ABSTRACT
Collective cognitive structures are collectively held, distributed cognitive structures that serve as a repository of cultural knowledge for a cultural community. From the perspective of cognitive anthropology, both semantics and much of pragmatics represent kinds of collective cognitive structures. Semantics can be seen as a single system paralleling the more exclusively linguistic systems of phonology, syntax, and perhaps lexicon. Cultural knowledge systems are collective rather than individual – that is, characteristics of, and properties of cultural communities. The important thing about cultural knowledge systems is not just that they are shared but that they each are differentially shared distributed systems. Cultural modes of thought, sometimes spoken of as “foundational cultural models” are culturally specific presuppositions concerning how sets of concepts (and their referents) are organized. Cultural modes of thought thus are the general meta-structures, or basic presuppositions that people in one or another cultural system have about the ways in which things in the world are organized.
