Is kinship back?
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- Published on Sunday, 27 May 2012 11:36
- Written by Dan Sperber
In the last issue of Science (25 May, 2012), a plea by Stephen Levinson for the study of kinship terminology, and an article by Charles Kemp and Terry Regier making a novel contribution to that study.
Charles Kemp talks about his and Regier's research
Levinson writes: "In 1860, Lewis Henry Morgan heard an Iowa man on a Nebraska reservation describe a small boy as “uncle.” Fascinated, he embarked on lifelong research into the kinship systems of the world’s cultures, which culminated in a typology of kin categories. Work on kinship categories flourished for a hundred years, but then became unfashionable. Yet, kinship is crucial to the transmission of human genes, culture, mores, and assets. Recent studies have begun to reinvigorate the study of kinship categories. … Kinship is a fertile domain in which to ask a question at the heart of the cognitive sciences: Why do humans have the conceptual categories they do? … There are more than 6000 languages, each with a different system of kin classification, at least in detail. … What constrains this exuberant diversity of systems?"
In their article entitled "Kinship categories across languages reflect general communicative principles" (available here), Kemp and Regier argue:
Why are some languages more regular than others?
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- Published on Sunday, 01 January 2012 23:37
- Written by Dan Sperber
Many years ago, I did anthropological fieldwork among the Dorze of Southern Ethiopia. Since no grammar of the Dorze language was available, I had to find out what were its basic morphological and syntactic rules. The good news was that once I had identified a rule, I could apply it across the board: there were hardly any exceptions. From this point of view, Dorze stood in sharp contrast with Amharic, the dominant language of then imperial Ethiopia. Amharic (like English) is a language with many irregularities. Dorze regularity was found not only at the morphological level, but also at the phonological level. The many words that had been borrowed from Amharic into Dorze had all, except for the most recent ones, acquired fully-regular dorze phonology.
Why are some languages quite regular and others not? I remember posing the question to the historical linguist Robert Hertzron, whom I met at the time in Addis Ababa. It is, he suggested, because, in the process of language acquisition, children tend spontaneously to over-regularize. They apply any rule they have acquired to all possible instances (in English, for instance, they may over-generalize the ordinary rule for past tense and say “he goed” instead of “he went”). In societies where adults correct children, these mistaken regularization are suppressed and irregularities are maintained; in societies where adults leave children alone in this respect, irregularities are less stable, and the language tends to be more regular. Gary Marcus et al. in their monograph on “Overregularization in language acquisition” (1992) quote Jill de Villiers half-joking: "Leave children alone and they'd tidy up the English language."
An epidemiology-of-representations solution to a WWII shipwreck mystery
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- Published on Sunday, 16 October 2011 17:05
- Written by Dan Sperber
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The Australian Cruiser HAMS Sidney
After a shameful lull in the activities of the ICCI (Sorry, folks!), we need something sensational – something, say, like Urbain Le Verrier’s famous conjecture that there had to be a yet unknown planet and his calculation of the location of Neptune that led to its actual sighting in 1846. Well, my story is not quite as sensational but I hope it will kick start a return to ICCI full speed. It involves two psychologists, John Dunn and Kim Kirsner, using cognitive and mathematical analyses of old testimonies to locate a German and an Australian warship that, in 1941, had been engaged in a firefight somewhere off the west coast of Australia and had both sunk. While none of the 645 men onboard the Australian HMAS Sydney survived, 317 sailors from the German cruiser Kormoran did, were picked up by the Australian navy, and interrogated. About 70 of them gave some indications of the location of the event. The locations they indicated however were spread out over hundreds of miles. Even assuming that the prisoners were not trying to deceive their captors, their testimonies seemed impossible to exploit.
Read more: An epidemiology-of-representations solution to a WWII shipwreck mystery
David Hume, the anthropologist, born May 7, 1711
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- Published on Friday, 06 May 2011 23:00
- Written by Dan Sperber
David Hume, described in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy as "the most important philosopher ever to write in English," was born 300 years ago. All anthropologists should celebrate one of the greatest Founding Fathers of the discipline (but will they?), and we at the Cognition and Culture Institute are particularly inclined to do so since Hume commonly sought to explain human ideas, practices and institutions by articulating psychological and sociological considerations. I propose to our members and readers to contribute to this commemoration by selecting quotes from Hume of particular cognition-and-culture relevance and adding them to this post as comments. I begin with a longish quote from his section “On miracles” in the Enquiry on Human Understanding, which is relevant to what is now called 'social epistemology' and in particular to the study of epistemic vigilance and of course to the study of religious beliefs. Before this, just a little anecdote that should ring a bell for many young scholars who pay a serious career price for going against orthodoxies. In 1744, Hume, who had already published his Treatise of Human Nature and a collection of moral and political essays, applied for the ‘Chair of Pneumatics and Moral Philosophy’ at the University of Edinburgh. However, the position was given to one William Cleghorn because of Hume's unorthodox views on religion.
Hume: 'On Miracles'
“A wise man… proportions his belief to the evidence.
What the judge ate for breakfast
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- Published on Wednesday, 13 April 2011 11:20
- Written by Dan Sperber
How do people make decision? One view is that they arrive at their decisions by reasoning, using as premises their beliefs and desires. Another view is that people’s beliefs, desires, and decisions are largely determined by internalized cultural patterns. Particularly relevant to both approaches are judicial decisions, since judges are supposed to make decisions that apply cultural patterns, viz. laws, to specific cases. How much are their decisions really a matter of reasoning? How much are they quasi-automatic applications of internalized patterns? Or do yet other factors, that are neither a matter of rational choice nor a matter of internalized patterns, affect judicial decisions?
