Abstract

We outline here a cognitivist analysis of the transmission and maintenance of culture. “Cognitivism” here indicates that cultural patterns exist primarily because of the cognitive organization in each of the individuals that together make up a society. This analysis arrives at particular positions on the issues of what is universal across cultures and what varies, of what is innate and what is learned, and of how the individual and the group are related. This cognitivist view of culture disputes several other theoretical positions, such as the position that culture has an autonomous existence beyond the cognition of individual humans. Our aim here has been, first, to array arguments and evidence for an individual-based cultural cognitivism in a way that consolidates this position; and, second, to lay out a framework in which further research could amplify, complement, or emend this position.