## 1. A First Pass at the Subject Matter



Each of the conjoined expressions in the title of this entry marks out
enormous terrain, and neither has a single, strict, canonical, or
uncontroversial definition. Philosophically interesting issues and
local debates relevant to each will be discussed in more detail
throughout the entry, but those discussions will be easier to grasp
with some initial, rough but orienting characterizations in hand.


### 1.1 What is Cognitive Science?



Cognitive science is an interdisciplinary approach to studying minds,
mental organization, and intelligent behavior (Thagard 1997 [2019]).
The field has developed over the last 70 years, incorporating research
from across more traditional disciplines like psychology, philosophy,
linguistics, logic, computer science, anthropology, economics,
evolutionary theory, and neuroscience (though see Nunez
et al. 2019 for doubts about the extent to which these have succeeded
in uniting into a distinctive field; cf. Stanford 2020). As these
disciplines converged on the same types of questions from different
directions, a loose cluster of shared concepts, methodological
assumptions, experimental paradigms, and theoretical goals emerged.
Together, the elements of this cluster have served as a productive
framework for constructing theories and guiding ongoing research about
behavior, minds, and mentality (Pylyshyn 1984; Lycan & Prinz 2008;
Brook 2009; Samuels, Margolis, & Stich 2012).



At the heart of the framework is the idea that minds and mental
activity can be understood not as any particular kind of substance,
but rather as some form of information processing. The currently most
intuitive and probably still dominant version of the idea is expressed
with the computer analogy, though some have argued that antecedents
and earlier versions of the core insight can be found as far back as
Aristotle's doctrine of hylomorphism and its distinction between
matter and form (Shields 1991; Nussbaum & Putnam 1992; cf. Nelson
1990; Olshewsky 1992). The computer analogy holds that the relation
between the physical and mental aspects of a person, between bodies
and minds, between the physical and the mental more generally, can be
understood on the model of the relation between hardware and software
(Putnam 1967). On this view, mental states are functional states
identified by the role they play in the "program" that
channels information through and guides the control system of a
physical body. Mental processes, then, are understood as computational
processes performed on mental representations, symbols that have both
syntactic and semantic properties, and that are usually but not
necessarily realized in brains. Mental processes and representations
can be modeled using the formal resources of computation theory, with
syntactic relations between the mental representations encoding
patterns of causal relations that hold between the physical states
that realize them (Fodor 1975; Stich 1983; Rescorla 2015 [2020]). In
the last several decades, aspects of this orthodoxy have been
challenged, especially regarding the existence and character of mental
representations (Pitt 2000 [2020]). Several alternatives to and
extensions of this "classical computationalist" way of
understanding information processing have made inroads into cognitive
science, and have been discussed by philosophers under the headings of
connectionism (Buckner & Garson 2019), embodied cognition (Clark
1997a; Shapiro 2011; R. Wilson & Foglia 2011 [2021]), enactivism
(Hutto & Myin 2013; Di Paolo & Thompson 2014), dynamic systems
approaches (Chemero 2009; M. Anderson 2014), complexity science
(Favela 2020), and predictive processing (Hohwy 2013; Clark 2016).



Still, the core idea of mental activity as information processing of
some sort remains compelling, in part because the differences between
the classical computationalist approach and these newer alternatives
may not be very deep (Cao 2020), but also due to the clear research
agenda it suggests. The general aim of cognitive science can be cast
as the attempt to understand minds and cognition by trying to
understand the nature and limits of computation and other forms of
information processing, and by trying to determine the character and
provenance of the programs our brains, and the brains of non-human
animals, typically run. It also suggests a suite of more specific
questions: How malleable are the different programs? How much of the
information and processing structure is innately specified? How much
and which elements are acquired via various forms of learning over the
course of development, and throughout different stages of a lifetime?
What is the character of the information processing that underlies
different psychological capacities such as vision and visual
consciousness, language acquisition and comprehension, individual and
social learning, emotion and affect, memory and imagination, skilled
behavior and deliberation, decision-making and moral judgment, and so
forth?



These broad questions and the general conceptual framework that is
common to them give the different disciplines that make up cognitive
science a base camp and a lingua franca with which to pursue different
hypotheses about minds, mental organization, and intelligent behavior.
Together they aim to provide a coherent way to bring together and
compare different kinds of theoretical, formal, and empirical work to
bear on a core set of questions.


### 1.2 What is Culture?



While 'cognitive science' refers to an *approach*
*to studying* a particular set of phenomena,
'culture' would appear to refer directly to a type of
phenomenon, rather than a way of investigating it. This much may seem
uncontroversial, but little else about culture (or
'culture') is (Risjord 2012; Lenard 2020). Before it
became central to the social sciences and humanities, the term had a
life of its own outside of academia, where it was primarily used to
refer to the training of mental capacities in humans. In this sense,
'culture' was roughly synonymous with
'education': a cultured individual was an educated person,
and the qualities of educated people, and the things that educated
people produced and consumed, were construed as cultural (Jahoda
2012). Vernacular usage has retained many of these connotations, and
some of the more technical uses of 'culture' remain
indebted to these folk origins. Still, most contemporary academic
understandings of the subject matter have been greatly influenced by
the work of eighteenth-century philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder,
whose approach to culture emphasized how human thinking and behavior
are extremely flexible, and steered by environmental variation and
social learning (Denby 2005).



During the first half of the twentieth century, historical influences
like these informed numerous conceptions of culture, with differences
between them often reflecting the different theoretical work the
notion was being asked to do. By the middle of the century, Kroeber
and Kluckhohn were able to identify more than 150 definitions, making
explicit numerous views about what was required of the concept, and
the demands placed on the it by different fields and theorists
(Kroeber & Kluckhorn 1952). A more recent overview (Baldwin et al.
2006) argues that definitions of 'culture' currently in
use can be placed into one of seven genres based on what they take as
their central theme: structure/pattern, function, process, product,
refinement, power/ideology, or group membership. The fact that
cognitive scientists are mostly concerned with patterns, processes,
and functions is reflected in this entry, but it is worth noting that
the other themes tend to attract more attention from adjacent academic
disciplines. For example, political philosophers and critical
theorists examining postmodernism and postcolonialism often analyze
power relations in terms of 'dominant cultures' (Gemignani
& Pena 2007), while those doing aesthetics often
concentrate on material artifacts that count as 'cultural
products' and part of a 'cultural heritage'
(Hammersley 2019). In sociology and much of cultural anthropology, the
emphasis is often on non-material cultural products such as beliefs,
values, and norms, and on how these serve to structure human social
arrangements (Sewell 2005). Edward Tylor, the founding father of
cultural anthropology, famously articulated a holistic variation on
this theme, describing culture as



> 
> 
> that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law,
> custom, and any other capacities acquired by man as a member of
> society. (Tylor 1871: 1)
> 
> 
> 



The diversity of the theoretical aims and approaches across academic
disciplines interested in culture, along with the inherent complexity
of those phenomena identified as cultural, have also inspired
pessimistic conclusions. Some have argued against the possibility of a
unified conception of culture, suggesting no single definition could
satisfy all of the demands placed on the term and still be coherent or
theoretically useful (Byrne, Barnard, et al. 2004; Segall 1984).
Others have argued that the lack of such a single univocal definition
would be no hinderance to scientific research, since no single
idealization of the idea of culture will be equally useful for all
explanatory purposes (Sperber & Claidiere 2008). That said,
many contend that in order to clarify what culture does and does not
do, refined conceptual tools are needed to think clearly about its
different manifestations and facets, and especially to distinguish it
from related but importantly distinct phenomena such as ecological
inheritance (Odling-Smee & Laland 2011) and epigenetics (Jahoda
1984; Jablonka & Lamb 2005). In light of this, Ramsey's
recent explication (2013) of a conception of culture that is both
currently influential and that has a venerable history (Cavalli-Sforza
& Feldman 1981; R. Boyd & Richerson 1985) is well-suited to
serve as a touchstone for this entry:



> 
> 
> Culture is information transmitted between individuals or groups,
> where this information flows through and brings about the reproduction
> of, and a lasting change in, the behavioral trait. (Ramsey 2013:
> 466)
> 
> 
> 



Cognitive science research using alternative conceptions of culture
will be noted below (see especially
 Section 2.2).


