ABSTRACT
This paper seeks to conceptualize some of the issues at stake when cognitive science seriously takes up the question of culture. A number of approaches have begun to consider cultural context as more than yet another variable, the complexity of which will simply require more sophisticated computational models. Rather these approaches have undertaken to research the very form of cognition differently, as situated, distributed, and as a social practice. In these new endeavors, what is the implicit model of culture that is being used? This paper raises this essential theoretical question and takes Michael Tomasello’s work on cognition, language, and culture as an example of how recent approaches in cognitive science can raise foundational questions on the relationship of culture to cognition.
