From: Robert Hettinga <rah@shipwright.com>
Date: Sat, 26 Dec 1998 15:00:09 +0800
To: cypherpunks@cyberpass.net
Subject: [PNS-List] CFP: Epidemiology of Ideas
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From: "Philosophy News Service List Mgr. [richard jones]"
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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




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-----------------
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'