In an article forthcoming in PNAS, “Extraneous factors in judicial decisions” (available here), Shai Danziger, Jonathan Levav, and Liora Avnaim-Pesso present evidence highly relevant to answering this question. They begin:
“Does the outcome of legal cases depend solely on laws and facts? Legal formalism holds that judges apply legal reasons to the facts of a case in a rational, mechanical, and deliberative manner. An alternative view of the law — encapsulated in the highly influential 20th century legal realist movement — is rooted in the observation of US Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes that “ the life of the law has not been logic; it has been experience ”. Realists argue that the rational application of legal reasons does not sufficiently explain judicial decisions and that psychological, political, and social factors influence rulings as well. The realist view is commonly caricaturized by the trope that justice is “what the judge ate for breakfast ”. We empirically test this caricature in the context of sequences of parole decisions made by experienced judges…”
Well, here are the striking results:
Creative pairs
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- Published on Monday, 20 September 2010 12:17
- Written by Dan Sperber
Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe (photo by Norman Seeff)
Hugo Mercier and I have of late been developing the idea that reasoning, typically seen as an activity of the individual thinker, is in fact a social activity aimed at exercising some control on the flow of communicated information by arguing in order to convince others and by examining others' arguments in order to be convinced only when appropriate (see here). With such ideas in mind, I was struck by the opening paragraphs of a the first of a series of essays by Joshua Wolf Shenk, (the author of Lincoln's Melancholy and a variety of essays in The New Yorker, Harper's, The Nation, Mother Jones, or the Atlantic Monthly) on "Creative pairs" published at Slate:
"What makes creative relationships work? How do two people—who may be perfectly capable and talented on their own—explode into innovation, discovery, and brilliance when working together? These may seem to be obvious questions. Collaboration yields so much of what is novel, useful, and beautiful that it's natural to try to understand it. Yet looking at achievement through relationships is a new, and even radical, idea. For hundreds of years, science and culture have focused on the self. We talk of self-expression, self-realization. Popular culture celebrates the hero. Schools test intelligence and learning through solo exams. Biographies shape our view of history.
This pervasive belief in individualism can be traced to the idea most forcefully articulated by René Descartes. "Each self inhabits its own subjective realm," he declared, "and its mental life has an integrity prior to and independent of its interaction with other people." ..."
Paul the Octopus, relevance and the joy of superstition
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- Published on Tuesday, 13 July 2010 00:10
- Written by Dan Sperber
So, as you all know, Spain beat the Netherlands and won the World Football Cup in Johannesburg on July 11, 2010. As most of you may also know, this victory was predicted by a German octopus named Paul. Paul was presented before the match with two transparent boxes each baited with mussel flesh and decorated one with the Spanish flag, the other with the Dutch flag, and, yes, Paul the octopus correctly chose the Spanish flag box. One chance out of two, you might sneer, but Paul had correctly predicted, by the same method, the results of the seven matches in which the German team played. The probability of achieving by chance such a perfect series of prediction is 1/256 or 0.003906. More impressive, no? Paul the Octopus is now a TV news star: he has today more than 200,000 Google entries and more than 170,000 Facebook friends; he has received both death threats and commercial offers, and so on. On July 12, Paul's owners presented him with a replica World Cup trophy and announced that "he won't give any more oracle predictions - either in football, or in politics, lifestyle or economy."
Should you be impressed?
Read more: Paul the Octopus, relevance and the joy of superstition
“Oy vey, have you got the wrong vampire!” A reply to Frans de Waal
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- Published on Tuesday, 22 June 2010 17:15
- Written by Dan Sperber
I am used to being attacked by fellow anthropologists for having a naturalistic approach and for arguing that cognitive science, experimental methods, and evolutionary theorizing are highly relevant to anthropology’s pursuit. Some of these attacks have been quite violent (one, in l’Homme 1982 concluded with the suggestion that, in order to show me the irrelevance of what is in the skull, I should be given a blow on the head); few if any have paid much attention to my precise claims, but at least they were quite right in targeting me as a naturalist. I am also used to having to work harder in order to get evolutionary biologists and comparative psychologists to pay attention to what I have to say than I would have to if I were one of them. That is understandable.
However, what happened in the past few days was a novel experience.
Read more: “Oy vey, have you got the wrong vampire!” A reply to Frans de Waal
Believing Maurice Bloch on doubting, doubting him on believing
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- Published on Sunday, 30 May 2010 05:50
- Written by Dan Sperber
My friend Maurice Bloch and I have been arguing since even before we first met in the 70s. What makes it worthwhile is that there is much we agree on, and, once in a while, one of us causes the other to change his mind on some issue. There has been one issue however where I have failed to convince Maurice (and reciprocally, of course); it is about an old argument of mine regarding the disunity of beliefs. Since my 1982 paper “Apparently irrational beliefs”, I have argued that we should distinguish two mental attitudes toward a belief content, an ‘intuitive’ and ‘reflective’ belief attitude (see here). Intuitive beliefs are experienced as plain knowledge of fact without attention and generally without awareness of reasons to hold them to be facts. Reflective beliefs are held for reasons that are mentally entertained. These reasons can be of two kinds: the authority of the source of the belief, or the sense that their content is such that it would be incoherent not to accept them.
Read more: Believing Maurice Bloch on doubting, doubting him on believing
Innocents fornicating and apes grieving
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- Published on Tuesday, 04 May 2010 23:00
- Written by Dan Sperber
In his novel Abbé Mouret's Transgression (La faute de l'abbé Mouret, 1875), Emile Zola has a young priest, Serge Mouret, and a teenage girl, Albine, fall in love with each other without any understanding of what is happening to them. Neither of them knows anything about sex - they don't even seem to know that there is such a thing. So, Zola has a long and lyrical account of how paintings in the house they inhabit, and the luxuriance of nature around them slowly, help them discover what to do:
Cézanne's L'enlèvement inspired his friend Zola's La Faute de l'Abbé Mouret
"It was the garden that had planned and willed it all:
Varieties of disbelief
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- Published on Tuesday, 23 March 2010 23:06
- Written by Dan Sperber
On March 15, the Washington Post website put a link to a small ethnographic study by Daniel Dennett and Linda LaScola entitled "Preachers who are not Believers." In this remarkable piece, the authors present interviews of five protestant pastors who have lost their faith, and analyse their predicament. This is stirring a growing debate not only at the WaPo website, but also on the religious blogosphere (e.g. here, here, and here). It is of cognition-and-culture relevance because the interview, the analyses, and the arguments go into fine-grained discussions of the variety of cognitive attitudes involved in ‘belief', which, with a few exceptions, have been sorely lacking in the ethnography of religion.