## 2. Culture and Variation



Information counts as cultural not by virtue of its content but rather
by where it comes from, how it travels, and what it does. Culture is
transmitted via behavior, and produces durable, non-ephemeral effects
on behavior. Although it is not explicitly mentioned in Ramsey's
explication, *variation* in behavior, between individuals but
especially between groups, has been diagnostically important for those
seeking to integrate culture and cultural explanations into cognitive
science. Many have sought to document patterns of behavioral
diversity, and more recently patterns of psychological diversity, and
show that they cannot be accounted for by genetic or ecological
differences, but rather are the result of *cultural
diversity*.


### 2.1 The WEIRD Challenge



A landmark paper published in 2010 consolidated and raised the
visibility of a cluster of issues surrounding the relationship between
culture and cognitive science (J. Henrich, Heine, & Norenzayan
2010). It laid out the case that the vast majority of research in
psychology used subjects who came from a very specific demographic;
most participants in psychological studies had been WEIRD, drawn from
societies that are Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich,
Democratic. Other premises of the argument pointed out that not only
was this a very narrowly circumscribed sample population, it was also
(a) an exotic outlier group, especially from an historical
perspective, that was nevertheless (b) typically treated by
researchers as representative of the species as a whole. Results from
studies done with WEIRD participants (and typically *by* WEIRD
cognitive scientists) were commonly extrapolated, taken to be true of
human beings in general, and thus to be illuminating universal
features of human psychological nature. The negative conclusion was
that this practice, widespread though it may be, is unjustified, and
that distressingly little was known about the range of variation in
human cognition, motivation, and behavior, or about the mechanisms
that create and support it. This conclusion also implied that as far
as *was* known, culture may have a much deeper and more
profound role in shaping human mentality than cognitive science had
yet appreciated.



The paper was not the first to recognize many of the problems and
challenges it raised, but the acronym it introduced gave a
recognizable name to a movement that had been coalescing for some time
(Shweder 1990, 2003; Markus & Kitayama 1991; Nisbett & Cohen
1996; Rozin 2001; Nisbett 2003; Arnett 2008; also see Broesch et al.
2020 for reflections about the entanglement of methodological and
ethical factors in cross-cultural research, and misgivings that the
acronym WEIRD invites misleading binary thinking about cultural
variation). The importance of culture for understanding human minds
and behaviors had long been central to some disciplines now
contributing to cognitive science, especially anthropology and
cross-cultural psychology (Tylor 1871; Malinowksi 1931; Levi-Strauss
1958; Triandis & Brislin 1984; Hofstede 1980; Greenfield 2000).
Culture had also become integral to the application of biological
thought to humans and human social behavior (Dawkins 1976, 1982; Tooby
& Cosmides 1992; Laland, Odling-Smee, & Feldman 2000;
Griffiths 2007) and had been central to the field of cultural
evolution from its inception (Cavalli-Sforza & Feldman 1981; R.
Boyd & Richerson 1985; even Darwin 1871).



The paper helped consolidate and focus attention on a host of
shortcomings that contemporary cognitive science is still coming to
terms with (Apicella, Norenzayan, & Henrich 2020). Many are
methodological. Cognitive scientists concerned about culture and WEIRD
sampling bias continue to debate the ideal role of theory in
formulating hypotheses, interpreting results, and investigating the
interaction between minds and cultural influence in a number of other
ways (Muthukrishna & Henrich 2019; Muthukrishna, Bell, et al.
2020; Barrett 2020; Rozin 2020; Sear 2020). Others seek to better
integrate historical evidence into the study of psychology (Turchin
2015, 2018; J. Henrich 2020; Muthukrishna, Henrich, & Slingerland
2021) and to clarify the best way to study the ontogenetic sources of
variation in development (Stotz 2010; Heyes 2018a; Amir &
McAuliffe 2020). Still others connect the discussion of WEIRD sampling
bias to psychology's recent difficulties with replication
(Fidler & Wilcox 2018), arguing that while having more
experimental participants and increased statistical power is, all else
equal, a virtue, it is not a panacea, especially if those participants
are all WEIRD. Rather, they urge that some questions about behavioral
and psychological diversity can be more thoroughly addressed by using
ethnographic methods from anthropology *alongside*
psychological experiments. In some cases, important insights about
human variation can be won by using these combined methods to study a
small but carefully chosen cultural group (N. Henrich & J. Henrich
2007; K. Smith & Apicella 2020; Zefferman & Mathew 2020). In
other cases, however, experimental approaches common to mainstream
cognitive science may be unsuitable for such work, because the
definition and operationalization of central constructs used to
investigate phenomena associated with, e.g., intelligence or
self-esteem may be difficult to apply, inhibiting rather than
facilitating genuine cross-cultural insight (Greenfield 1997; Joe
2014; J. Henrich 2020).



Appreciation of the blind spots and questionable inferences
highlighted by the WEIRD challenge has contributed to substantive
theorizing about minds as well. It has informed work focused on
establishing the existence and character of psychological variation,
but also made urgent the need to develop a more sophisticated range of
theoretical resources to *explain* that variation. Questions
here have often been framed using contemporary versions of the
distinction between innate and acquired traits (Carruthers et al.
2005, 2006, 2007). While theses about the presence and significance of
innate mental characteristics have loomed large in the history of
Western thought (Samet 2008 [2019]; Markie & Folescu 2021), the
distinction and its attendant concepts are not philosophically
unproblematic (Griffiths 2002; Mallon & Weinberg 2006; Griffiths
& Machery 2008; Gross & Rey 2012). Nevertheless, much research
has sought to illuminate which aspects of mental structure and content
(and even personality, see Gurven et al. 2013; Smaldino, Lukaszewski,
et al. 2019) might be part of a genetically shared, (quasi-)universal
human psychological nature, and which aspects can vary between groups,
and how much (Roughley 2021). Further efforts have been directed at
discovering, of those aspects that are acquired and that do exhibit
variation, which are obtained via individual learning, and which are
culturally 'inherited', acquired via (a particular type
of) social learning. This framing has in turn brought increased
scrutiny to the psychology of learning itself, and especially the
structure and provenance of those cognitive mechanisms that underlie
different forms of social transmission. Research on this front will be
the focus of
 Section 3.2
 and
 Section 3.3.


### 2.2 Alternatives and Objections to Cultural Explanations of Intergroup Variation



Many attempts to establish the influence of culture in shaping
behavioral and psychological diversity take the form of arguments from
exclusion, aimed at ruling out other candidate explanations that might
account for the specific pattern of intergroup variation in question.
Competing explanations can take numerous forms. For example, until the
1950s many instances of behavioral variation were thought to be
attributable to genetic differences between human groups (Barkan
1992). Research in the life sciences over the last 70 years, however,
failed to produce evidence to support such explanations, finding
instead that biological differences between human populations are
minor and superficial (Hirschman 2004). The loss of confidence in
purely genetic explanations inspired researchers to continue exploring
alternatives.



Alternatively, many social sciences deal in
"structuralist" explanations that account for behavior by
appeal to factors exogenous to individuals, such as norms, laws,
institutions, economic policies, and government types. These would
explain patterns of intergroup variation in behavior by appeal to
differences between the structures that organize each group. Since
structural factors of this sort are passed along socially rather than
genetically, however, they fall comfortably under the broad working
definition of 'culture' provided above, and so can be
counted as a genre of cultural explanation (Haslanger 2016; Davidson
& Kelly 2020; Soon 2021).



Most of the alternative explanations that are *not* cultural in
the sense at issue here--and so which do *not* give a
central role to social transmission--attempt to explain
intergroup variation by stressing the importance of differences in the
external physical or ecological environments inhabited by different
groups, or by appeal to the operation of psychological mechanisms like
causal reasoning or individual trial-and-error learning (Richerson
& Boyd 2005). The range of options can be elucidated by examining
evolutionary approaches to human behavior, and comparing the distinct
way each approach appeals to such factors in their proprietary modes
of explanation (E. Smith 2000). For example, human behavioral ecology
remains largely agnostic, or at least assigns little significance to,
the character of the internal psychological mechanisms that might lead
to group level behavioral diversity. Instead, behavioral ecologists
appear to simply assume (perhaps unrealistically, see Driscoll 2009)
that humans are able to produce behavior that optimizes fitness across
a wide range of environments, and by implication also assume that
individual human minds are generally flexible enough to calibrate
behavioral strategies to best fit whatever ecological circumstances
they find themselves in (Grafen 1984). On this view, patterns of
behavior within a group typically reflect commonalities in the
ecological circumstances faced by most members of the group, and
differences in the patterns found between groups reflect, fairly
directly, differences in the ecological circumstances those groups
inhabit. Such explanations make little mention of mental structure and
no mention of culture or cultural inheritance.



