Dan Sperber

@dansperber.bsky.social

Why do societies rely on rigid moral rules? Don't lie. Keep your promises. Don't steal. We all recognize there are good reasons to make exceptions. So why are moral rules so often categorical? Our new paper proposes an answer. 🧵

Screenshot of article title page, "Why human societies adopt rigid moral rules"

Nothing undermine the never-ending fight against antisemitism in a worse way than the repression of pro-Palestinian activism as inherently antisemitic, which has become routine in many European countries and in the US

Kate Scott: "...offers a cognitive underpinning to existing understandings of the various hearer roles that individuals might play in a discourse, ... a key expansion of the scope of relevance theory via application to multiparty communicative interactions." www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

A relevance-based framework for hearer roles in multiparty interactions

This paper proposes a cognitive pragmatic, relevance-theoretic framework for understanding and analysing hearer participant roles in discourse. Releva…

sciencedirect.com

Here is a PhD fellowship in one of the best places in the world to study cognition and culture. 1. Cultural phenomenon: writing 2. Cognitive capacity: to detect what is unpredictable 3. Mission: Show how (2) drives the evolution of (1) 😲 4. Methods: you’ll eventually master some powerful ones

Olivier Morin@oliviermorin.bsky.social · 6mo ago

CALL: a PhD grant (3 years) to do a PhD with me at @cognitionens.bsky.social on the evolution of graphic codes. euraxess.ec.europa.eu/jobs/410213

Yuli Novak (executive director of the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem): "Demanding accountability from Israeli leaders isn’t just about the past, it’s the only way to challenge a system designed to repeat such violence." www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Israel needs to face accountability for our genocide. And so does the US | Yuli Novak

The international community allowed all of this to happen. We must not look away or move on

theguardian.com

Cheyenne Dosso, Tiffany Morisseau, Christophe Heintz, Jean-Sébastien Vayre, A cognitive resource-rational account of epistemic injustice, The Philosophical Quarterly, 2025;, pqaf088, doi.org/10.1093/pq/p... Preprint in FREE ACCESS at philpapers.org/archive/DOSA...

A cognitive resource-rational account of epistemic injustice

Abstract. We advance a novel account of the cognitive foundations of epistemic injustice. We argue that such injustice arises from the efficient allocation

doi.org