Block and Kitcher review What Darwin Got Wrong by Fodor and Piatelli-Palmarini
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- Published on Wednesday, 24 February 2010 23:00
- Written by Dan Sperber
Given the strong reservations that most social scientists have towards evolutionary biology, they might welcome Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piatelli-Palmarini's new book, What Darwin Got Wrong (2010), as they once did Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin famous article, "The Spandrels of San Marco" that criticized the so-called "adaptationist programme." From the book's blurb: "Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini, a distinguished philosopher and a scientist working in tandem, reveal major flaws at the heart of Darwinian evolutionary theory. Combining the results of cutting-edge work in experimental biology with crystal-clear philosophical arguments, they mount a reasoned and convincing assault on the central tenets of Darwin's account of the origin of species."
Before getting carried away however, read Ned Block and Philip Kitcher's review (here) in the Boston Review. In their conclusion, Block and Kitcher note: "Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini take the role of philosophy to consist in part in minding other people's business. We agree with the spirit behind this self-conception. Philosophy can sometimes help other areas of inquiry. Yet those who wish to help their neighbors are well advised to spend a little time discovering just what it is that those neighbors do [...] What Darwin Got Wrong shows no detailed engagement with the practice of evolutionary biology..."
Jingle Bell - Punjabi Tadka
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- Published on Thursday, 24 December 2009 23:00
- Written by Dan Sperber
When we started this blog, we hoped that anthropologists among our readers would be willing to contribute 'pictures of the week', photos (or videos) that would illustrate in a suggestive manner a theme of cognition-and-culture relevance, but we had very little success and, sadly, we have all but given up. Here however is video not from an ethnographer but suggested by 3QuarksDaily and borrowed from YouTube that illustrates in a pleasant and timely manner how cultural items borrowed in another culture get transformed in the direction of a better integration to their novel environment.
Original creation by: Nupur. Music by: Amartya Rahut.
Language faculty? Semiotic system? Or what?
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- Published on Sunday, 22 November 2009 23:00
- Written by Dan Sperber
To what extent does the use of language involve a language-specific ability, to what extent is it subserved by a more general symbolic or semiotic system? This is an old and ongoing controversy to which an article pre-published online in PNAS on Nov. 18, 2009 (doi: 10.1073/pnas.0909197106) and freely available here, "Symbolic gestures and spoken language are processed by a common neural system" by Jiang Xu, Patrick J. Gannon, Karen Emmorey, Jason F. Smith, and Allen R. Braun, makes an interesting contribution. Their abstract:
"Symbolic gestures, such as pantomimes that signify actions (e.g., threading a needle) or emblems that facilitate social transactions (e.g., finger to lips indicating ‘‘be quiet''), play an important role in human communication. They are autonomous, can fully take the place of words, and function as complete utterances in their own right. The relationship between these gestures and spoken language remains unclear. We used functional MRI to investigate whether these two forms of communication are processed by the same system in the human brain. ... Results support a model in which bilateral modality-specific areas in superior and inferior temporal cortices extract salient features from vocal- auditory and gestural-visual stimuli respectively. However, both classes of stimuli activate a common, left-lateralized network of inferior frontal and posterior temporal regions in which symbolic gestures and spoken words may be mapped onto common, corresponding conceptual representations. We suggest that these anterior and posterior perisylvian areas, identified since the mid-19th century as the core of the brain's language system, are not in fact committed to language processing, but may function as a modality-independent semiotic system that plays a broader role in human communication, linking meaning with symbols whether these are words, gestures, images, sounds, or objects"
Examples of pantomime (top row, English gloss: unscrew jar)
and of emblem (bottom row. English gloss: I've got it!)
The authors distinguish different types of meaningful gestures. With good reasons, they focus on gestures that are neither linguistic, like in sign language, nor peri-linguistic like gesticulations accompanying speech. As in the two examples illustrated above, they look at what they call 'pantomimes' and 'emblems'. These cause similar patten of brain activation as their linguistic glosses.
I am not competent enough to interpret brain imagery evidence, let alone criticise it. Still, I would like to raise two issues.
Grieving animals?
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- Published on Sunday, 01 November 2009 11:29
- Written by Dan Sperber
Picture: Monica Szczupider, in the National Geographic Magazine (Nov. 2009)
Proper names in mind, language and culture
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- Published on Tuesday, 20 October 2009 16:36
- Written by Dan Sperber
Proper names are a standard topic of anthropological research, focusing on the variety of naming systems across cultures and on the role of names in social relationships and verbal interactions (for a recent collection, see The Anthropology of names and naming, edited by Gabriele vom Bruck and Barbara Bodenhorn; Cambridge UP 2006). Proper names are also a standard topic in philosophy of language, where their contribution to the meaning of the utterances in which they occur raises a number of challenging issues. A major philosophical approach to proper names is that proposed by Saul Kripke in Naming and Necessity (1980) where he suggested that when a proper name, say "Plato", is effectively used, it succeeds in referring to the name-bearer via a causal chain that relates, through often countless acts of communication, the present use to the initial naming of Plato. With the role it gives to cultural transmission, this "causal theory of reference" (extended to natural kinds name by Hilary Putnam) can be seen as a properly anthropological theory. It has rarely however been fleshed out or discussed by anthropologists (Atran Cognitive Foundations of Natural History: Towards an Anthropology of Science,1990, pp 64-71, is one interesting exception), nor have philosophers paid much attention to the anthropology of proper names. As for the psychology of proper names, it has remained until recently an underdeveloped topic.
The last issue of Mind and language, Volume 24 Issue 4 (September 2009), with five papers on proper names, is particularly welcome in this context. It helps bridge the gap between philosophy and psychology. I hope it will inspire someone to work further on bridging the gap with anthropology. Read on for the abstracts.
Inverse correlation between norms and behaviour?
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- Published on Sunday, 28 June 2009 08:43
- Written by Dan Sperber
We know, of course, that people don't strictly abide by the norms they publicly express: the flesh is weak, and so on, but, from an anthropological point of view, it would be surprising to see a complete disconnect between norms and behaviour. Even more surprising would be to see a reverse correlation, that is to have people who insist, "don't do A!" (for instance, don't commit adultery) do A more often than other people who have no strong objection to A. This, however, is exactly what is happening with American conservatives, according to Charles M. Blow (a New York Times's columnist with a blog about all things statistical and their visual expressions) who published on June 27 an op-ed with a fascinating chart (reproduced below) to prove it.
