Dark Matter of the Mind: The Culturally Articulated Unconscious Reprint Edition

by Daniel L. Everett (Author)

13 ratings

ISBN-13: 978-0226526782

ISBN-10: 022652678X

Why is ISBN important?

Share <Embed>

Other Sellers

from

Other Sellers

See all 4 versions

Used: Very Good | Details

Sold by midtownscholarbookstore

Access codes and supplements are not guaranteed with used items.

$3.99 delivery: Nov 26 - Dec 2

Fastest delivery: Nov 23 - 29

In Stock.

Ships from and sold by Amazon.com.

Available at a lower price from other sellers that may not offer free Prime shipping.

List Price: $34.00 Details

Save: $2.00 (6%)

FREE delivery: Friday, Nov 19 Details

Fastest delivery: Wednesday, Nov 17
Order within 6 hrs and 13 mins Details

Available at a lower price from other sellers that may not offer free Prime shipping.

Is it in our nature to be altruistic, or evil, to make art, use tools, or create language? Is it in our nature to think in any particular way? For Daniel L. Everett, the answer is a resounding no: it isn’t in our nature to do any of these things because human nature does not exist—at least not as we usually think of it. Flying in the face of major trends in Evolutionary Psychology and related fields, he offers a provocative and compelling argument in this book that the only thing humans are hardwired for is freedom: freedom from evolutionary instinct and freedom to adapt to a variety of environmental and cultural contexts.

Everett sketches a blank-slate picture of human cognition that focuses not on what is in the mind but, rather, what the mind is in—namely, culture. He draws on years of field research among the Amazonian people of the Pirahã in order to carefully scrutinize various theories of cognitive instinct, including Noam Chomsky’s foundational concept of universal grammar, Freud’s notions of unconscious forces, Adolf Bastian’s psychic unity of mankind, and works on massive modularity by evolutionary psychologists such as Leda Cosmides, John Tooby, Jerry Fodor, and Steven Pinker. Illuminating unique characteristics of the Pirahã language, he demonstrates just how differently various cultures can make us think and how vital culture is to our cognitive flexibility. Outlining the ways culture and individual psychology operate symbiotically, he posits a Buddhist-like conception of the cultural self as a set of experiences united by various apperceptions, episodic memories, ranked values, knowledge structures, and social roles—and not, in any shape or form, biological instinct.

The result is fascinating portrait of the “dark matter of the mind,” one that shows that our greatest evolutionary adaptation is adaptability itself.

Customers who viewed this item also viewed

Page 1 of 1 Start overPage 1 of 1

Daniel L. Everett
123
Paperback
22 offers from $13.78
Daniel L. Everett
488
Paperback
98 offers from $2.07
Daniel L. Everett
57
Paperback
56 offers from $2.70
Annie Murphy Paul
183
Hardcover
36 offers from $12.77
Daniel L. Everett
Paperback
10 offers from $69.95
Terrence W. Deacon
68
Paperback
86 offers from $1.55

What other items do customers buy after viewing this item?

Page 1 of 1 Start overPage 1 of 1

Daniel L. Everett
123
Paperback
22 offers from $13.78
Daniel L. Everett
488
Paperback
98 offers from $2.07
Daniel L. Everett
57
Paperback
56 offers from $2.70

Special offers and product promotions

Create your FREE Amazon Business account to save up to 10% with Business-only prices and free shipping.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Everett begins by offering a fascinating argument: the only source of human learning is the individual—not in the mind, not in the brain, not in societies. Further, most of this learning is transmitted through “culturally articulated dark matter,” which he defines as “any knowledge … that is unspoken in normal circumstances, usually unarticulated even to ourselves.” From this, Everett lays out his thesis in three parts: the human unconscious may be classified into “the unspoken and the ineffable”; this unconscious is influenced by the interaction of human perception and “a ranked-value, linguistic-based model of culture”; and that “learning as cultural beings” affects human thought and identity. Everett argues for and develops his thesis and its consequences in the remainder of the book. He makes a strong argument and brings in a wide-range of interesting anthropological case studies along the way. Recommended."

