The Enigma of Reason: A New Theory of Human Understanding

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. 
'Original and provocative ... likely to have a big impact on our understanding of ourselves' Steven Pinker 
'Brilliant, elegant and compelling ... turns reason's weaknesses into strengths, arguing that its supposed flaws are actually design features that work remarkably well ... A timely and necessary book' Julian Baggini, Financial Times 
'Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber have solved one of the most important and longstanding puzzles in psychology' Jonathan Haidt 
'Reason is more likely to confirm things that we want to be true, or which we already believe. So why does it exist? This book provides the answer' Alex Dean, Prospect

Mercier, Hugo

Sperber. Dan

Reference

Penguin

<div>"The main thrust of this book is to deliver a major critique of materialist and rationalist explanations of social and cultural forms, but the in the process Sahlins has given us a much stronger statement of the centrality of symbols in human affairs than have many of our 'practicing' symbolic anthropologists. He demonstrates that symbols enter all phases of social life: those which we tend to regard as strictly pragmatic, or based on concerns with material need or advantage, as well as those which we tend to view as purely symbolic, such as ideology, ritual, myth, moral codes, and the like. . . ."&mdash;Robert McKinley, Reviews in Anthropology</div>

Rethinking Symbolism (Cambridge Studies in Social and Cultural Anthropology, Series Number 11)

Health, Fitness & Dieting

Psychology & Counseling

Cambridge University Press

Politics & Social Sciences

Anthropology

On Anthropological Knowledge: Three Essays (Cambridge Studies in Social and Cultural Anthropology, Series Number 54)

What can be understood of other cultures? And what can we learn about people in general from the study of other cultures? In the three closely related essays that constitute this book and which have already created considerable controversy in their original French versions, and been rewritten and expanded for this edition, Dan Sperber discusses these fundamental issues of anthropology. In the first essay he analyses the way in which anthropology is written and read. In the second, he offers a novel rationalist alternative to cultural relativism, based on both anthropological and psychological arguments, and illustrated by his own fieldwork in Ethiopia. The third essay provides an assessment of the work of Lévi-Strauss, in which the arguments of the previous two essays are linked with an incisive critique of Lévi-Strauss' contribution to the study of cultural variation.

Social Sciences

When people speak, their words never fully encode what they mean, and the context is always compatible with a variety of interpretations. How can comprehension ever be achieved? Wilson and Sperber argue that comprehension is a process of inference guided by precise expectations of relevance. What are the relations between the linguistically encoded meanings studied in semantics and the thoughts that humans are capable of entertaining and conveying? How should we analyse literal meaning, approximations, metaphors and ironies? Is the ability to understand speakers' meanings rooted in a more general human ability to understand other minds? How do these abilities interact in evolution and in cognitive development? Meaning and Relevance sets out to answer these and other questions, enriching and updating relevance theory and exploring its implications for linguistics, philosophy, cognitive science and literary studies.

Meaning and Relevance

Wilson, Deirdre

Words, Language & Grammar

Relevance: Communication and Cognition.

Blackwell*publishers

Relevance, first published in 1986, was named as one of the most important and influential books of the decade in the Times Higher Educational Supplement. This revised edition includes a new Preface outlining developments in Relevance Theory since 1986, discussing the more serious criticisms of the theory, and envisaging possible revisions or extensions. The book sets out to lay the foundation for a unified theory of cognitive science. The authors argue than 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. Thus, a single property - relevance is seen as the key to human communication and cognition. A second important feature of the book is its approach to the study of reasoning. It elucidates the role of background or contextual information in spontaneous inference, and shows that non-demonstrative inference processes can be fruitfully analysed as a form of suitably constrained guesswork. 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 view on the nature and goals of verbal comprehension, and in particular on metaphor, irony, style, speech acts, presupposition and implicature.

Relevance: Communication and Cognition

Wiley/Blackwell

This work provides new ways of bridging the social and cognitive sciences. Suppose, it suggests, a net is cast that lets through anything but mental things, and environmental things that have mental things, both among their causes and their effects. Will peole still catch all the subject matter of the social sciences? Sperber argues that people will, and that explanations of social-cultural phenomena in this reconceptualized domain will take the form of an epidemiology of representations, grounded in evolutionary thinking and in psychology. This volume should be of interest to cognitive scientists, social scientists and philosophers, but does not require specialized competence in any of these fields. This work provides new ways of bridging the social and cognitive sciences. It argues for an epidemiology of representations, grounded in evolutionary thinking and in psychology. The book should be of interest to cognitive scientists, social scientists and philosophers, but does not require specialized competence in any of these fields.

Explaining Culture: A Naturalistic Approach

Blackwell Pub.

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. This book will be read by all those with an interest in the impact of the cognitive revolution on our understanding of culture.

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Books by Sperber. Dan

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Sperber. Dan. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The Enigma of Reason: A New Theory of Human Understanding

Rethinking Symbolism (Cambridge Studies in Social and Cultural Anthropology, Series Number 11)

Rethinking Symbolism (Cambridge Studies in Social and Cultural Anthropology, Series Number 11)

On Anthropological Knowledge: Three Essays (Cambridge Studies in Social and Cultural Anthropology, Series Number 54)

On Anthropological Knowledge: Three Essays (Cambridge Studies in Social and Cultural Anthropology, Series Number 54)

Meaning and Relevance

Relevance: Communication and Cognition.

Relevance: Communication and Cognition

Explaining Culture: A Naturalistic Approach

Explaining Culture: A Naturalistic Approach