Evolutionary psychology under attack
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- Published on Tuesday, 23 June 2009 15:34
- Written by Dan Sperber
The article in Newsweek, with the telltale title "Why Do We Rape, Kill and Sleep Around? The fault, dear Darwin, lies not in our ancestors, but in ourselves" is a pathetic misrepresentation of evolutionary psychology, mentioning only work on mate choice and reproduction, giving pride of place to Randy Thornhill and Craig Palmer's book on rape, and presenting the controversial claim that human rape is an adaptation as a central dogma of evolutionary psychology as a whole when not even Palmer agrees with it. Cultural diversity is presented as proving evolutionary psychologists wrong, as if, somehow, they had been unaware of it and had had nothing to contribute to its study. Behavioural ecology is represented as diametrically opposed to evolutionary psychology. And so forth. I assume that most readers of this blog are familiar enough with evolutionary psychology not to be misled by such poor reporting (or else Cosmides and Tooby's "Evolutionary psychology: A primer" is still a good place to start) .
In memoriam: Nicola Knight
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- Published on Friday, 12 June 2009 12:35
- Written by Dan Sperber
We mourn Nicola Knight who died this Tuesday, June 9, at the age of 33, from a heart attack. He was an active member of this Institute, a friend, a colleague, and a former student of many of us. The day before his death, he sent a new post for this blog, which we publish below.
Nicola was a lecturer and a post-doctoral researcher at the Centre for Anthropology and Mind and the Institute of Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology, University of Oxford. He held a BSc in Social Anthropology from LSE, an MSc in Human evolution and behaviour from UCL, and a dual PhD in Anthropology and Psychology from the University of Michigan. He had been visiting researcher at the Institut Jean Nicod in Paris and at the Centre for philosophy of natural and social science, LSE. He had published important articles on normativity, on religion, and on the epistemology of anthropology in the Journal of Cognition and Culture, Cognitive Science, the JRAI, and in several edited volumes. We all felt he would be a major contributor to the development of research in the area of cognition and culture in the years to come.
Our thoughts are with his wife, Maria Doglioli, and his family.
Truth among the...
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- Published on Saturday, 30 May 2009 23:30
- Written by Dan Sperber
(Ten year ago or so, Maurice Bloch and I started discussing a basic issue in folk-epistemic, the variety of notions of truth across cultures, and we ran several workshops in Paris with psychologists, historians, and anthropologists on the theme. I would like to revive the discussion, maybe in the form of an online workshop, but first, let me raise the issue on this blog.)
Do considerations of "truth" play a role in human intellectual and social practices in all cultures? Are diverse notions of truth involved both across and within cultures? Are implicit notions of truth involved, and, if so, how do they relate to explicit notions? In which cultural practices and domains of discourse is a notion of truth invoked? Are there institutions and social positions which entertain a privileged relationship with "truth"?
There is a rich philosophical, philological, and historical literature relevant to the issue and concerning literate, and more specifically, scholarly traditions (Ancient Greece, Buddhism, judicial practices, modern science - to mention just two examples, Marcel Détienne's The Masters of Truth in Archaic Greece, and Steven Shapin's A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England) . Anthropological literature hardly ever directly addesses the issue (Pascal Boyer's Tradition as Truth and Communication: A Cognitive Description of Traditional Discourse being a notable exception), even if it often contains relevant data collected from a different perspective.
Is the left hemisphere more Whorfian than the right one?
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- Published on Thursday, 21 May 2009 13:30
- Written by Dan Sperber
In the May 19, 2009 issue of PNAS, an article by Wai Ting Siok, Paul Kay, William S. Y. Wang, Alice H. D. Chana, Lin Chen, Kang-Kwong Luk and Li Hai Tan shows that "Language regions of brain are operative in color perception" (article freely available here). It is nice to see how far we are, in this classical area of anthropological debate, from the old nature/nurture all-or-nothing: It turns out the left hemisphere is more Whorfian than the right one!
Here is the abstract:
Read more: Is the left hemisphere more Whorfian than the right one?
Success or Prestige? Hunters' cultural biases
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- Published on Wednesday, 29 April 2009 23:00
- Written by Dan Sperber
Rob Boyd and Pete Richerson have identified two biases, one based on success, the other on prestige, that might influence which individual is most imitated. If you were living in a foraging society, would you rather imitate prestigious hunters or successful ones? Successful ones, you say? It may not be so easy or so argue Kim Hill and Keith Kintigh in "Can Anthropologists Distinguish Good and Poor Hunters? Implications for Hunting Hypotheses, Sharing Conventions, and Cultural Transmission" by (in Current Anthropology Volume 50, Number 3, June 2009) available here.
Here is the Abstract:
Numerous articles examine the relationship between men's hunting skill and other important biological and social traits. We analyzed more than 14,000 hunter days during 27 years of monitoring the Ache of Paraguay by using resampling methods to demonstrate that large sample sizes are generally required in order to distinguish individual men by hunting skill. A small published study on !Kung hunters shows that large‐game hunters are even more difficult to distinguish by individual skill level. This is a serious problem because regressions using noisy hunting data as the independent variable systematically underestimate the association of hunting ability with other biosocial traits. The analysis suggests that some coresidents in many small‐scale societies will be unable to accurately distinguish hunters by skill level, possibly favoring groupwide meat‐sharing conventions and biased cultural transmission that emphasizes prestige rather than perceived hunting skill.
The future of human cooperation: Some minuscule evidence
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- Published on Saturday, 28 March 2009 00:08
- Written by Dan Sperber
I look at the table of content and some abstracts in several journals, and, last week, one abstract really caught my attention. Here is how it begins:
"Globalization magnifies the problems that affect all people and that require large-scale human cooperation, for example, the overharvesting of natural resources and human-induced global warming. However, what does globalization imply for the cooperation needed to address such global social dilemmas? Two competing hypotheses are offered. One hypothesis is that globalization prompts reactionary movements that reinforce parochial distinctions among people. Large-scale cooperation then focuses on favoring one's own ethnic, racial, or language group. The alternative hypothesis suggests that globalization strengthens cosmopolitan attitudes by weakening the relevance of ethnicity, locality, or nationhood as sources of identification. In essence, globalization, the increasing interconnectedness of people worldwide, broadens the group boundaries within which individuals perceive they belong. We test these hypotheses..."