― Choice

"Everett takes us through the history of philosophy to show variations on those two themes as elaborated by the famous philosophers of the Western intellectual tradition, ending with his basically Aristotelian view, in contrast to the Chomskyan theory of innate structures and universal grammar. In the process, he challenges Freud’s theory of the unconscious, Jung’s archetypes, Bastien’s psychic unity of man, Joseph Campbell’s monomyth, and other variations on that theme. . . . What he says about this broad and multifaceted scope of human behavior is interesting and informative, and can be profitably read by anthropologists in all four fields of the discipline."

― American Anthropologist

“A hit and the biggest wallop in the breadbasket Noam Chomsky’s hegemony had ever suffered.”

-- Tom Wolfe ― Harper’s, on Don't Sleep There are Snakes

Review

“In Dark Matter of the Mind, Everett defends two ideas that were once highly heterodox but which he has helped push toward the mainstream. One is a radical antinativism. Informed by his rich and challenging background as a linguist and anthropologist, Everett sees the human mind as profoundly shaped and organized by learning and culture. As he sees it, there is nothing like a language acquisition device or theory of mind module to be found in the architecture of the mind. The second is an emphasis on implicit information: hunches, know-how, and skill. That is the ‘dark matter,’ thought that moves us in action and decision without our being able to articulate it, sometimes beyond awareness. The work is rich with example and argument; it is a reflection of many years of thought and experience.”

-- Kim Sterelny, author of The Evolved Apprentice

Publisher ‏ : ‎ University of Chicago Press; Reprint edition (November 6, 2017)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 394 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 022652678X
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0226526782
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.24 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 9.02 x 5.98 x 0.81 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #1,447,510 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #922 in Cognitive Psychology (Books)
- #1,374 in Philosophy of Logic & Language
- #2,431 in Anthropology (Books)

Customer Reviews:
13 ratings

Start reading Dark Matter of the Mind on your Kindle in under a minute.

Don't have a Kindle? Compra tu Kindle aquí, or download a FREE Kindle Reading App.

About the author

Follow authors to get new release updates, plus improved recommendations.

Daniel L. Everett

Brief content visible, double tap to read full content.

Full content visible, double tap to read brief content.

Dan Everett (1951) was born in Holtville, California. He worked in the Amazon jungles of Brazil for over 30 years, among more than one dozen different tribal groups. He is best-known for his long-term work on the Pirahã language. He has published more than 100 articles, as well as 13 books on linguistic theory, life in the Amazon, and the description of endangered Amazonian languages. His book, Don't sleep, there are snakes: life and language in the Amazonian jungle (Pantheon), was selected by National Public Radio as one of the best books of 2009 in the US, by Blackwell's bookstores as one of the best of 2009 in the UK , and was an 'editor's choice' of the London Sunday Times. It was also a featured BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week. His book, Language: The cultural tool (Pantheon), was a New York Times Editor's Choice .

His book from the University of Chicago Press is: Dark Matter of the Mind: The Culturally Articulated Unconscious. In this book, whose primary audience is intended to be professional cognitive scientists (especially anthropologists and linguists), he develops a theory of tacit knowledge and culture that proposes a model of embodied empiricism.

His next book, How Language Began: The Story of Humanity's Greatest Invention, published by Liveright Publishers (US) and Profile Books (UK), is due out August 2017.

A documentary of his life and work, The Grammar of Happiness, was released worldwide in 2012. It is available through the Smithsonian Channel in the USA. The Grammar of Happiness has now won first prize for Human Sciences at the Jackson Hole Film Festival. It won the Young Europeans Jury Award at the FIPA Film Festival in Biarritz, France. It is a finalist for best science film of 2012 at the Pariscience Film Festival.

A play based on Everett's life, Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes, premiered in London in the spring of 2016. Another piece of performance art based on Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes, was performed in Berlin, also in late spring 2016.

Everett is currently Dean of Arts and Sciences at Bentley University in Waltham, Massachusetts.

Customer reviews

5 star		73%
4 star		27%
3 star 0% (0%)		0%
2 star 0% (0%)		0%
1 star 0% (0%)		0%

How are ratings calculated?

Top reviews from the United States

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.