By contrast, practitioners of the research program that has become
known as Evolutionary Psychology are much more concerned with mental
structure and evolved psychological mechanisms, and readily discuss
some forms of cultural variation (Barkow, Cosmides, & Tooby 1992;
also see Hagen 2015). Evolutionary Psychologist's approach to
explaining human behavioral variation builds on the more general
notion of phenotypic plasticity. The approach emphasizes that
phenotypic plasticity (of the behavioral phenotype, but also of
morphological, physiological, and other dimensions of phenotypic
expression) is found not just in humans, but in almost all organisms.
Mechanisms that underlie such plasticity allow individuals with
similar genotypes to express different phenotypes, and thus to
flexibly adapt to different environments in a variety of ways. For
instance, researchers have appealed to this kind of interaction
between environmental differences, on the one hand, and mechanisms
underlying phenotypic plasticity, on the other, to explain systematic
patterns of variation in the clutch sizes of members of the same
species of bird found in different geographical regions (Tooby &
Cosmides 1992). Evolutionary Psychologists offer explanations with a
similar form for many instances of human variation, such as regional
differences in the distribution of values. One such account holds that
the prevalence in some groups of certain kinds of values and
norms--collectivist or exclusivist--can be explained as an
adaptive response evoked by the salience of cues indicating high
pathogen threat in the group's environment. Alternatively, the
prevalence in other groups of contrasting values and
norms--individualistic or inclusivist--are explained by the
absence of such cues, and thus an environment that allows the
expression of a different adaptive phenotype (Schaller & Park
2011; also see Buchanan & Powell 2016; cf. Gelfand et al. 2011;
House et al. 2020).



With respect to the psychological sources of human behavioral
plasticity and cultural diversity, Evolutionary Psychologists tend to
construe human minds as "massively modular" (though the
conception of a "module" involved in this kind of claim is
typically more liberal than the one made famous by Fodor 1983; see
Samuels 1998, 2000; Sperber 2001; Barrett & Kurzban 2006;
Carruthers 2006; Robbins 2009 [2017]). Human minds share a number of
distinct, genetically inherited dispositions, each shaped by the
selective pressures generated by the adaptive problem it evolved to
handle. Each disposition can produce a circumscribed range of
behaviors to deal with its associated adaptive challenge, but not all
the behaviors made possible by those dispositions are manifested by
every human or every group. Rather, patterns of behavior are shaped
and constrained by the character of mental modules, but are also
explained in part by appeal to external circumstances, with different
environments acting to select or *evoke* different subsets of
behaviors from the range already "contained in" and made
available by these universally shared psychological dispositions
(compare Plato *Meno*). Proponents point out that on this view,
evoked behaviors can persist even as the environment that originally
evoked them changes or disappears. For example, once a behavioral
phenotype is initially expressed it can be effectively locked in by a
process of developmental canalization (D. Wilson 2009; Witherington
& Lickliter 2016). Proponents also stress that the view does not
imply that all behaviors and differences between groups are adaptive.
For example, the claim that the comparatively higher incidence of teen
pregnancies in lower income groups is an adaptive response evoked by
conditions of poverty remains a matter of controversy and empirical
investigation (Johns, Dickins, & Clegg 2011).



These "evoked culture" explanations associated with
Evolutionary Psychology are often contrasted with the
"transmitted culture" explanations associated with dual
inheritance theory (Norenzayan 2006). While both are designed to
account for patterns of behavioral variation between groups, the
former do not involve the kind of information conveyed between
individuals central to the explication given in
 Section 1.2.
 For this reason, the psychological modules from which behaviors are
evoked in the explanations given by Evolutionary Psychologists have
been classified by other theorists as "non-cultural
mechanisms" (Mathew & Perreault 2015). Alternatively,
transmitted culture explanations point to a different source of
phenotypic plasticity, namely cultural inheritance and the
psychological mechanisms that underpin social transmission. A third
approach can be seen as combining elements of both of these (Sperber
1996; Morin 2011 [2016]). Advocates of cultural epidemiology, which is
often presented as being distinct from both dual inheritance theory
and Evolutionary Psychology, typically attempt to explain instances of
cultural diversity and stability in terms of how different evolved,
domain-specific modules influence the acquisition, transmission,
reconstruction, and retention of specific mental representations.



These three forms of explanation are distinct in many ways, but are
not necessarily in competition with each other (Sterelny 2017). In
many cases advocates of the different approaches are concerned with
different kinds of behavior: few Evolutionary Psychologists have
attempted to account for the accumulation of material technology or
scientific knowledge. Dual inheritance theorists tend to focus on
forms of cooperation, social organization, and culturally complex
adaptions while eschewing topics like sexual behavior, mate
preferences, and phobias (although there are exceptions; see Dugatkin
1996; Faucher & Blanchette 2011; Adriaens & De Block 2006).
Neither pay as much attention to the character and dynamics of
non-adaptive traditions centered on, e.g., recipes, songs, or folk
tales as cultural epidemiologists typically do (Acerbi, Kendal, &
Tehrani 2017). Advocates of the three types of explanation typically
accept that each is able to account for some instances of behavioral
variation but not others. Moreover, the boundaries between these
approaches are vague and overlapping at best, and much good work on
evolution and culture combines ideas from more than one. Nevertheless,
advocates of different approaches occasionally disagree about the best
way to conceptualize culture (Sperber & Claidiere 2008),
about the relative importance of social learning and transmitted
culture in general (Richerson & Boyd 2008), about whether and how
culture should enter into ultimate explanations of behavior
(Scott-Phillips, Dickins, & West 2011), and about the best
explanation of specific cases, such as different features of prosocial
religions (Bulbulia 2004; Norenzayan et al. 2016) and morality
(Sripada & Stich 2007; Buchanan & Powell 2018; Brownstein
& Kelly 2019).



Philosophers have joined these debates. Many have challenged
Evolutionary Psychology's evoked culture explanations by
attempting to show that alternative explanations better capture
various target phenomena, or by arguing that the kinds of behaviors
that Evolutionary Psychologists focus on lead them to underestimate
the variation exhibited by our species and the plasticity required to
account for it (Dupre 2001; Buller 2005; Richardson 2007;
Downes 2015). By contrast, philosophers have tended to think more
'with the science' of cultural epidemiology (Nichols 2002;
De Cruz & De Smedt 2015) and dual inheritance theory (Skyrms 2010;
Sterelny 2012; Davis & Kelly 2018). Philosophical advocates of
these approaches see them as more promising in virtue of the
conceptual and methodological sophistication they find in them,
together with the models they have developed to clarify the kinds of
interactions that might hold between genes, transmitted culture, and
cognition (R. Boyd & Richerson 2005; Gualaderex 2012; also see
Paul 2015). As a result, philosophical discussions of cultural
epidemiology and dual inheritance theory are often less
straightforwardly critical. Instead, many aim at drawing out
interesting philosophical implications (Boudry, Blancke, &
Pigliucci 2015; Kelly & Hoburg 2017), shoring up conceptual
foundations by offering refinements and amendments (Lewens 2015;
Buskell 2019); or emphasizing the need for more elaborated methods to
empirically test their hypotheses (Sterelny 2020).


## 3. The Cognitive Science of Cultural Capacities



Humans, and some non-human animals, are natural social learners. A
crucial form of social learning is enabled by their *cultural
capacities*, typically understood as capacities that allow them to
acquire and transmit cultural information. The number, character, and
contribution of the different psychological mechanisms that underlie
these cultural capacities remain a matter of much debate within
cognitive science, as does the issue of which ones are required to
produce and sustain not just culture but complex cultural traits and
*cumulative* culture. This section describes research that
investigates these capacities, the methodological and evidential
reasoning involved, and some of the conceptual issues that it
raises.



Important caveat: for the purposes of this section, capacities and
mechanisms are classified as "cultural" in virtue of their
functionality, what they *do*. Broadly speaking, they count as
cultural if they support the spread of cultural information. This is
importantly distinct from saying they are cultural in virtue of their
*provenance*. Some of the psychological mechanisms that enable
the acquisition and transmission of cultural information--such as
those that underpin mindreading or normative cognition--may
themselves be the products of cultural rather than biological
evolution, and thus be mostly culturally inherited, e.g., cognitive
'gadgets' in Heyes' terminology (Heyes 2018a; Birch
& Heyes 2021; also see
 Section 3.3).
 Other mechanisms that enable the acquisition and transmission of
cultural information may be genetically inherited, e.g., cognitive
"instincts." Both would count as contributing to cultural
capacities in the sense at issue here.