Are humans getting better at living together, as one hopes, or are we heading towards a world of moral, political and material misery, as one may fear? This is indeed a major issue, and I would welcome any contribution to a better understanding of it. So I read the paper, "Globalization and human cooperation" by Nancy R. Buchan, Gianluca Grimalda Rick Wilson, Marilynn Brewer, Enrique Fatas, and Margaret Foddy (PNAS March 17, 2009 vol. 106 no. 11 4138-4142). The paper is available here.
Could an experiment really help us decide between an optimistic and a pessimistic view? Here is what the authors did.
Read more: The future of human cooperation: Some minuscule evidence
Individual recognition in horses, monkeys and humans
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- Published on Tuesday, 20 January 2009 23:11
- Written by Dan Sperber
In the last issue of PNAS (January 20, 2009; 106 (3)), there is an article on "Cross-modal individual recognition in domestic horses (Equus caballus)" by Leanne Proops, Karen McComb and David Reby. Here is the abstract:
"Individual recognition is considered a complex process and, although it is believed to be widespread across animal taxa, the cognitive mechanisms underlying this ability are poorly understood. An essential feature of individual recognition in humans is that it is cross-modal, allowing the matching of current sensory cues to identity with stored information about that specific individual from other modalities. 
Here, we use a cross-modal expectancy violation paradigm to provide a clear and systematic demonstration of cross-modal individual recognition in a nonhuman animal: the domestic horse. Subjects watched a herd member being led past them before the individual went of view, and a call from that or a different associate was played from a loudspeaker positioned close to the point of disappearance. When horses were shown one associate and then the call of a different associate was played, they responded more quickly and looked significantly longer in the direction of the call than when the call matched the herd member just seen, an indication that the incongruent combination violated their expectations. Thus, horses appear to possess a cross-modal representation of known individuals containing unique auditory and visual/olfactory information. Our paradigm could provide a powerful way to study individual recognition across a wide range of species."
This article is discussed in a comment by Robert M. Seyfarth and Dorothy L. Cheney, "Seeing who we hear and hearing who we see," who begin:
Read more: Individual recognition in horses, monkeys and humans
Why does sneezing elicit blessing?
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- Published on Saturday, 17 January 2009 23:00
- Written by Dan Sperber
I have long been puzzled by the title question, and have never come across a satisfactory answer. So, let me share the puzzle and raise a few more specific questions:
A) Ethnographic questions :
- Examples of different blessing elicited by sneezing (e.g., among the Dorze of Southern Ethiopia where I did fieldwork, “bear a son” for a woman, “kill an elephant” for a man, “grow up” for a child)
- Examples of other hard to control sudden bodily events (coughing, belching, farting, and so on) eliciting a standard reaction
- Folk interpretations of these practices
- Examples of societies without any such pairing of sneezing and blessing
B) Anthropological question:
Why should such practices be widespread? (Attributing a universal meaning to sneezing, even if it were properly argued, would at best displace the question, not answer it)
C) Primatological question:
Any evidence of sneezing in other primates eliciting a specific reaction?
Please, DO help with answers!Claude Lévi-Strauss: the first 100 years
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- Published on Monday, 24 November 2008 21:00
- Written by Dan Sperber
Claude Lévi-Strauss - who is 100 years old today! - may well be the most famous anthropologist in the history of the discipline (or is it Margaret Mead?). Among French intellectuals, he cut a singular and imposing figure, second to none and close to none. By making their hearts beat faster with the promise of intellectual adventures, he attracted to anthropology generations of students - I one of them - who otherwise would have become philosophers, historians or sociologists. Unlike their master, many of these students became thorough fieldworkers and spent little time with theory. In his seminar, they would typically present ethnographic data and he would make theoretical comments. He did, and I remain grateful, encourage my own untypical theoretical musings in spite of their critical tenor, but I remember well that many of his followers saw them as presumptuous, as if, to his theorizing, one could at most hope to add exegeses and footnotes.
Claude Lévi-Strauss in the field
Say "Claude Lévi-Strauss," people answer "structuralism." Right, but he has been also, and quite consistently, a lone defender of a naturalistic and mentalistic perspective in anthropology. While his structuralism has been met with enthusiasm, his naturalistic perspective has been generally treated as an impropriety, an intellectual faux-pas one had better ignore. Lévi-Strauss undeterred insisted throughout his work on a naturalistic perspective...
Cosma Shalizi on Supernatural Horror in Electoral Politics
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- Published on Friday, 31 October 2008 14:47
- Written by Dan Sperber
“What, you actually thought it was a coincidence that Election Day and Halloween are so close?
“On the one hand, Barack Hussein Obama: is he the candidate of a nefarious African conspiracy of cannibalistic pseudo-Christian Muslim witches, or the candidate of Lucifer himself?
“On the other hand, Cindy McCain is just like any other female human (via Pandagon).
Read more: Cosma Shalizi on Supernatural Horror in Electoral Politics
Tasty food for anthropological thought
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- Category: Dan's blog
- Published on Monday, 27 October 2008 18:00
- Written by Dan Sperber
Picture: Taste buds from Gray's Anatomy
The alleged non-existence of universal colours categories provided a textbook illustration for cultural and linguistic relativism until Berlin and Kay’s published their famous Basic color terms: Their universality and evolution (1969), which has played a major role in the development of cognitive anthropology. On the other hand, the idea of four universal basic tastes, sweet, sour, salty, and bitter, has been generally accepted, even in anthropology. In “A study of the science of taste: On the origins and influence of the core ideas” (Behavioral and Brain Sciences (2008), 31:59-75, freely available online) Robert P. Erickson challenges this idea from a neuropsychological point of view.
