RT list: Sperber lectures in London 13 Nov - 22 Jan

Dan Sperber
Leverhulme Visiting Professor, Department of Phonetics and
Linguistics, UCL, London
will be giving a series of five Leverhulme lectures at University
College London on
COGNITION, COMMUNICATION, AND CULTURE
The lectures will be followed by drinks.

Tuesday, November 13th, 4.15-6.00, UCL Psychology, Bedford Way, room
LG04
1) The evolution and modular organisation of human cognition
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Presumably, the ancestors of modern humans lived in environmental
conditions where selective pressures favoured a massive investment in
cognitive resources. What adaptations are then likely to have
evolved? Were they adaptations to the natural environment, to social
life, or to an emerging cultural environment? In this lecture, I
develop critical and constructive remarks on evolutionary psychology.

Tuesday, November 20th, 4.15-6.00, UCL Psychology, Bedford Way, room
LG04
2) Relevance in cognition
-------------------------
In our book Relevance: Communication and Cognition (2nd edition 1995)
and many papers, Deirdre Wilson and I have put forward an account of
human communication grounded in a general cognitive hypothesis: that
human cognitive mechanisms are geared towards the maximisation of
relevance. In this lecture, I develop this claim, discuss its fit
with the view of human cognitive architecture outlined in the first
lecture, and look at some of its testable implications for cognition.

Tuesday, November 27th, 4.15-6.00, UCL Psychology, Bedford Way, room
LG04
3) The evolution and development of metarepresentations,
communication and trust
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Humans have a metarepresentational ability: that is, an ability to
represent representations. One form of this ability, the ability to
represent the mental representations of others – known as Theory of
Mind, mindreading, or mentalisation – has been intensively studied. I
argue that there are other metarepresentational abilities at work in
communication and in the allocation of trust. I discuss the
relationship between these different abilities from both an
evolutionary and a developmental point of view.

Tuesday, January 15th, 2008, 4.15-6.00, UCL Roberts Building, room
106, Malet Place (corner of Malet Place and Torrington Place,
opposite UCL Anthropology)
4) Relevance in communication
-----------------------------
In this lecture, entirely based on work done with Deirdre Wilson, I
outline the basic tenets and some recent developments of Relevance
Theory as applied to communication, situating them in an evolutionary
and developmental perspective.

Tuesday, January 22nd, 2008, 4.15-6.00, UCL Roberts Building, room
106, Malet Place (corner of Malet Place and Torrington Place,
opposite UCL Anthropology)
5) Modularity and relevance in cultural evolution
-------------------------------------------------
In Explaining Culture (1996) I outlined an ‘epidemiological’ approach
to culture, described in terms of the causal chains that distribute
representations, practices and artefacts in a human population. The
causal factors that explain the evolution of culture, I argued, are
in part ecological, and in part psychological. In this lecture, I
focus on two major aspects of the human mind: its complex modular
structure, and its tendency to maximise relevance, and discuss the
way in which these aspects may help explain both the relative
stability and the high variability of culture.

Apologies for the short notice for the first lecture.

Best,
Nick

Nicholas Allott
Teaching fellow
Department of Phonetics and Linguistics
UCL
Received on Mon Nov 12 13:12:09 2007