### 3.1 Culture, Cumulative Culture, and Cultural Complexity



Theorists of culture see great significance in a distinction between
mere culture, on one hand, and cumulative culture, on the other. The
latter involves not just the spread of information between individuals
via social transmission, but the wherewithal of later generations to
retain, refine, add to, and innovate on the cultural repertoire they
inherit from previous generations. Some have claimed that cumulative
culture is distinctly human and evolutionarily unique (Sterelny 2009,
Tomasello 2009) while others have suggested that rudimentary instances
of cumulative culture can also be found in some non-human animals like
whales (Whitehead & Rendell 2015), Japanese monkeys (Schofield et
al. 2018), and chimpanzees (Marshall-Pescini & Whiten 2008). There
is little controversy, however, about the claim that the scale and
complexity of human culture outstrips anything found in other animals
(Dean et al. 2014). While some have expressed doubts about whether the
current evidence suffices to establish that most human cultural traits
result from the accumulation of modifications over time (Vaesen &
Houkes 2021), most researchers hold that understanding our capacities
for cumulative culture, perhaps more so than those that underlie
individual intelligence, creativity, or problem solving, is crucial to
understanding the distinctive character and success of the human
species (Richerson & Boyd 2005; Sterelny 2009, 2012; J. Henrich
2016; Derex & Boyd 2015; R. Boyd 2017; cf. Pinker 2010).



There remains disagreement on how to characterize the relevant notion
of complexity, however. As Querbes, Vaesen, and Houkes (2014) note,
increase in cultural complexity has been characterized in several
ways, including as an increase in a trait's fitness, as an
increase in the number of elements that make up a trait, and as an
increase in the difficulty of transmitting the trait faithfully (see
also Mesoudi & Thornton 2018) or how difficult it is to learn (J.
Henrich 2004). These characterizations are not theoretically or
empirically equivalent, and each suffers from its own shortcomings.
Specifying complexity in terms of fitness, for instance, seems to
require an agreed upon metric for cultural fitness, but no such metric
has been widely accepted (Ramsey & De Block 2017). Relatedly,
while it is relatively easy to recognize episodes of technological
change that are instances of progress, it is far less clear how to
evaluate changes in other kinds of cultural traits, and so it remains
difficult to know when transformations in, say, a religious or
linguistic system should be classified as improvements or degradations
(Miton & Charbonneau 2018).



Attempts to characterize cultural complexity by appeal to number of
elements confront an individuation problem, and it remains unclear how
to determine what counts either as a distinct element or a single
trait. A similar individuation problem emerged in the debate over
cultural replication. Dawkins famously coined the term
'meme' to refer to discrete bits of culture that play a
role in cultural evolution similar to that played by genes in
biological evolution, arguing that memes are independent replicators
whose propagation serves their own interests (Dawkins 1976).
Subsequent research revealed, however, that it is very difficult to
determine how a bit of cultural information might qualify as single
meme (Chvaja 2020), and many scholars are skeptical that cultural
variants are usefully thought of as being discrete or primarily
serving their own interests (Hull 1982, 1988; Heyes & Plotkin
1989; R. Boyd & Richerson 2000; Claidiere &
Andre 2012; De Block & Ramsey 2016). Consequently, memetics
has largely disappeared from academic discussion (though see Sterelny
2006 and Dennett 2017 for exceptions).



What has not entirely waned, however, are debates over the nature of
cultural acquisition, whether and when the spread of culture is
usefully thought of in terms of replication, and if not why not. Some
proponents of replication hold that most stable cultural traditions
are primarily the result of imitation, and that imitation drives a
kind of faithful, high fidelity copying of cultural variants that
should qualify as replication (Tomasello 1999). Dual inheritance
theorists argue that the type of high fidelity copying suggested by
the term 'replication' may or may not be rare, but it is
not required for complex cultural adaptations to evolve. Rather,
cumulative cultural evolution can be sustained by low fidelity
imitation because the influence of many teachers and models can
compensate for noise and copying errors (J. Henrich & Boyd 2002).
Cultural epidemiologists also reject the need for replication, arguing
instead that many traditions are mainly the result of 'guided
variation'. This is a phenomenon whereby learners do not simply
copy what they are exposed to, but rather creatively reconstruct
representations from what they observe, slightly but significantly
altering the cultural variants they acquire in the process of
acquiring them. In these cases, the recipient of the cultural signal
is not a passive vessel, but actively filters or even transforms the
representations that they adopt. Moreover, cultural epidemiologists
hold that these processes of reconstructive learning are
systematically influenced by stable features of human cognitive
architecture, which can be represented as 'attractors' in
the abstract possibility space of cultural evolutionary models
(Sperber 1996; Claidiere & Sperber 2007; Claidiere,
Scott-Phillips, & Sperber 2014; Lewens 2015; Morin 2011 [2016];
Buskell 2017; Scott-Phillips 2017). For example, a proponent of
'pure' replication might hold that the pronunciation of
words remains relatively stable because individuals tend to copy with
high fidelity the pronunciation of their peers and parents. A
proponent of the cultural epidemiology approach could offer a
different explanation, claiming rather that the pronunciation of words
evolves in the direction of better fit with the mechanisms of
verbalization, comprehension, and retention, and then stabilizes
around these attractors (for similarly competing accounts of some of
the common features of religion, see Boyer 2001; Atran 2002;
Norenzayan et al. 2016).



As just noted, this debate about cultural transmission and the
complexity and character of cultural variants is entangled with
debates about different kinds of human universals, how common or rare
they are, and how they should be explained (Brown 1991, 2004; Singh et
al 2021; also see J. Henrich, Blasi, et al. forthcoming). For example,
if features of a shared human psychological nature are implicated in
reconstructive social learning, and those features, in turn, help
stabilize certain types of group level behavioral regularities by
funneling social transmission towards cultural attractors, then those
types of group level behavioral regularities are likely to be common
to many cultures (Sperber 1996; De Cruz 2006). If, on the contrary,
high-fidelity copying is the rule in social learning, then small
modifications in initial conditions, minor copying errors, and slight
perturbations in the flow of cultural information have a better chance
of being propagated, and to develop into more and more dramatic
differences between cultures (Acerbi & Mesoudi 2015; but see
Tchernichovski, Eisenberg-Edidin, & Jarvis 2021 for how imitation
can sustain high ingroup variability).



To a large extent, many of these are empirical issues that turn on the
relative importance of the respective transmission processes in
different episodes of social learning, as well as the relative effect
of each process on cultural stability. However, there may be
conceptual issues involved as well (Lewens 2015), concerning whether
or not the type of cognitive reconstruction of cultural variants
posited to occur in guided variation is necessarily at odds with
replication, or is perhaps a process that sometimes produces
high-fidelity copies, but other times does not (Boudry 2018). Such
local discussions are part of the larger debate over how to best
conceptualize, study, and understand the significance of cumulative
culture, cultural complexity, and the psychology and population
structure (e.g., Derex & Mesoudi 2020) required to create and
sustain it.


### 3.2 Culture and Individual Learning



While social learning is a central concern to those focused on
culture, other forms of learning are also important for understanding
the range of interactions between cognition, culture and its
accumulation, and perhaps the evolution of cultural capacities
themselves. For instance, while social learning appears to be suited
to contribute to the rapid *spread* of new behaviors and
beliefs in a population, individual learning may be better suited to
contribute to the *initial generation* of new behaviors, novel
beliefs, and to the production of *innovations* on existing
cultural variants. Theorists have carved out different positions on
how the distinction between individual and social learning should be
conceived, and how these two facets of cultural capacities might
interact.



Cognitive scientists have traditionally been interested in learning,
broadly defined as the acquisition by individuals of new information,
knowledge, and skills. There is also an established history of
research on related cognitive phenomena such as attention, perception
and memory, much of which focuses on identifying functions and causal
mechanisms, and on developing methods to optimize learning and memory
(De Houwer & Hughes 2020). Historically speaking, the distinction
between social and individual learning does not seem to have been
given much theoretical significance. Those participating in cognitive
science's recent cultural turn accord it greater importance.