Here is the abstract:
Ideas of immanent justice in cognition and culture
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- Category: Dan's blog
- Published on Tuesday, 21 October 2008 20:00
- Written by Dan Sperber
How common in cognitive development and how widespread across cultures is the idea of immanent justice, with the good or bad fortune being seen as generally deserved and even as a sign of the moral worth of lucky or unlucky people? A new article by Kristina R. Olson, Yarrow Dunham, Carol S. Dweck, Elizabeth S. Spelke and Mahzarin R. Banaji, “Judgments of the Lucky Across Development and Culture” (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2008, Vol. 94, No. 5, 757–776) provides novel and relevant experimental evidence.
The abstract:
For millennia, human beings have believed that it is morally wrong to judge others by the fortuitous or unfortunate events that befall them or by the actions of another person. Rather, an individual’s own intended, deliberate actions should be the basis of his or her evaluation, reward, and punishment. In a series of studies, the authors investigated whether such rules guide the judgments of children. The first 3 studies demonstrated that children view lucky others as more likely than unlucky others to perform intentional good actions. Children similarly assess the siblings of lucky others as more likely to perform intentional good actions than the siblings of unlucky others. The next 3 studies demonstrated that children as young as 3 years believe that lucky people are nicer than unlucky people. The final 2 studies found that Japanese children also demonstrate a robust preference for the lucky and their associates. These findings are discussed in relation to M. J. Lerner’s (1980) just-world theory and J. Piaget’s (1932/1965) immanent-justice research and in relation to the development of intergroup attitudes.
It would be particularly relevant to have studies on the topic combining experimental and standard ethnographic method and illuminating the relationship between the culturally affirmed views and the people’s (including children’s) spontaneous inference in the matter.
Picture: design by Erica Michaels.
Picture of the week: enteromancy among the Dorze of Southern Ethiopia
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- Category: Dan's blog
- Published on Sunday, 19 October 2008 19:00
- Written by Dan Sperber
The pattern of blood vessels on the entrails represents genealogical relationships and blemishes show which of these relationships (with the living or with the dead) need mending.
Not quite your standard case of a cognitive tool or or of distributed cognition, but...
Manual Trackback: One Stop Thought
A cultural practice, conjuring, gives food for thought to cognitive neuroscientists
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- Category: Dan's blog
- Published on Tuesday, 12 August 2008 18:47
- Written by Dan Sperber
Read more: A cultural practice, conjuring, gives food for thought to cognitive neuroscientists
"Very well-rounded analysis. A few thoughts. First, I am glad you mentioned nurses in your comment* because in the article you discount this, perhaps unintentionally. I remember my aunt consistently bribing the nurses when my uncle was recovering from a stroke for several months in the hospital. Also, I've had many conversations with my family here in Hungary about this, trying to understand the rationale behind this irrational system (I'm originally from the US). I think both motivations could be at play here. I got the impression that, in addition to the bribe, people are still very sensitive to the "wage supplement" aspect. That is, most people I've talked to find the wages of doctors and other health care providers rather deplorable. Even if GMs are a considerable expense for my working class family members, they seems to use the wage supplement as a way to render this dysfunctional reality more palatable somehow. I also think there is a third factor at work here - but I think it's linked to the others. I've witnessed situations where doctors behave very condescendingly toward patients or their families, despite a hefty bribe of some 20,000 HUF. Part of that harks back to the days of the socialist regime - when the power of public authorities was unquestioned. As one of my Hungarian friends likes to say about health clinics here: "they just want to make you feel like they still have power over you." When my aunt and I went to visit my cousin in critical care last year, the doctor didn't want to give us the time of day. We didn't give her a tip, but we kept pressing her for answers. I said to her, "is it a virus or a bacteria?" The doctor looked at me like a deer in headlights. I think she was surprised I even knew the difference. She opened up quite a lot to us after that and we never gave her a tip. Finally- and I'll get off my soapbox - private insurance systems are not necessarily more transparent. The US being a case in point. There is a great (surprisingly) 28-pg TIME article about this, "The bitter pill: why medical bills are killing us." I'm sue you'd find it relevant. Anyway, thanks so much for posting this!!"
*This is the comment by me which Eva refers to:
"I should have also added that, in fact, there is GM directed to nurses when they are perceived as the primary caretakers. Usually this is the case for families having elderly parents in retirement houses."
That GM thing reminds me of a funny routine that happens in France: around the end of the year, firemen and mailmen knock at your door to sell (ugly) calendars. Folk wisdom holds that if you don't buy the calendar, firemen will not rush if there is a fire in your house. Similarly, mailmen will be more likely to lose important mail you receive. What is striking is that this belief seems to carry on though it makes complete non-sense. I bet the situation is a bit different as for GM: the physician obviously remembers you and s/he is more likely to act benevolently towards you with a bit of extra money...
Azzouni certainly has the bona fides to weigh in on this. But it seems to me that the pure sociology of it isn't quite so simple.
Take Wiles' first proof of Taniyama-Shimura. It had an error, but it took concerted efforts by extreme experts to locate it. But that's not the end of the story. It turns out that he and Richard Taylor were able to ascertain that piecing together two parts of the theory that didn't quite seem to work on their own was in fact enough to 'patch' the proof together (Wiles himself says as much).
So, Yes, the original proof was wrong. To a much lesser extent, Perelman didn't fill in all the blanks in his landmark proof of Poincare, leading to a (minor scandal) where two other mathematicians claimed to give the "first" proof based on the "ideas of" Perelman and Hamilton.
The question is this: if someone had done the patching of Wiles' proof for him, would THEY be the prover? How large does the hole have to be? When an error is found, who gets to decide whether it is trivial, whether it wrecks the proof entirely, and who will be the one credited with the insight that makes the whole thing work?
These are not trivial matters, and the issue isn't apportioning credit, but deciding what an error truly is. Typos don't count. Proving incorrect results certainly do. But what about "generally correct" ideas that eventually lead to a proof? How loose do those ideas have to be?
I don't think there's ANY argument about when large, demonstrable errors have been found in published proofs. But there are many other cases -- like de Branges' purported proof of the Riemann Hypothesis -- that fall through these neat cracks.