Amazon Customer

Kant and Fodor as well as critiquing the views of psychoanalysts like Freud and Jung

Reviewed in the United States on December 16, 2016

Verified Purchase

Everett’s ‘Dark Matter of the Mind: The Culturally Articulated Unconscious’ is an ambitious attempt to revisit the ancient empiricist/rationalist debate on the nature knowledge. However, Everett’s book takes an unusual twist of setting this debate around the nature and influence of our unconscious knowledge. Along the way Everett spars with philosophers from Plato, Kant and Fodor as well as critiquing the views of psychoanalysts like Freud and Jung, linguists like Chomsky and psychologists like Pinker. But Everett’s book doesn’t amount to a mere negative attack on thinkers who postulate too much innate apparatus, he also defends his own theory which he thinks can handle the data much better than his rivals explanations can.
Everett places himself squarely in the empiricist camp in explaining how we arrive at our world views. But his position differs from traditional empiricists because of his emphasis of cultural learning. Philosophers like Hume, and Locke typically studied the disembodied mind receiving sensory data and making sense of that data using minimal innate resources. Everett on the other hand is studying embodied agents who are learning through the culture they are embedded in from day one. The book is an excellent addition to the literature and will hopefully stand as a counterpoint to naïve cognitive science which often badly underestimates the role that culture plays in informing our total theory of the world.

24 people found this helpful

Helpful

Heather T. Remoff

A Must-read for Anyone Curious About the Nature of Human Nature

Reviewed in the United States on January 12, 2017

Verified Purchase

Dark Matter of the Mind is a must-read for anyone curious about the nature of human nature. The fact that author Daniel Everett challenges the existence of a universal human nature or at least of anything conventionally labeled human “instinct” adds to the fun, at least if you are the sort of reader who likes to fully engage with a book. As evidenced by the fact that all the end pages and margins in my personal copy are jammed with my scribbled notes, questions, responses, and outright disagreements, it’s clear that I fall solidly into the category of someone who enjoys a good debate.

Lacking a background in linguistics, my interest in evolutionary biology alerted me to the current controversies within the field of linguistics. In the early 1970s, Noam Chomsky was something of a hero to those of us who wanted to make consideration of human biology part of the exploration of human behavior. Chomsky’s claim that a universal human grammar was hardwired in the brain has since been challenged, and part of Everett’s purpose in writing this book seems to be to forever put the argument for a universal grammar to rest. I think this book does that, but I am unable to go as far as Everett does in denying the existence of any behavioral constraints imposed by our biological natures.

By his very definition, what Everett calls Dark Matter seems to exclude any possible biological contribution.

"Dark Matter of the mind is any knowledge-how or knowledge-that that is unspoken in normal circumstances, usually unarticulated even to ourselves. It may be, but is not necessarily, ineffable. It emerges from acting, “languaging” and “culturing” as we learn conventions and knowledge organization, and adopt value properties and orderings. It is shared and it is personal. It comes via emicization, apperceptions, and memory, and thereby produces our sense of “self.”

Given this definition, no one should be surprised that most of the citations in his thoroughly researched book support this conclusion. When Everett describes dark matter, I am unable to abandon my belief that some underlying genetic architecture provides the scaffolding on which we hang the definition of ourselves and our world that results from all that acting, languaging, and culturing.

That said, Everett has such a deep and thorough grasp of the nature of human language that his book makes a major contribution to any discussion of this most central of human behaviors. I agree with Everett that we don’t advance our knowledge of the human condition by falling back on undocumented notions of “instinct.” If I were pressed to come up with my own definition of instinct, I would turn to something loosely called species specific traits. Language, as distinct from the communication systems of other animals, might be the only trait that I see as uniquely human. Any other characteristics that define us as human flow from our language abilities. Everett feels that culture creates language. This is perhaps too simplistic a summary of his belief. My own view can be described equally simplistically. Language makes culture possible. In fact, it is more reasonable to propose a positive feedback loop between culture and language that enables humans to adapt quickly to changing conditions. We don’t have to wait for the slow process of natural selection and speciation events to adapt us to a variety of environmental niches. We remain one species. I view language as the tool we use to spread the cultural knowledge that makes survival in extreme conditions possible.

