--- begin forwarded text Mailing-List: contact pns-list-owner@egroups.com Reply-To: pns-list@egroups.com Delivered-To: listsaver-egroups-PNS-List@eGroups.com From: "Philosophy News Service List Mgr. [richard jones]" <ListMgr@PhilosophyNews.com> To: "'PNS-List@eGroups.com'" <PNS-List@egroups.com> Date: Fri, 25 Dec 1998 22:50:49 -0500 Subject: [PNS-List] CFP: Epidemiology of Ideas To: pns-list@egroups.com From: Mariam Thalos <thalos@ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU> Subject: CALL FOR PAPERS: THE EPIDEMIOLOGY OF IDEAS (fwd) Date: Wed, 23 Dec 1998 15:49:49 -0500 (EST) From: Barry Smith <phismith@acsu.buffalo.edu> To: thalos@acsu.buffalo.edu, rapaport@cs.buffalo.edu Subject: CALL FOR PAPERS: THE EPIDEMIOLOGY OF IDEAS THE MONIST An International Quarterly Journal of General Philosophical Inquiry Edited by Barry Smith http://wings.buffalo.edu/philosophy/Publications/Monet/ CALL FOR PAPERS THE EPIDEMIOLOGY OF IDEAS Deadline for submissions: July 2000 Advisory Editor: Dan Sperber (CREA, Paris) mailto:sperber@poly.polytechnique.fr 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. ______________________________________ Department of Philosophy 611 Baldy Hall University at Buffalo 716 633 2041 Buffalo NY 14260 - 1010 fax: 716 645 6139 http://wings.buffalo.edu/philosophy/faculty/smith ------------------------------------------------------------------------ eGroup home: http://www.eGroups.com/list/pns-list Free Web-based e-mail groups by eGroups.com --- end forwarded text ----------------- Robert A. Hettinga <mailto: rah@philodox.com> Philodox Financial Technology Evangelism <http://www.philodox.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'