In respect to kinship terminologies, Levinson's question, "What constrains this exuberant diversity of systems?", is not answered by Kemp and Regier's analysis for one simple reason: Terminologies have a structure and logic, like grammars for language, that determine the possible range of kinship terminologies. Kemp and Regier assume any partition of the space of genealogical relations is a potential terminology and then show that existing terminologies occupy only a small portion of this space due, they assert, to a tradeoff between simplicity and usefulness. This would be like saying a sentence can be any subset of all possible vocabulary words, then asserting that the realized languages have sentences that are a tradeoff between simplicity and usefulness, but ignoring the fact that the simplicity and usefulness of sentences is created through the grammar of the language that constrains what are admissible sentences. The same is true for kinship terminologies, and the answer to Levinson's question has already been made by showing that kinship terminologies have a generative structure that determines the corpus of kinship terms, starting from the primary kin terms of a terminology, along with kinship concepts that are expressed in the terminology (such as reciprocity of kin terms), and the kinship structural properties embedded in a particular terminology (Read 1984, 2001, 2007, 2009; Read and Behrens 1990; Leaf and Read 2012, among others). For example, the difference giving rise to the fundamental division of terminologies into descriptive versus classificatory (bifurcate merging) terminologies derives from two different ways that sibling relations are conceptualized in different societies: (1) a sibling is the child of my parent other than myself (descriptive terminologies) or (2) siblings are those persons who have parents in common (classificatory terminologies) (Bennardo and Read 2007; Read, Fischer and Leaf 2013). Trying to understand kinship terminologies (and hence kinship systems) without first working out the generative logic of a terminology is like trying to understand languages without working out the grammar of a language. Extensive work has already been published on the generative logic of kinship terminologies and this work makes evident what constrains the variability in kinship terminologies that Levinson asks about.
References
Bennardo, G. and D. Read 2007. Cognition, Algebra, and Culture in the Tongan Kinship Terminology. Journal of Cognition and Culture 7: 49-88.
Leaf, M. and D. Read. (2012) Human Thought and Social Organization: Anthropology on a New Plane. Lanham: Lexington Press
Read, D. l984. An algebraic account of the American kinship terminology. Current Anthropology 25: 4l7-440
Read, D. 2001 What is Kinship? In The Cultural Analysis of Kinship: The Legacy of David Schneider and Its Implications for Anthropological Relativism, R. Feinberg and M. Ottenheimer eds. University of Illinois Press, Urbana. Pp. 78-117.
Read, D. 2007. Kinship Theory: A Paradigm Shift. Ethnology 46(4):329-364
Read, D. 2009. Another Look at Kinship: Reasons Why a Paradigm Shift is Needed. Algebra Rodtsva 12:42-69.
Read, D. and C. Behrens. 1990. KAES: An expert system for the algebraic analysis of kinship terminologies. J. of Quantitative Anthropology 2:353-393.
Read, D., Fischer, M. and M. Leaf. 2013. What are kinship terminologies, and why do we care? A computational approach to analyzing symbolic domains. Social Science Computer Review 31(1): 16-44.
Yes, kinship is back -- or more accurately, it is reclaiming its original vigor. Haven't you heard of the Kinship Circle? For each of the past three years, and as part of this year's annual meeting of the Amerian Anthropological Association as well, we have had highly successful sessions on kinship. The sessions have been integrated with the themes of each of the meetings. We have had an international group of scholars from Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, England, France, Germany, Italy, Qatar and the United States, presenting a wide range of papers, ranging from more "classic" questions about kinship systems to current research that is challenging some of our theoretical ideas about what constitutes kinship. The papers from the first two sessions will be published shortly.
Dwight Read
Fadwa El Guindi
Dear learned scholar of mathematicians, I disagree with your premise that mathematicians do not disagree, and, being wonderful souls, are easily converted to consensus. No less a scholar, intellectual and role model than Von Neumann (1961), the founder of game theory, argued against your premise. In fact, he bemoaned that unlike physicists, mathematicians who don't agree behave in an unsocial manner by striking out in new directions, leaving their conflicts unresolved. In his article, the first in his collected works, Von Neumann wished that mathematicians disagreed as physicists did. Whenever conflict arose between two physicists (e.g., Bohr and Einstein), physicists refused to ignore it, often bringing their field to a standstill until a resolution was found (i.e., consensus via debate, unlike your fanciful example of consensus without debate). I have long cherished Von Neumann's insight, and his remarkable paper on mathematicians. BTW, in my research, I too have found that consensus without conflict is indeed possible, except that none of the participants can agree on the result.
Von Neumann, J. (1961). The mathematician. Collected works, Pergamon.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/10/magazine/the-professor-the-bikini-model-and-the-suitcase-full-of-trouble.html?_r=3&
People concur in saying that Frampton is unusually gullible.
This story of an incredibly gullible scientist (or so it seems) might also be relevant to your remark that the optimality of epistemic vigilance can only be measured in view of its fit to the milieu. An optimal epistemic vigilance would enable people to believe most of the true things they are told and to disbelieve most of the false things they are told (especially the costly one). The inconvincible sceptic as well as the gullible has less than optimal epistemic vigilance. The optimal vigilance fall in between, but its precise position depends on whether the environment is full of false claims or not. It would be interesting to know whether there are different cognitive developments of epistemic vigilance depending on the type of environment in which a child grows up. This could account for some variability across individuals.
As for scientists, they are supposed to instantiate high epistemic vigilance. So how can Frampton be at the same time so gullible and a good physicist? I see two non-exclusive possibilities:
(1) Frampton exercises epistemic vigilance, but only in the domain of physics. This can happen because the scientific environment fosters argumentative abilities. By contrast, Frampton did not wish or need to convince others that he was having a relation with a beautiful model. He did not need to find good reasons for his beliefs and did not wish to adress counter-arguments. Hugo Mercier pointed to me that this difference in the argumentative context could explain the fact that Newton, with so great achievements in physics, did so badly in chemistry/alchemy. There was in alchemy no need to convince others; it was a secret enterprise.
(2) Frampton does not exercise much epistemic vigilance, but does well in physics nonetheless because the process of checking the plausibility of claims is distributed to others. Only very selected information arrives to his creative mind. This is thanks to the process through which scientific information comes to be distributed---the review process for instance. In science, epistemic vigilance is distributed across individuals and institutionalised. In that context, some gullibility might be an advantage. The schoolgirl, in any case, does better by believing the apparently crazy things that her teacher says (e.g. sound is the vibration of matter). At the research level also, it can pay to believe improbable hypotheses; it means pursuing a high risk, high reward research programme.
