During class, we ended up analyzing an example to help clarify the nature of Sperber's epidemiology of representations.  (Actually, I'm afraid I confused folks a little by going too fast through the middle of my presentation.  Hopefully we got back on track by the end of class.)  Since we will be considering this theory in more detail next week, I wanted to give  a brief outline of the example here.

The example begins with a story "ripped from the headlines", as they say on television.  A perpetrator (A) commits a crime, and is seen in the act by a witness (B).  The witness goes to the police, who bring in a sketch artist (C) to draw a composite (D) of the perp.  The following picture illustrates the story itself:

From an epidemiological perspective, we then have three representations.  We have the idea of the perp in the mind of the witness, the idea of the perp in the mind of the sketch artist, and the actual composite itself.  The first two are both individual representations, because they are in the minds of individuals.  This means those individuals have direct and privileged access to these representations.  The third is a public representation:  it is a picture that can be passed around the squad room, reproduced and hung in the windows of area shops, etc.  The following picture illustrates the consecution of representations:

(The first picture illustrates a causal sequence, and this causal sequence underwrites the consecution illustrated in the second picture.)

The content of all three representations  is, in a sense, the same:  they are all representations of the perp.  But they all are somewhat different, just as a matter of fact.   Sperber's epidemiology of representations says that  the explanation of the social fact that D is a composite [i.e., a picture of the perp (A)] is just the "consecution" of these three representations.

This is the full analysis of the story, from the perspective of Sperber's theory.

I then asked a question, which to my mind is one of the biggest problems that Sperber has to address:  namely, how are these representations individuated?  In other words:  If the three representations (# 1- 3 in the second diagram above) are all different, how do we know that they are all representations of the same person, namely the perp?  We came up in class with three theories for how to individuate representations:
 

We didn't get too far beyond this.  Given more time, we could have looked for reasons why any of these three theories would not be sufficient to explain the individuation of representations, and we could have talked about what this all means for Sperber's theory.  Maybe we will get back to this next week.