AN EPIDEMIOLOGY OF REPRESENTATIONS

From The Edge: A talk with Dan Sperber:

Spader How do the microprocesses of cultural transmission affect the macro structure of culture, its content, its evolution? The microprocesses, the small elementary processes of interest, are both those which happen inside individuals’ mind — the cognitive psychological processes, on the one hand, and on the other hand, the interactions among individuals through the changes they bring about in their common environment, and in particular, communication.

Just as the human mind is not a blank slate on which culture would somehow imprint its content, the communication process is not a xerox machine copying process from one mind to another. This is where I part company not just from your standard semiologists or social scientists who take communication to be an unproblematic copying system, a transmission system, biased only by social interest, for instance, almost in intentional distortion but that otherwise would guarantee a kind of smooth flow of undistorted information. I also part company from Richard Dawkins who sees cultural transmission as based on a process of replication, and who assume that communication, imitation, provide a robust replication system.

More here.