1. Dan Sperber has developed: an approach to cultural evolution known as the epidemiology of representations or cultural attraction theory as part of a naturalistic reconceptualization of the social; relevance theory; the argumentative theory of reasoning.
Dan Sperber was born in France and raised an atheist but his parents, both non-religious Ashkenazi Jews, imparted to the young Sperber a "respect for my Rabbinic ancestors and for religious thinkers of any persuasion more generally".
Dan Sperber became interested in anthropology as a means of explaining how rational people come to hold mistaken religious beliefs about the supernatural.
Dan Sperber was trained in anthropology at the Sorbonne and the University of Oxford.
Dan Sperber was initially attracted to structural anthropology, having been introduced to it by Rodney Needham at Oxford.
Dan Sperber attended the seminar of Claude Levi-Strauss, credited as the founder of structuralism, who encouraged Sperber's "untypical theoretical musings".
Dan Sperber soon developed a more critical attitude to structuralism and objected to the use of interpretive ethnographic data as if it were an objective record, and for its lack of explanatory power.
Nevertheless, Dan Sperber has persistently defended the legacy of Levi-Strauss' work as opening the door for naturalistic social science, and as an important precursor to cognitive anthropology.
Dan Sperber's 'epidemiology of representations' is an approach to cultural evolution inspired by the field of epidemiology.
Dan Sperber argues that cognitive processes are geared toward the maximisation of relevance, that is, a search for an optimal balance between cognitive efforts and cognitive effects.
Dan Sperber is the Director of the International Cognition and Culture Institute, a scientific discussion and research website.
Dan Sperber has been visiting professor in philosophy at Princeton, the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, the University of Hong Kong, the University of Chicago ; in anthropology at the London School of Economics ; in linguistics at University College London ; in communication at the Universita di Bologna.
Dan Sperber is a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy.
Dan Sperber has been awarded Rivers Memorial Medal, Royal Anthropological Institute, London in 1991, the Silver Medal of the CNRS in 2002 and in 2009 was awarded the inaugural Claude Levi-Strauss Prize for excellence of French research in the humanities and social sciences.