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Dan Sperber, Deirdre Wilson.
Relevance: communication and cognition.
Blackwell. 1986

This is one of those rare books that promises to alter the direction of research in a whole range of disciplines. Its importance is, firstly, that it lays the foundations for a unified theory of cognitive science. The authors argue that human cognition has a goal: we pay attention only to information which seems to us relevant. To communicate is to claim someone's attention, and hence to imply that the information communicated is relevant. A single property – relevance – is seen as the key to human communication and cognition.

Secondly, the book achieves a breakthrough in the study of reasoning. It elucidates the role of background or contextual information in spontaneous inference, and offers an analysis of non-demonstrative inference processes. It directly challenges recent claims that human central thought processes are likely to remain a mystery for some time to come.

Thirdly, the authors offer new insight into language and literature, radically revising current views on the nature and goals of verbal comprehension, and in particular on metaphor, irony, style, speech acts, presupposition and implicature. Sperber and Wilson’s writings on relevance theory are already influencing work in a wide variety of fields, including artificial intelligence and computer science.

Dan Sperber.
Explaining Culture: a naturalistic approach.
Blackwell. 1996

Ideas, Dan Sperber argues, may be contagious. They may invade whole populations. In the process, the people, their environment, and the ideas themselves are being transformed. To explain culture is to describe the causes and the effects of this contagion of ideas. Sperber re-conceptualizes the social domain in terms of ecological patterns of psychological phenomena, of an epidemiology of representations.

This book will be read by all those with an interest in the impact of the cognitive revolution on our understanding of culture. The controversial ideas it presents will be widely discussed and debated by cognitive scientists, social scientists and philosophers.

Dan Sperber, ed.
Metarepresentations: a multidisciplinary perspective.
OUP. 2000

Metarepresentation, the construction and use of representations that represent other representations, appears to be ubiquitous among human beings, and is possibly implicated in the behavior of other animals as well. It is involved whenever we think or talk about mental states or linguistic acts, and whenever we theorize about the mind or language. Normal human social interaction appears to involve a good deal of “mind-reading”—the almost unconscious process of divining the mental states of others. This aspect is thought to be crucial to metarepresentation, and ultimately, to a theory of the mind. Given the centrality of metarepresentation to human cognition, the aim of this volume is to gather scholars from philosophy, computer science, and developmental, clinical, and evolutionary psychology to try to advance our understanding of what such representations are, where they come from, and how they are deployed.

Included in this volume is a very high-quality cast of contributors including philosophers Daniel Dennett, Alvin Goldman, Keith Lehrer, evolutionary psychologist Leda Cosmides, and anthropologist John Tooby. Metarepresentation will appeal to the interdisciplinary field of cognitive scientists including philosophers, psychologists, linguists, and computer scientists.

Contents

• Daniel C. Dennett. Making Tools for Thinking. 2000
• Robert A. Wilson. The Mind beyond Itself. 2000
• Leda Cosmides, John Tooby. Consider the Source: The Evolution of Adaptations for Decoupling and Metarepresentations. 2000
• Metarepresentations in an Evolutionary Perspective. 2000
• Andrew Whiten. Chimpanzee Cognition and the Question of Mental Re-representation. 2000
• Alvin I. Goldman. The Mentalizing Folk. 2000
• Alan M. Leslie. How to Acquire a Representational Theory of Mind. 2000
• Susan Carey, Susan C. Johnson. Metarepresentation and Conceptual Change: Evidence from Williams Syndrome. 2000
• David M. Rosenthal. Consciousness and Metacognition. 2000
• Keith Lehrer. Meaning, Exemplarization and Metarepresentation. 2000
• Francois Recanati. The Iconicity of Metarepresentations. 2000
• Steven Davis. Social Externalism and Deference. 2000
• Raymond W. Gibbs Jr. Metarepresentations in Staged Communicative Acts. 2000
• Deirdre Wilson. Metarepresentation in Linguistic Communication. 2000

Hugo Mercier, Dan Sperber.
The Enigma of Reason: a new theory of human understanding.
Penguin. 2017

If reason is what makes us human, then why do we humans often behave so irrationally? Taking us from desert ants to Aristotle, cognitive psychologists Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber explore how our ‘flawed superpower’ of reason works, how it doesn’t, and how it evolved to help us develop as social beings.