(2005-12-05) Shalizi Sperber Culture

Cosma Shalizi reviews Dan Sperber's Explaining Culture. Roswell is certainly worthy of contemplation: like Lourdes, it has become famous for something which never happened. I refer, of course, to the infamous myth that a flying saucer crashed there in 1947, making the national news,

the museum is a mis-guided monument to a particularly absurd fanaticism, to the strength of human gullibility

Having taken it thus in with a glance, that eye dismisses Roswell and its Museum, and moves on (probably on Route 285) to more pleasant prospects. That eye moves on; but the truly philosophical eye will linger.

The child of the Enlightenment, trained to uncover the hidden springs of conduct, penetrates the inner workings of the museum with ease

In sum: the museum was created as a tourist trap by the local rulers, to their direct benefit

However satisfactory this potion may be in explaining deliberate products of human effort, like the Roswell Museum, it does not seem to work so well with other cultural phenomena, like the story of the Roswell UFO crash itself. For how are people to know what, in view of their stations in society, it would be advantageous for them to believe, and believe it sincerely?

What is needed is a way of establish consensus, of getting the same belief into the minds of the multitude, without Hidden Persuaders actually implanting it there like so many buttock-dwelling microchips.

Now, it is a fact of observation that belief is catching

The heart of the matter is that people have long realized that ideas can spread as though they were agents of disease and infection; in a word, like viruses, using that term in its original sense.

The first published attempt to explain social and cultural change in a selectionist, that is to say a genuinely Darwinian, manner was made in an 1880 essay by William James

The idea has been re-discovered at intervals ever since then

The great breakthrough, however, was in the middle of the 1970s, when one of the biologists, Richard Dawkins, had the genius to give the idea one of its most compelling presentations; and the further genius to give the replicators a simple but neologistic name, "memes," which sticks in the memory

Since then, even literary critics have grasped the notion --- at least, those literary critics who can actually understand popular science books.

This is all very fine stuff; it makes a great mind-toy and is a wonderful stick to beat over the heads of the infamous. The problem with it --- and I say this with real regret --- is that it's very far from clear that most of the elements of culture are stable replicators.

Here at last we come to the contribution of Sperber.

a synthesis of anthropological knowledge and cognitive science

One product of this effort was an excellent book he wrote with the linguist Deirdre Wilson, Relevance. This, depending on how it is approached, is variously an assault of the self-proclaimed science of semiotics, a new understanding of how we understand natural languages, a hypothesis on hypothesis formation

Another product was the reluctant conclusion that most of what passes for explanation in anthropology is no more explanatory than the scribblings of a newspaper editorialist; like them, it is really either merely description, or interpretation, or sometimes vacuous.

Any methodological individualist would have agreed to such a formula; Sperber seems to have been the first to rise to the challenge it presents.

Sperber saw that we need an "epidemiology of beliefs," or even of "representations" in general

Now, however, he reaps the fruit of his anthropological and cognitive studies. Unlike the genetic apparatus, the mind never leaves its contents alone; to think, even to remember, is to change. Nor are these changes, as it were, equally in all directions. Rather the mind works upon its representations in the direction of what Sperber and Wilson call "maximum relevance" --- roughly, extracting the most new information from them for the least processing

But the decoupling of variation from selection has long been recognized as essential to selectionist theories; as James put it in his essay, it is necessary that they belong to "irrelevant cycles" of causes. Relevance thus constitutes one objection to the selectionist account of culture.

The same transformations block selectionist theories at another point as well, undermining the need for selection by providing an another mechanism capable of inducing similar beliefs in a great many heads at once.

Sperber imagines our representations (as instantiated in actual brains, not as abstracta) as elements of the space of a dynamical system, with attractors and basins of attraction

It will not have escaped the attention of certain professionally-deformed readers that this verbal picture cries out for agent-based modeling

There are fascinating issues in evolutionary game-theory as well, since the representational dynamics will to some extent depend on what representations are already held

Somewhere in the above-mentioned Philosophical Dictionary --- the passage eludes me just now --- Voltaire has fun with the effects of trying to believe an impossible or contradictory religious dogma. Sperber explains our ability to do so as follows. We can hold (says Sperber) "reflective" beliefs, "believed in virtue of second-order beliefs about them."

Reflective beliefs are not limited to such statements as "God is everywhere," but include all of our knowledge which is not either direct perception, or arrived at from direct if not unconscious inference from perception: history, empirical science, most of mathematics.

well-understood reflective beliefs ... include an explicit account of rational grounds to hold them. Their mutual consistency and their consistency with intuitive beliefs can be ascertained

By contrast, mysterious reflective beliefs are rationally held (when they are rational) solely upon the authority of those whom we learned them from

Sperber's book carries on from the "epidemiology of representations" in two directions.

One is an explication of social institutions and social facts

The other direction in which Sperber pursues the implications of his basic notion (that "culture is the precipitate of cognition and communication in a human population")

Sperber's arguments carry conviction, at least at the hand-waving level at which the social sciences are accustomed to conducting themselves. Whether they can be carried further, to precision and even accuracy, is another question, technical and empirical

To explain how it comes about that every sapient creature in the United States knows the Roswell story, and similar facts, Sperber saw that we need an "epidemiology of beliefs," (Memetic) or even of "representations" in general. So far he has the agreement of the whole line of cultural Darwinists, from James to Richard Dawkins to Aaron Lynch. Now, however, he reaps the fruit of his anthropological and cognitive studies. Unlike the genetic apparatus, the mind never leaves its contents alone; to think, even to remember, is to change. Nor are these changes, as it were, equally in all directions. Rather the mind works upon its representations in the direction of what Sperber and Wilson call "maximum relevance" --- roughly, extracting the most new information from them for the least processing. (This concept is made clear and precise in their book.) The correctness of their relevance theory is not essential to Sperber's present argument; it is enough that representations change in a highly non-random fashion.