ABSTRACT
Cognitive approaches aim to be explanatory, that is, to interpret cultural practices as the products of underlying cognitive processes that are conceptualized as universal. The “Theory of Mind” provides an interesting take-off point for much of this theorizing, as well as for the theory of language in general as a communicative tool. Cognitivists have developed a suite of such concepts, which for them further explain phenomena, such as religion, “belief ”, sorcery, and witchcraft. John Leavitt’s discussion of the work of Benjamin Lee Whorf is also helpful. He points out that Whorf, like Boas and Sapir, believed firmly in the idea that humans share basic cognitive capacities. Guy Deutscher also overstates his case when he says that linguistic relativity theories portray language as a prison house of cognition, when in fact the theorists we have discussed all recognize that the constraints of language are not absolute and that they are identifying habitual rather than absolute cognitive patterns.
