ABSTRACT
Traditionally, holders of the view that culture is “real” (as opposed to epiphenomenal) have dealt with the problem of the relationship between the individual and the collectivity by seeing a child’s socialization or enculturation as a process by which basic cultural structures and propositions were “internalized”, inserted deeply into the individual psyche. The requirements of productivity and ease of learning both demand systems that are simple for new learners to infer and provide a biased transmission filter that moves systems – across successive learners – toward such simplicity. Both language and culture are systems of “collective representations”, that is, they inhere in social groups. In modern terms, if we take a broad view of “cognition”, we can speak of these – as noted earlier – as distributed cognitive systems. The pragmatic knowledge that forms culture seam-lessly includes the pragmatic knowledge needed for language use. Language can best be seen as a tightly structured set of a few tightly integrated subsystems.