Given the centrality of language in any description of Homo sapiens—whether that view gives primacy to culture, biology or some combination thereof—my take-away from Dark Matter of the Mind is that nothing is more important than an understanding of language in enabling us to bridge the gap that divides human groups. Everett is a master at breaking down and classifying the individual components of grammar and language. It’s all well and good to speculate on the role of language in various theories of human evolution, but unless someone has done the difficult work of learning other languages and analyzing the similarities and differences between them, many of those theories rest on little more than conjecture. I view this book as the start of a conversation in which I struggle to learn the vocabulary that will enable me to shift my own understanding and consider the evidence from an insider’s point of view.

13 people found this helpful

Helpful

phardog

If you've read Dr Everett's other books, this one is a must.

Reviewed in the United States on November 28, 2020

Verified Purchase

He digs deeper into the pragmatics of conscious thought and how it is formed through the filter of culture (both emic and etic) as well as concluding correctly that the cognitivists are wrong about the origin of language and why they are wrong.

Helpful

A needed academic correction, but only that?

Reviewed in the United States on April 5, 2017

I find it hard to assign a star rating to this book. The writing style is highly engaging, and the content is an important revision of academic models, suggesting a new way of thinking which would match what I would consider to be simple common sense knowledge about cultural difference -- things that anyone who has worked with multiple cultures takes into consideration at moments of translation or thick description.

However, the main concern of the author is not with our general way of thinking as Westerners, but with these inaccurate models used by academics and other specialists, and how we should rethink them. As such, it takes a bit of work for someone with a humanities background to understand what novel ideas he is bringing to the discussion. Much of what Everett is trying to say at the cultural level was already argued by humanities scholars 40 years ago (!) in After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation . The new information he's introducing is hard(er) science to respond to people in linguistics who don't really get it.

Everett suggests "dark matter" as a more generic term than "culture" for the type of unspoken knowledge that lies behind language, and provides examples of why this is helpful -- but the reason he chooses this term is because this kind of knowledge is "dark" and not articulated, so the end result is not in any way an improvement upon structural accounts of language, but merely to bring deficient accounts of language and human cognition up to the common sense standards of cultural studies through a recognition of an unspoken and generic "dark" aspect to the mind, which lies beyond the reaches even of psychology.

Everett makes a strong case for skepticism (or rejection) of the cognitive-science models currently infesting the humanities, so the book is valuable on that front. He also restates his case against Chomsky. On those fronts this book is fairly interesting and provides a good summary of his own research with the Pirahã and related research by others. Only the last chapter of the book dares to look beyond the confines of social sciences, to cast doubt on the possibility of a single human nature -- and here Everett's conclusions, while interesting and reasonable, do not resolve all doubts.

9 people found this helpful

Helpful

Top reviews from other countries

Translate all reviews to English

Cliente Amazon

MUY BIEN ESCRITO

Reviewed in Spain on February 9, 2017

Verified Purchase

EXCELENTE SERVICIO Y ENVÍO Y MUY BUEN PRECIO. ME GUSTA TODO SEGUIRÉ PIDIENDO BUENOS LIBROS Y OTROS MATERIALES QUE VAN SALIENDO AL MES

Translate review to English

See all reviews

Dark Matter of the Mind: The Culturally Articulated Unconscious Reprint Edition

Frequently bought together

Customers who viewed this item also viewed

What other items do customers buy after viewing this item?

Special offers and product promotions

Editorial Reviews

Review

Review

About the Author

Product details

About the author

Daniel L. Everett

Customer reviews

Top reviews from the United States

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.

Top reviews from other countries

Dark Matter of the Mind: The Culturally Articulated Unconscious Reprint Edition

Buy used: $26.09

Buy new: $32.00

Frequently bought together

Customers who viewed this item also viewed

What other items do customers buy after viewing this item?

Special offers and product promotions

Editorial Reviews

Review

Review

About the Author

Product details

About the author

Daniel L. Everett

Customer reviews

Top reviews from the United States

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.

Top reviews from other countries

Buy used:

$26.09

Buy new:

$32.00