Metarepresentations: A Multidisciplinary Perspective

by Dan Sperber (Editor)

This volume in the Vancouver Studies in Cognitive Science series concerns the construction and use of representations that represent other representations. Metarepresentations are ubiquitous among human beings, whenever we think or talk about mental states or linguistic acts, or theorize about the mind or language. This volume collects previously unpublished studies on the subject by an interdisciplinary group of contributors, including Daniel Dennett, Alvin Goldman, Keith Lehrer, Leda Cosmides and John Tooby.

Paperback

First published January 1, 2000

About the author

Dan Sperber is a French social and cognitive scientist. His most influential work has been in the fields of cognitive anthropology and linguistic pragmatics: developing, with British psychologist Deirdre Wilson, relevance theory in the latter; and an approach to cultural evolution known as the 'epidemiology of representations' in the former. Sperber currently holds the positions of Directeur de Recherche émérite at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique and Director of the International Cognition and Culture Institute.

Reviews

[Leyla Moore · Rating 1 out of 5]

Honestly, I feel like I need a PhD just to get through the introduction. I was really interested in the concept of how we represent our own thoughts, but this is less of a cohesive book and more of a dry collection of academic papers that don't always talk to each other. The jargon is relentless. I found myself reading the same paragraph four times and still having no clue what point the author was trying to make. It felt like a chore rather than an insight, and I eventually just gave up halfway through because the "multidisciplinary" aspect just meant it was confusing in five different ways instead of one.

[Larry · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Cosmides & Tooby paper is finally starting to sink in with all its implications upon third reading