Culture, Society, and Cognition: Collective Goals, Values, Action, and Knowledge

In this book a pragmatics approach leads to a new understanding of culture as a system of parallel distributed cognition – and its role vis-a-vis society."Cultural models" relate actions to goals, values, emotional content, and context, and allow both systematic productivity and systematic variation across cultural and subcultural groups.They form the basic units of cultural action. Culture is shown to be a tool that people use rather than as something deeply internalized in their psyches.