ABSTRACT
In this chapter the contemporary cognitive theory of cultural models is explored in detail. Culture is that which we must know to function adequately in our society. This knowledge is encoded in shared cultural models. In anthropology a theory of cultural models developed from earlier approaches (especially ethnoscience) with the incorporation of insights from the cognitive sciences generally. An important contribution from anthropology is the cultural consensus model, a statistical model that can assess in a theoretically and methodologically satisfying way the degree to which models are shared, how they are socially distributed, and their basic content.