Efforts to articulate a precise and theoretically useful version of
that distinction have run into complications, however, and have not
always yielded intuitive results. For example, an episode of learning
can be plausibly classified as social if a conspecific facilitates the
acquisition of new information (Heyes 1994, 2012). Individual
learning, on the other hand, is often construed as acquiring new
information directly from the environment. But these specifications
are not mutually exclusive, and together they entail that many
episodes of human learning qualify as *both* individual and
social. The environments that our species inhabits are often
themselves engineered, and are thus to a large extent shaped by other
humans, often in ways specifically designed to facilitate learning
(Sterelny 2012; J. Henrich 2016; Lewens 2017). As many have noted,
this is an important form of (epistemic) niche construction and
ecological inheritance. It bears important similarities to behaviors
found in a range of other species whose members live in environments
that are deeply shaped by other members (and sometimes previous
generations) of their own species (Laland, Odling-Smee, & Feldman
2000; Kendal, Tehrani, & Odling-Smee 2011; Aaby & Ramsey
forthcoming). In response to such difficulties, others have urged that
individual learning should be distinguished from social learning in
that only episodes of the latter involve social transmission,
understood as happening when "the behaviour of an individual
[comes] to resemble the behaviour of others through social
interaction" (Heyes 2021: 228; also see R. Boyd, Richerson,
& Henrich 2011).



Aside from the question of how specific episodes of learning should be
classified, there seems to be something close to consensus about
functionality. Broadly construed, the primary adaptive function of
individual learning is to generate information that is useful for
dealing with (often novel features of) one's environment. The
adaptive value of social learning, on the other hand, comes from
avoiding the costs of individual learning, allowing an individual to
acquire useful information from others without having to go through
the trouble of figuring it out on their own. This consensus, however,
gives rise to a puzzle whose solution remains a matter of controversy
(Rogers 1988). What has become known as Rogers' paradox centers
on the question of how capacities for social learning could have
evolved. The difficulty arises from the thought that pure social
learners would be unable to help increase the mean fitness of the
populations they invade or in which they live, because they would be
unable to contribute any innovations or useful new information. They
would just imitate others, copying what is already there. From this
perspective, social learners are free-riders, exploiting the knowledge
and skills created by the epistemic work of individual learners while
providing nothing novel or beneficial in return (Laland 2004).



Nevertheless, social learning is undeniably found in a range of
species, with humans exhibiting especially sophisticated forms of
social transmission. Some proposed solutions to Rogers' paradox
have emphasized that capacities for social learning can be adaptive
(and thus evolve and spread) if social learning is selective.
Individuals can use mixed strategies, strategically switching between
individual and social learning in different circumstances (Enquist,
Eriksson, & Ghirlanda 2007). They can also be selective about who
they learn from, when, and in what domains of knowledge (J. Henrich
& McElreath 2003; Buttelman et al. 2013; Koenig & Sabbagh
2013). Others hold that capacities for social learning likely evolved
from capacities for individual learning, in a process of descent with
modification that was driven by gene-culture coevolutionary processes
and the kind of epistemic niche construction mentioned above (Sterelny
2021: chapter 1; Kendal, Boogert, et al. 2018; also see Heyes 2018a
and Taylor, et al 2021).


### 3.3 Culture and Social Transmission



Some researchers have expressed surprise that social learning is
thought to be so crucial for understanding what is distinctive about
humans, especially in light of its apparent ubiquity in the animal
(and even botanical) world (Hill 2010). Similar concerns have led some
theorists to distinguish what they call 'cultural
learning', holding it to be a form of social learning that
essentially involves fairly sophisticated forms of cognition like
perspective-taking or intersubjectivity (Tomasello, Kruger, &
Ratner 1993, also see Hoppit & Laland 2013; Legare & Nielsen
2015; J. Henrich 2016). The term "social transmission"
remains useful, however, as it is neutral on this score. It is also
intuitively inclusive of psychological capacities for learning but
also for teaching, both of which support the flow of cultural
information between individuals and generations (also see Heyes &
Moore forthcoming).



Some of the most fruitful research into the psychology of social
transmission has been comparative, investigating the similarities in
and differences between the cultural capacities of humans and those
found a wide range of other animals (Andrews 2020b: chapter 8). Much
of this research is structured by efforts to isolate and understand
"difference makers" (Buskell forthcoming; Charbonneau
2020), those ecological, social, and especially psychological factors
that are distinctive of humans and responsible for our unique cultural
sophistication. Here too a central debate involves the issue of
*cumulative* culture and the kind of psychological machinery
required not just to socially acquire and transmit information, but
for it to accumulate over time, enabling each generation to innovate
and build on the advances inherited from previous generations (Dean et
al. 2014; Mesoudi & Thorton 2018; cf. Querbes, Vaesen, &
Houkes 2014; Haidle & Schlaudt 2020; Vale et al. 2021). It has
been known for some time that other animals have the wherewithal to
sustain group-specific behavioral traditions (Buxton 1948; Imanishi
1957; Whiten, Goodall, et al. 1999; Laland & Galef 2009; for
overviews of more recent work see Whitehead & Rendell 2015; Aplin
2019; Whiten 2019). However, it remains unclear whether any of those
traditions accrue complexity and adaptive functionality in the same
way their human counterparts do, or what additional cultural
capacities would be necessary or sufficient to enable groups of
non-human animals to collectively achieve this "rachet
effect" of accumulation (Tomasello 2009, 2014; Tennie , Call,
& Tomasello 2009).



Much of this comparative work is also guided by hypotheses about the
kinds of evolutionary pressures that selected for uniquely human
cultural capacities and drove the dramatic expansion of relative brain
size in the human lineage. For instance, one framing (Baimel et al.
2021; also see Muthukrishna, Doebeli, et al. 2018) pits this family of
"cultural brain" hypotheses that focus on the adaptive
challenges associated with social learning and handling cultural
information against "Machiavellian intelligence"
hypotheses (Byrne & Whiten 1988 and Whiten & Byrne 1997).
These latter hypotheses see key selective pressures as stemming not
from culture but from more competitive social dynamics that arise from
antagonistic scheming among conspecifics (cf. Downes 2008 [2021];
Lewens 2008 [2020]). Another view holds that many of our particular
cultural capacities are the product of cultural rather than biological
evolution, cognitive gadgets that are assembled and passed along as
part of a cultural inheritance rather than a genetic one (Heyes
2018a). On this account, what is unique about human brains is that
they are innately equipped with a set of cognitive mechanisms for
associative learning that are hypertrophied compared to other species,
but are not genetically specialized for any particular domain or
content. These general learning mechanisms, together with some number
of attentional biases, are often used to acquire all manner of
culturally inherited, domain-specific packages of skills, e.g., to
play chess, to drive a car, to read and write, etc. These may also
include skills that allow individuals to imitate others more adeptly,
thus allowing them to learn to become better and more selective social
learners (also see Dennett 2017).



As this and above discussions suggest, much effort has been directed
at distinguishing different grades of social learning and the kinds of
cognitive sophistication required to engage in each. The disagreements
between the participants seem to be mainly about the number and nature
of genetically transmitted learning mechanisms, and how canalized the
development of different types of social learning is. Of the different
mechanisms, imitation, understood as the ability of an individual to
observe and then copy another's body movements, has attracted
the most attention (Zentall 2006; Whiten et al. 2009). A key debate
concerns whether imitation in particular is underpinned by genetically
inherited, domain specific psychological mechanisms, or whether it is
subserved by domain general associative learning mechanisms that are
themselves further sculpted by cultural influences (Heyes 2016a, 2021;
cf. Fessler & Machery 2012). A related debate concerns the
significance of *over*-imitation, the tendency of humans to
copy *all* of the steps in the arc of a model's behavior,
even those that are superfluous to the perceived goal (Lyons et al.
2011; Keupp, Behne, & Rakoczy 2013; Clay & Tennie 2018; Hoehl
et al. 2019). Researchers disagree about whether over-imitation is a
mistake, produced by a generally adaptive capacity for social learning
merely overreaching and exhibiting predictable false positives in
certain circumstances, or whether it is a key to the human capacity to
support not just culture but cumulative culture. An influential
hypothesis about how it might do this is by driving the reproduction
and spread of cultural traditions that are so complex that the
adaptive benefits they provide are causally opaque to and
unappreciated by their users (J. Henrich 2016).



