ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that understanding the mind is doubly important to the study of culture. Psychological considerations are crucial both to a proper characterization of what is cultural and to a proper explanation of cultural phenomena. The chapter suggests that a properly naturalistic approach to social and cultural phenomena centrally involves identifying the causal factors and mechanisms that shape these causal chains and explaining the macroregularities and changes of social and cultural life in term of these microprocesses. It also argues that cognition enables culture through domain-specific constructive mechanisms. Cognitive processes are linked to one another in causal chains such chains are Cognitive Causal Chains (CCCs). Social Cognitive Causal Chains (SCCC) that have the function of preserving mental content, behavioral form, or both, may extend across many individual and through a social group, distributing throughout this group similar mental representations or public productions. Such representations and productions are cultural and the SCCCs that distribute them are cultural CCCs.
