Dan Sperber in Edge

From: Robin Faichney (robin@mmmi.org)
Date: Fri 29 Jul 2005 - 07:16:14 GMT

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    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 contents 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 a coding-decoding system, a transmission system, biased only by social interests, by power, by intentional or unconscious distortions, but that otherwise could deliver 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 imitation and communication provide a robust replication system. -- Dan Sperber in the current Edge: http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge164.html

    -- 
    Best regards,
     Robin                          mailto:robin@mmmi.org
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