Another debate is over the importance of imitation relative to other
forms of social learning, both to the transmission and accumulation of
culture (Caldwell & Millen 2009; Singh et al. 2021) and to the
more creative forms of acquisition of interest to cultural
epidemiologists (Sperber 1996; Boyer 2001; Nichols 2004; Morin 2011
[2016]). This issue has attracted the attention of philosophers in
part because it intersects with those conceptual issues about fidelity
and replication mentioned in
 Section 3.1.
 Thus, empirical findings in the cognitive science of imitation stand
to shed light on conceptual questions about if and when the cultural
variants that spread via social transmission can serve as *units of
selection* in cultural evolution, in something analogous to the
way that genes serve as units of selection in genetic evolution, in
virtue of the fact that they can be replicated with high levels of
fidelity (R. Boyd & Richerson 2000; J. Henrich & Boyd 2002;
Claidiere, Scott-Phillips, & Sperber 2014; Acerbi &
Mesoudi 2015; Boudry 2018; Charbonneau 2020; Charbonneau & Bourrat
2021; also see Lloyd 2005 [2020]; Wilkins & Bourrat 2018
[2020]).



A related line of research explores the ways in which imitation and
social learning are selective, guided by strategies and heuristics
that dispose individuals to acquire some the behaviors, skills, and
ideas they are exposed to rather than others (Laland 2004; Chudek,
Brosseau-Liard, et al. 2013; Koenig & Sabbagh 2013; Heyes 2016b;
Kendal, Boogert, et al. 2018). Many different strategies have been
explored, and those have been taxonomized in a variety of ways (see J.
Henrich & McElreath 2007). Some of the most discussed types of
strategies include a *conformity* heuristic that induces
individuals to copy behaviors and ideas that are already common in
their community (Muthukrishna, Morgan, & Henrich 2016);
sensitivities to *status* and *success* that make one
more likely to copy prestigious, dominant, successful, or otherwise
high-ranking individuals (J. Henrich & Gil-White 2001; Cheng,
Tracy, et al. 2013; Cheng & Tracy 2014; Maner 2017, Jimenez
& Mesoudi 2019, 2021), and sensitivities to the similarities or
differences between oneself and those one might learn from, sometimes
discussed in terms of *my-side bias* (Mercier & Sperber
2017) or *tribal social instincts* (Richerson & Boyd 2001;
Richerson & Henrich 2012). Though they are often called
"biases" and lead to what can appear to be reasoning
errors when evaluated in isolated episodes of learning, modeling work
suggests that when such heuristics are prevalent in a population they
can collectively produce results that are beneficial, both for the
individuals whose social learning they are guiding and for the
cultural repertoire of the group those individuals belong to
(Richerson & Boyd 2005; see also Skyrms 2014). Recent
philosophical work has taken up the question of whether or not these
kinds of selective social learning heuristics can be assimilated to
traditional perspectives on rationality and epistemic virtue (N. Levy
& Alfano 2020; Fadda 2021). Other philosophical research has
critically examined the explanatory work done by appeal to such
heuristics, and looked at how these biases relate to different forms
of social influence (Padalia 2014; Chellappoo 2021).



When social learning is important for the members of a species, it is
not unreasonable to expect there to be complementary psychological
mechanisms that guide and facilitate *teaching*. In humans,
researchers have investigated the propensity to engage in what has
been called 'natural pedagogy' (Csibra & Gergely 2006;
Gergely, Egyed, & Kiraly 2007, but see Little, Carver,
& Legare 2016). For example, some of this work looks at
complementary patterns of attention and eye contact that emerge in
pedagogical settings, and the psychological mechanisms that support a
complex interaction between the ostensive signals that teachers
provide for their students and the referential expectations that
learners have of their teachers (Csibra & Gergely 2009; cf. Heyes
2018b). Other researchers who focus on human mentalizing capacities
approach their subject matter from a broadly pedagogy-centered
perspective, developing a general reinterpretation of those
capacities' basic functions. On this mindshaping view, the
mechanisms that underpin human folk psychological practices are not
designed to merely passively interpret others' behavior; rather,
they primarily evolved to help (co)construct and regulate the minds of
others. They thus guide many pedagogical tasks involved in actively
helping to structure and influence the minds of learners (Mameli 2001;
McGeer 2007, 2015; Zawidzki 2013). Others have argued that human
pedagogy is both active and deeply facilitated not just by internal
psychological mechanisms, but by meticulously structured learning
environments--the cumulative epistemic niches--that are a
crucial part of the non-biological inheritance that one generation
uses to educate the next. These include engineered physical
environments (Clark 1997a), but also norms that govern relationships
between apprentices and their mentors (Sterelny 2012) which can scale
up into larger informal and formal institutions of education (Gillett
2018). Others have explored ways in which the psychological machinery
of learning and teaching contributes to the generation, intentional or
otherwise, of *innovations* in cultural variants, and thus to
the production of variation on which cultural evolution operates
(Claidiere, Scott-Phillips, & Sperber 2014; Legare &
Nielsen 2015; Mesoudi 2016; Laland 2017; Leibo et al. 2019; Gopnik
2020; Miu et al. 2020; Rule, Tenenbaum, & Piantadosi 2020).



While the psychological mechanisms underlying social transmission are
widely thought to play a foundational role, other cognitive abilities
have been put forward as additional candidates for being key
difference makers that allow human minds to produce and sustain unique
forms of complex cumulative culture. Though the exact character of
their respective contributions remains unclear, some prominent
candidates include: novel and more powerful forms of memory (Donald
1991, 2007; Carruthers 2015), especially for particular sequences of
actions (Ghirlanda, Lind, & Enquist 2017; Milne, Wilson, &
Christiansen 2018; Petkov & Cate 2020); imagination and mental
time travel (Suddendorf & Corballis 2007; Dor 2015, 2017; Fuentes
2017); analogical thinking (Brand, Mesoudi, & Hewlett 2021);
metacognition (Heyes 2016b; Dunstone & Caldwell 2018; also see
Heyes, Bang, et al. 2020); mindreading (Carruthers 2013; Heyes &
Frith 2014; Moore 2021; cf. McGeer 2007; Zawidzki 2013); social
tolerance brought about by self-domestication (J. Henrich 2016; Hare
2017; Wrangham 2019); shared intentionality (Tomasello, Carpenter, et
al. 2005; Tomasello & Moll 2010); norm psychology (Chudek &
Henrich 2011; R. Boyd 2017; Davis & Kelly 2018; cf. Andrews 2020a;
Fitzpatrick 2020; also see Kelly & Setman 2020); resolve (Ainslie
2021; Setman & Kelly 2021); natural language (Ross 2007; Tamariz
& Kirby 2016; Dennett 2017: chapter 9; Sterelny 2020); narrative
(Scalise Sugiyama 2001, 2017; B. Boyd 2009; Sterelny 2012); reasoning
(Pinker 2010; Mercier & Sperber 2011, 2017); and various tool and
technological proficiencies (Vaesen 2012; A. Schulz forthcoming; Birch
2021; cf. Osiurak & Reynaud 2020).



Faced with this proliferation of options, several theorists have
espoused "no magic bullet" positions, holding that there
is unlikely to be any single, crucial psychological advance that will
turn out to be *the* pivotal cognitive ingredient needed for
cumulative culture. Rather, they argue, the gap between human and
non-human capacities for culture will likely flow from small changes
and minor increases in the functionality of several psychological
mechanisms that are shared between species, along with new
interactions that emerge between those and with other ecological and
social factors (Sterelny 2012; J. Henrich 2016; Laland & Seed
2021; also see Ross 2019).


## 4. Influence on Philosophical Debates



As illustrated throughout the previous sections, philosophers have not
been mere consumers of research on the cognitive science of culture,
but also active contributors to various projects. This section shifts
gears, highlighting several areas in which philosophers have worked to
clarify the implications of this research for more conceptual debates
and to draw out its consequences for discussions that have
traditionally been seen as philosophical.



Indeed, philosophers are more and more frequently weaving insights and
evidence about culture and cognition into discussions across a number
of areas of philosophical inquiry. This entry does not pretend to
provide an exhaustive overview of such work. Thus, it is worth
explicitly noting that scholars in nearly every philosophical subfield
have used findings from the cognitive science of culture and cultural
diversity to enrich their understanding of their subject matter and
support their arguments. For example, in the philosophy of religion
and philosophy of language, recent insights into the cognitive
foundations and dynamics of culture have been used to argue that human
capacities for religion and language are not as universal and/or
innate as many philosophers have taken them to be (Cloud 2014; Davis
2020). In aesthetics, philosophers have used work on culture and
cognition to explore more specific questions about phenomena that were
already taken to exhibit significant culturally variation, such as
artistic form and aesthetic taste (Jan 2007; Verpooten & Dewitte
2017). In what follows, the focus will be on philosophical
subdisciplines were the influence of work on the cognitive science of
culture and cultural diversity seems to have been most pervasive:
philosophy of mind, philosophy of psychiatry, ethics, epistemology,
and philosophical methodology.