Thank you all for the very interesting discussion!
First, I would like to recommend a paper by Paul Rubin entitled “Folk Economics," where some of the views that have come out of the discussion are treated in an evolutionary framework.
In addition, I would like to mention that during my doctorate I have worked on the intellectual aversion for the market economy from a historical angle, studying the implications of the rhetorical phenomenon of the personification of money in the English literature of the early modern period. Comparing the economic views expressed by satyrical dramatists and pamphleteers to those of the economists of the time, aka the “early mercantilists,” I found out that the characterization of money as a supernatural force that takes hold of human behavior (a “visible god,” as Shakespeare called it) reveals a naive understanding on the part of the writers of the social and economic transformation taking place at the time. Most of them overlooked the economic implications of that transformation, and construed it merely as a process of corruption of traditional ethical values. This investigation led me to conclude that a promising line of research on the aversion for the market economy might consist in understanding how lay people make sense of complex economic ideas.
Let me give you a hint. When economists use such concepts as rationality, profit, cost, trade, competition, and so on, they are using words that embed a whole set of assumptions, a shared knowledge that defines the economic way of thinking. On the other hand, also common people are exposed to this jargon in their daily life: they often use the same words, but they arguably attach to it a different, non-technical meaning. How does that meaning form? Drawing on the culture and cognition research program, I have hypothesized that it forms according to the way people relate their own understanding on the word in question with real-world examples of which they have personal experience. More generally, our opinion on matters on which we have no special competence may emerge from the relation we establish between the delusively familiar ideas involved in them and our own interpretation of the small piece of world we see around us.
I have more fully developed this hypothesis here. I’ve recently also uploaded a draft here, in which I explore the topic of the aversion to the market using as a case study the Italian movies of the economic boom era. It turns out, that the Italian filmmakers, just as the English dramatists of a few centuries earlier, were quite wary of the capitalistic development of the country.
Let us suppose that there is a characteristic (or a set thereof) which determines the functioning of epistemic vigilance, and let us suppose that this characteristic varies between individuals. Simply put, some individuals are more gullible than others, everything else being held constant. These individuals are unversed in worldly matters, or they have an inclination to believe everything they are being told, or an inclination to trust everyone. Maybe they present a combination of these features. Among these, only the most gullible ones would fall for a 419 Nigerian scam. (I am referring to current circumstances, not to those of initial scams). You must have never paid attention to web security to have never heard about the scam, and you must be very trusting of people to put your money into their hands, or as greedy as to make you blind to the telltale signs. I’d say you are lot more gullible than almost everyone I know - your characteristics of epistemic vigilance make you a clear outlier.
But victims of fool’s errands are no outliers. Although, (in my estimation) most novice workers fall for the prank, I would consider their epistemic vigilance as entirely warranted by the situation. By warranted, I mean that they are as vigilant as required to function as competent social actors given that they know apprentices should trust their masters, that their technical competence is low and obscure terms will appear in conversations, etc. They know no more and no less than the average novice and are as gullible (in terms of personal characteristics - see above) as the next guy. Moreover, they are as epistemically vigilant when they leave to search for a “pipe-stretcher” as when searching for a “round about” (a real tool with funny-sounding name used for pipelines). What differentiates a fool’s errand from a normal request is the malicious intention of pranksters. The “initiated” know that victims cannot tell the difference between a real and an imaginary tool, that victims trust them with expertise and professionalism, etc. The dice are loaded from the start against the “fool”, and the prankster knows it.
To sum up, I would say that deceivers in each case are angling for different fish in different waters. 419’ers search for the easy prey, the most gullible individuals from an immense pool of unknown recipients. They send out the lure and expect the golden fish, yet know nothing about potential victims. Organisers of fool’s errands are shooting fish in a barrel, since they have control over specific victims in advantageous institutional settings ( distribution of knowledge,structure of command, authority of social roles, etc). This explains the vast difference in success rates between the two forms of deception: one is addressed to millions of users to “capture” a few, the other aims at a handful to ensnare most of them. In order to make the contrast clearer, I venture to say that most people tricked in “fool’s errands” would avoid Nigerian scams. A victim of 419 starting as an apprentice is doomed by the double handicap of institutionalised ignorance and personal gullibility. On a more amusing line, 419 artists would like to replicate the power of fool’s errand practitioners, such as by cracking into the email database of “I am wealthy and I trust unknown people too much” Anonymous.
The interesting theoretical implication suggested by your comment addresses the level at which we evaluate epistemic vigilance. On the one hand, we have the level of personal traits of gullibility. On the other hand, we have the level of structures of knowledge distribution. Can we pry them apart analytically? Empirically, it is problematic since it is very possible that forms of deception take into account both levels. For example, one would not attempt a “fool’s errand” with a highly suspicious apprentice bound to ask questions defusing the prank. Perhaps scammers try to eliminate segments of likely targets according to their web expertise (this is Herley’s argument).
One example comes to mind where both levels are addressed by scammers. On La Rambla in Barcelona, extremely well organised groups of con men play the three card trick. They target individuals with scarce local knowledge - tourists - by using a “touristy” location. However, their hope lies with the most gullible (greedy? drunk? careless?) tourists which can be parted with their money. The population of likely “marks” is selected by con artists (at the level of distributed social competence), while the actual mark selects himself by betting on the rigged game (at the level of individual characteristics).
Sorry for the long reply which mostly stated the obvious and restated in a less concise form your keen observations - but I think there is something theoretically interesting here: is epistemic vigilance only something “in the head”? Or do we need to rely upon an externalist perspective in which levels or mechanisms of epistemic vigilance can only be judged in the context of wider institutions of knowledge production and distribution? On my part, I think future explorations in the latter direction are promising.
P.S. Thinking about gains: fool’s errands are about hearty laughs and humiliating social initiation. Three card tricks aim for the quick buck, 50 euros made in a few minutes, a score of marks per day. 419 target the rare and precious victim, stripped of considerable sums after a prolonged investment in deceptive maneuvers. An association between kinds of gain and kinds of exploited weakness in epistemic vigilance?