84:3 July 2001
The Epidemiology of Ideas 

Advisory Editor: Dan Sperber, CREA, Ecole Polytechnique, Paris

Both in the psychological and in the social sciences, the notion of representation plays a major role. But how are the psychological notion of a mental representation and the sociological notion of a collective or cultural representation related? While there has been a naturalistic turn in cognitive science, proposals for the naturalization of mental representations have had little or no impact on the social sciences. This may be due in part to the fact that these naturalistic proposals typically focus on the individual cognizer. Yet, a large proportion of the mental representations of a human individual are, in fact, mere individual versions of representations widely distributed in human groups.

By embracing the hypothesis that populations of representations (somewhat like populations of bacteria or viruses) are hosted by human populations, it becomes possible to apply to the distribution and evolution of mental representations models derived from epidemiology, population genetics, and evolutionary theory. Cultural representations are then seen as strains of mental representations of very similar content widely distributed across a population. To approach cultural representations in this way is to look for the causal explanation of macro-scale cultural phenomena in the micro-processes of cognition and transmission. It is to engage in a kind of epidemiology of ideas. Philosophers, biologists, and anthropologists have developed a variety of such epidemiological or evolutionary models, with particular application to cultural diffusion and to the history and philosophy of science. Both philosophers and social scientists with a serious interest in philosophy are invited to contribute papers on these and related topics.

Table of Contents:

Daniel Dennett        

The Evolution of Culture 

Lynd Forguson        

Oxford and the "Epidemic" of Ordinary Language Philosophy 

Alvin I. Goldman        

Social Routes to Belief and Knowledge 

Philip Kitcher             

Infectious Ideas: Some Preliminary Explorations  

Ruth Garrett Millikan.         

Purposes and Cross-purposes: On the Evolution of Languages and Language 

F. C. T. Moore    

Scribes and Texts: A Test Case for Models of Cultural Transmission

Asa Kasher and Ronen Sadka    

Constitutive Rule Systems and Cultural Epidemiology