### 4.1 Culture and Extended Cognition



The cognitive science of culture has become relevant to one of the
most provocative and productive ideas put forward in the philosophy of
mind in recent decades, namely the extended mind thesis (Clark &
Chalmers 1998). This is the claim that minds (human minds, anyway,
though perhaps others as well; see Japyassu & Laland 2017)
can and frequently do extend beyond brains and out into the world. The
thesis can be understood as a particular expression of a broader set
of ideas that also includes embodied, embedded, and enactivist
approaches to cognition, and which are often discussed in terms of
externalism about the mind (Rowlands, Lau, & Deutsch 2020). The
common thread running through positions characterized as externalist
is the thought that the boundary between a biological organism and its
environment is less psychologically important than it may
pretheoretically seem. Rather, insists the externalist, many
interesting and important mental phenomena span that physical border,
and what is external to an individual's skull and skin can be
determinative and even constitutive of their mind and its contents (R.
Wilson 2004).



This core idea has been developed in several ways. Initial versions of
externalism focused on semantics and mental *content*, holding
that what some intentional mental states are about is at least in part
determined by factors outside the body, including social arrangements,
cultural patterns of expertise and deference, and norms that structure
the division of linguistic labor (McGinn 1977; Burge 1979; Fodor 1987,
1994; cf. Putnam 1975a). Later and more contentious forms of
externalism focused on the *vehicles* of content, holding that
some cognitive processes and mental states are themselves located
outside the head and body. According to this more "active"
version of externalism, when a part of the environment or piece of
technology becomes sufficiently integrated with an individual's
other mental processes, that bit of the world external to the skull
is, strictly speaking, just as much a part of her mind as what's
going on in her brain. Her cognition extends into the world beyond her
head.



The extended mind thesis is controversial (Rupert 2004; Gertler 2007,
2012; Adams & Aizawa 2008) and portions of the debates it has
sparked are informed by an array of views about how to understand the
relationship between cognition and different aspects of culture. For
instance, Sterelny (2003, 2012) develops the conceptual resources of
niche construction theory to show how humans actively engineer the
cultural niches in which they live, learn, and raise children. He
accepts that the accumulated structure and adaptive information found
in human environments are key factors for explaining human
intelligence and behavior, but he stops short of fully embracing the
extended mind thesis. He holds that human cognitive functioning is
greatly enhanced and amplified--*scaffolded*--by
social, epistemic, and technological resources that are culturally
transmitted and located outside the head. But he argues that genuinely
*extended* mentality is rare, and should be understood as an
extreme, limiting case of the more common and theoretically important
phenomena of cognitive scaffolding (Sterelny 2010).



Others have explored more specific ideas about how the hallmarks of
extended cognition are related to human culture and cultural
cognition. Many have examined aspects and implications of our ability
to smoothly 'couple' our minds with our technology (Clark
2007; Palermos 2014; Carter & Palermos 2016) as well as with our
physically and socially constructed environments (Hutchins 2008, 2011;
Davidson & Kelly 2020). Others have explored the idea that culture
was part of the design problem that selected for minds that are
cultural--porous, technologically extendable, deeply socially
permeable--in exactly these ways (Tomasello 1999; R. Boyd,
Richerson, & Henrich 2011; Dennett 2017; Kelly & Hoburg 2017;
Muthukrishna, Doebeli, et al. 2018). Some of this work focuses on
material culture and technology (Jeffares 2010; Malafouris 2013;
Sterelny 2018), including how artifacts might scaffold or extend
specific psychological faculties like memory (Clark 2005; Heersmink
forthcoming), mathematical cognition (Menary 2015), or economic
reasoning (Clark 1997b). Other work focuses on sociality and social
organization (Gallagher 2013; Sterelny 2016, 2021; Carter, Clark,
& Palermos 2018b; Gallagher, Mastrogiorgio, & Petracca 2019).
Contributors to this strand of research have also explored the ways in
which investigations into the nature of culture and extended cognition
can dovetail with and help inform investigations into the nature of
distributed cognition, collective mental states, and group agency
(Hutchins 1995; Tollefsen 2006; Donald 2007; Huebner 2008; Smaldino
& Richerson 2013; Jablonka 2017). This line of thought has even
inspired hypotheses about the evolution of human brain size, linking
increases in collective intelligence, the division of cognitive labor,
and the externalization of knowledge with the decrease in the size of
individual human brains that appears to have occurred around 3000
years ago (DeSilva et al. 2021).


### 4.2 Culture, Mental Disorder, and the Philosophy of Psychiatry



While the experience and recognition of cognitive dysfunction is by no
means unique to any one culture, academic psychiatry was long focused
on and practiced mainly by WEIRD individuals. Nonetheless, the
beginning of Western ethnopsychiatry and cross-cultural
psychology--the study of the cultural aspects of mental health
and illness (Jovanovski 1995)--predates the recent cultural turn
in cognitive science. Early pioneers were iconoclasts of Western
psychiatry, rejecting its ethnocentrism and setting out to discover
what they could learn from non-Western approaches to mental suffering
(Ellenberger 1959; Torrey 1972). Their research agendas were driven by
questions about the kinds of practices other cultures had developed to
treat individuals with behavioral or mental problems, and how culture
is crucial to understand how individuals give meaning to their
symptoms (Good 1993). They were also concerned with how cultures
differed in their conceptions of such problems, especially in how and
where they drew the distinction between normal and abnormal mental
conditions (Kleinman 1988; Fabrega 1991). What attracted the most
attention, however, were inquiries into the nature and significance of
so-called culture bound syndromes, those ways of being mentally unwell
that are confined to, or are only recognized as diseases within, a
particular culture. Well-studied examples of non-Western culture bound
syndromes include *amok* (an episode of rage that often ends in
killing, thought to be typical for the Indonesian Archipelago, see
Griffiths 1997 for illuminating philosophical discussion)
*koro* (a genital-shrinkage anxiety, most common in China and
Southwest Asia, Crozier 2012), and *latah* (a condition
associated with a disordered startle response that can lead to
abnormal and extreme behavior, found in southeast Asia, Simons 1996).
Other candidates that might fit the description (or that may have fit
it at one time) include old hag (Ness 1978), fugue (Hacking 1998),
multiple personality disorder (Hacking 1995a), anorexia nervosa (Banks
1991), and the Truman Show delusion (Gold & Gold 2012, 2014).



The significance of this range of syndromes lies not in their
strangeness, but in the striking evidence they provide about the ways
in which culture shapes mental illness. Indeed, it suggests that
culture has a profound influence on several key dimensions of
psychological dysfunction, affecting not just how it is diagnosed and
treated, but also how it is expressed and assigned social
significance. For example, schizophrenics from different cultures
experience different kinds of auditory hallucinations, which they and
the members of their community interpret in different ways (Luhrmann
et al. 2015). The very existence of culture bound syndromes also
suggests the possibility that the forms of mental disorder common in
Western societies may be no exceptions to the rule. Certain eating
disorders, for instance, may be culturally transmitted, spreading
contagiously through social learning and media consumption
(Vandereycken 2011). Evidence also suggests that while some cross
culturally shared elements of PTSD flow from an innate human response
to danger, others symptoms exhibit variation. For example, the
depressive symptoms associated with PTSD in American war veterans may
be the result of sufferers understanding themselves to have violated
their own culture's moral norms (Zefferman & Mathew 2021;
also see Munch-Jurisic forthcoming).



The mounting evidence that mental disorder is so dramatically shaped
by culture seemed to be unsettling. Mainstream psychiatry had long
accepted the general claim that cultural factors can play a role in
mental health and the etiology of disorders, by creating conditions
that trigger unhealthy levels of anxiety or stress, or by stabilizing
other circumstances that elicit more extreme and pathological forms of
discontent with civilization (Freud 1930). Nonetheless, cultural
variation in symptoms was given relatively little attention compared
to what were thought to be the core, pan-cultural indicators of
universal forms of dysfunction. Indeed, until recently, the
*Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders* (DSM)
treated disorders commonly found in WEIRD cultures, along with the way
they presented in symptoms, as (quasi-) universal, while classifying
those only found in other cultures as 'culture-bound
syndromes' and treating them as exotic outliers. Hence one
extreme and slightly tongue-in-cheek description of the perspective
adopted by the DSM: "American mental illness is universal, and
other cultures have specific conditions" (Murphy 2015).



