Dan Sperber Master Class "Rethinking social ontology from scratch"

In January Dan Sperber will give a Master Class, in which he will present his most recent research on social ontology (abstract below). 

His research has been at the crossroad between anthropology, linguistics, philosophy and psychology. He has been one of the first to develop a naturalistic approach to culture under the name of epidemiology of representations. With Deirdre Wilson, he has also developed a cognitive approach to communication known as Relevance Theory. More recently, with Hugo Mercier, he has developed an argumentative theory of reasoning and expanded it into an interactionist approach to reason. These theories have been extensively discussed across the world. He was awarded the Claude Lévi-Strauss Prize in 2009. 

Dan Sperber has been one of the founding members of the Jean Nicod Institute, and he is now a part-time professor at the Department of Cognitive Science of the Central European University in Vienna. 

His series of 4 lectures on
January 9 ^th from 2 to 4pm (Salle Assia DJEBAR, 29 rue d’Ulm). 
January 16^th (Salle RIBOT, 29 rue d’Ulm). 
January 23 ^th (Salle LANGEVIN, 29 rue d’Ulm).
and January 30 ^th, Salle to be defined.

ABSTRACT
Rethinking social ontology from scratch
Social ontology should answer two main questions : What kind of things are social things ? What kinds of social things are there ? Philosophers and social scientists have addressed these questions but with limited and perfunctory interactions between the two fields (quite unlike, say, the intense and productive interactions between philosophy of mind and cognitive science in the past 50 years).

Some social scientists—anthropologists and historians in particular—and some cognitive scientists—social and developmental psychologists in particular—have been interested in a different but closely related topic : folk social ontology : the way people conceptualise their own social life. How closely related to folk social ontology is or should be social ontology as studied by philosophers and social scientists ?

There is a general idea the gist of which is quite generally accepted in philosophy and in the social sciences : what social things are and what social things there are depends on how people think of them. Social things are somewhat enigmatically described as “mind-dependent” or “socially constructed”. With few exceptions, this has led to more discussions of the meaning of these expressions themselves than of the cognitive and social processes the existence of which they seem to imply.

In these four lectures, I will argue that, to better understand the relationship between mental and social things (and not just among humans) and to do so in a way relevant to empirical research, the basics of social ontology should be rethought from scratch. I will suggest how this might be done.