David Chalmers (ANU, NYU)
Rafael De Clercq
Jack Alan Reynolds
Learn more about PhilPapers
Philosophical Explorations 7 (3):281 – 297 (2004)
The cognitive revolution in psychology was a significant advance in our thinking about the mind. Philosophers and social scientists have looked to the cognitive sciences with the hope that the social world will yield to similar explanatory strategies. Dan Sperber has argued for a programme that would conceptualize the entire domain of anthropological theory in cognitive terms. Sperber's 'epidemiology' specifically excludes interpretive, structuralist and functionalist theories. This essay evaluates Sperber's epidemiological approach to anthropological theory. It argues that as a programme for anthropological theorizing, Sperber's epidemiology could not be empirically grounded. Cognitive explanations depend on prior interpretations. While interpretation is a kind of theorizing, it cannot be assimilated to cognitive explanation. The essay concludes by sketching an explanatory coherence framework in which ethnographic interpretation and cognitive explanation are seen as parts of a unified body of anthropological theorizing.
|Keywords||No keywords specified (fix it)|
|Categories||categorize this paper)|
Setup an account with your affiliations in order to access resources via your University's proxy server
Configure custom proxy (use this if your affiliation does not provide a proxy)
|Through your library|
References found in this work BETA
Willard Van Orman Quine, Patricia Smith Churchland & Dagfinn Føllesdal (2013). Word and Object. The MIT Press.
Peter Lipton (2004). Inference to the Best Explanation. Routledge/Taylor and Francis Group.
D. Sperber & D. Wilson (1995). Relevance. Blackwell.
Gilbert Harman (1986). Change in View. MIT Press.
William G. Lycan (1988). Judgement and Justification. Cambridge University Press.
Citations of this work BETA
No citations found.
Similar books and articles
Jonathan Trigg & Michael Kalish (2011). Explaining How the Mind Works: On the Relation Between Cognitive Science and Philosophy. Topics in Cognitive Science 3 (2):399-424.
Rick Dale, Eric Dietrich & Anthony Chemero (2009). Explanatory Pluralism in Cognitive Science. Cognitive Science 33 (2):739-742.
Paul Thagard (1994). Mind, Society, and the Growth of Knowledge. Philosophy of Science 61 (4):629-645.
Claudine Provencher (2011). Towards A Better Understanding of Cognitive Polyphasia. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 41 (4):377-395.
Alison Gopnik (1998). Explanation as Orgasm. Minds and Machines 8 (1):101-118.
Martin Davies (2010). Double Dissociation: Understanding its Role in Cognitive Neuropsychology. Mind and Language 25 (5):500-540.
Raymond W. Gibbs Jr & Markus Tendahl (2006). Cognitive Effort and Effects in Metaphor Comprehension: Relevance Theory and Psycholinguistics. Mind and Language 21 (3):379–403.
David Henderson (2011). Lets Be Flexible: Our Interpretive/Explanatory Toolbox, or In Praise of Using a Range of Tools. Journal of the Philosophy of History 5 (2):261-299.
Richard Montgomery (1998). Grades of Explanation in Cognitive Science. Synthese 114 (3):463-495.
Added to index2009-01-28
Total downloads146 ( #20,292 of 1,778,284 )
Recent downloads (6 months)116 ( #7,415 of 1,778,284 )
How can I increase my downloads?