This entrenched orthodoxy has drawn more critical scrutiny as cultural
approaches to psychiatry have gained more traction. For instance, an
influential 'network theory' of mental disorder shows that
network models can provide important new insights into the patterns of
causal interactions among symptoms, and how these patterns serve to
structure (certain) mental disorders (Borsboom, Cramer, & Kalis
2019). A virtue of these models is that they allow for
straightforwardly cultural factors to be involved in the relevant
patterns of causal interaction (also see Kendler, Zachar, & Craver
2011). These models are thus able to capture, for example, the kinds
of 'labelling effects' that have been posited to account
for the way that naming and talking about certain deviant forms of
behavior can stigmatize them, feeding back and influencing the
psychological states of those who are so labelled, often producing
further negative impacts on their mental health (see Hacking 1995b;
Tekin 2014; also see Mallon 2016 for more general discussion of
'looping effects' and their interaction with cognition;
cf. Goffman 1961 for a sociological perspective on similar
phenomena).



Further evidence of the unsettling of the orthodoxy is that the latest
edition of the DSM explicitly dropped the terminology of
'culture bound syndromes', replacing it with
'cultural concepts of disease'. The rationale for this
modification was that it "acknowledges that *all* forms
of distress are locally shaped, including the DSM disorders"
(American Psychiatric Association 2013, italics in original).
Nevertheless, there is reason to think the changes may be merely
cosmetic and peripheral rather than indicative of a deeper structural
reorientation of Western psychiatric institutions. Philosophical
critics have argued that at its heart the DSM remains committed to a
biomedical model of disease, still conceptualizing mental disorder via
an analogy with somatic disease. This conception remains inadequate,
they argue, in no small part because it is unable to capture the deep
influence of culture on minds and mental health (Tekin 2011; Tekin,
Flanagan, & Graham 2017).



Nevertheless, philosophers of psychiatry continue to reflect on how
the growing appreciation of cultural diversity should inform issues in
the conceptual foundations of the field (Washington 2016; Radden 2019;
Murphy ;2010 [2020]; also see Adriaens & De Block 2011). Some have
addressed questions about whether psychopathologies and categories of
mental disorder are best understood as natural kinds, or whether some
alternative--socially-constructed kinds, pragmatic kinds,
conventional kinds, interactive kinds, normative kinds--provides
a better model (Tsou 2007; Cooper 2004, 2007; Khalidi 2010; Kendler,
Zachar, & Craver 2011; Tekin 2016; Stegenga 2018). Given the
subject matter, these debates have immediate practical and ethical
implications as well. For example, according to proponents of the
normative model, a culture's conception and categories of mental
disorder are mainly a reflection of what it values rather than any
objective mental or physiological facts. This would raise familiar
challenges concerning relativism and disagreements about mental
disorder between cultures: behaviors and states of mind that are
unusual (or even normal) but considered normatively acceptable in one
culture may be pathologized in another, and there would be no further
fact of the matter that would make correct or incorrect either way of
separating genuinely pathological and disordered behavior from
behavior that is merely unusual or socially unacceptable behavior
(Feit 2020; but see Wakefield 2006). Others have explored different
ethical aspects of psychiatric diversity and cognitive dysfunction.
For example, the widespread exportation of Western practice and
thought about mental illness to the rest of the world may have
resulted in a global transformation of human mental life (Watters
2010), leading some philosophers to call for a postcolonial psychiatry
(Kamens 2020).


### 4.3 Culture, Moral Psychology, and Moral Theory



Empirical approaches to moral psychology have risen dramatically in
influence and visibility in the last few decades (Nichols 2004; Prinz
2007; Sinnott-Armstrong 2008a,b,c; Doris and the Moral Psychology
Group 2010; Doris, Stich, & Walmsley 2020; Doris, Stich, et al.
2020; Alfano, Loeb, & Plakias 2018; Kelly & Setman 2020), but,
as in other areas of cognitive science, practitioners continue to
wrestle with the WEIRD challenge. Moral psychologists concerned with
cultural and cognitive variation have added to the case that
Westerners are outliers, and along many of the dimensions that appear
directly relevant to moral theory (Graham et al. 2013, 2018).
Comparatively speaking, WEIRD people appear to be more
individualistic, guilt-ridden, impersonally prosocial, and accepting
of impartial fairness norms, but less nepotistic, less loyal to
friends, and less likely to exhibit ingroup favoritism (J. Schulz et
al. 2019; J. Henrich 2020; also see Davis & Kelly forthcoming for
a cultural perspective on the psychology of ingroup/outgroup biases).
Their moral judgments also appear to be more sensitive to the
intentions and mental states of those whose behavior they are
evaluating (Barrett, Bolyanatz, et al. 2016; McNamara et al. 2019;
Curtin et al. 2020; Barrett & Saxe 2021; also see Willard &
McNamara 2019). This has led some philosophers to argue that the
explicit moral theories produced by Western moral philosophers,
especially those who rely mainly on their own intuitions, may be
worrisomely parochial rather than expressions of panhuman or
transcendent moral truth (Flanagan 2016; Van Norden 2017; see also
 section 4.5
 below). Others have explored the ways in which research on the
biological and cultural origins of human moral psychology can help
inform our understanding of the nature of morality itself (Joyce 2007;
Machery & Mallon 2010; Stanford 2018). This perspective has led
some to argue that the category of morality, understood as a special
subdomain of normativity in general, is itself culturally parochial,
an historically recent creation of Western philosophers (Machery 2018;
also see Stich 2018; Davis & Kelly 2018).



Others have drawn on empirically-oriented work on culture and
cognition to inform more specific debates within moral theory, broadly
construed. A wealth of empirical evidence has demonstrated cultural
differences in behaviors, norms, and judgments concerned with
reciprocity, fairness, and altruism (Sober & Wilson 1998; J.
Henrich, Boyd, et al. 2004, 2005; Mathew, Boyd, & Van Veelen 2013;
Baumard, Andre, & Sperber 2013; Sterelny 2016).
Naturalistic philosophers, in turn, have attempted to clarify the
significance of the revealed variation, spelling out what it might
mean for metaethical theorizing (Machery, Kelly, & Stich 2005;
Doris & Plakias 2008) or how it might reflect on the range and
moral status of different forms of altruism and cooperation (Binmore
2006; Zollman 2008; Clavien & Chapuisat 2013; Sterelny, Joyce, et
al. 2013, Sterelny 2021; Curry 2016; Curry et al. forthcoming;
Piccinini & Schulz 2019; Doris, Stich, & Walmsley 2020).
Several philosophers have argued that there is non-trivial cultural
variation in the most basic components of morality, and as such that
there are unlikely to be many moral universals (Prinz 2008; A. Levy
& Levy 2020; cf. Mikhail 2007, 2011).



Philosophers have long been interested in the genealogy of morals
(Nietzsche 1887), and the subsequent rise of the fields of cognitive
science, Evolutionary Psychology, and empirical moral psychology has
brought with it a surge of interest in evolutionary debunking
arguments of morality. These have sparked a great deal of
philosophical debate, but it has been slow to seriously integrated
cultural evolution or the contemporary cognitive science of culture
into the discussion (Kelly 2017). Critics have pointed out that
debunkers have rarely paid close attention to the details of
scientific accounts of the evolution of morality, even though some of
the premises of their debunking arguments seem to rely on such
details, including details about the cultural roots of many components
of our moral minds (Cline 2015; Braddock 2021). Others have similarly
traced out how empirical inaccuracies in the premises of debunking
arguments undermine their conclusions (Machery & Mallon 2010;
Sterelny & Fraser 2017; A. Levy & Levy 2020).



Unsurprisingly, moral realists who take a genealogical perspective see
things differently than the debunkers (Huemer 2016). Many philosophers
have been attracted to the idea that human cultures are in the midst
of a significant historical trend in the direction of moral progress,
as the last several centuries have witnessed a putative triumph of the
open society, a proliferation of broadly inclusive norms and values
across the globe (Jamieson 2002; Singer 1981 [2011]; Buchanan &
Powell 2018; Gaus 2021; also see Pinker 2011, 2018). This wide and
relatively rapid spread of inclusivity is difficult for
evolutionarily-inspired moral skeptics and anti-realists to account
for, the realist argues, because the extension of moral concern beyond
members of a cultural ingroup seems to be maladaptive from an
evolutionary perspective. Thus, realism seems better able to account
for the trend, explaining why inclusivist norms and values spread so
quickly, and of why it only happened so recently.



Critics have responded by arguing that there *are* viable
alternative accounts for the trend, explanations that appeal to the
interplay between cultural capacities and cultural dynamics rather
than to the discovery and tracking of mind independent moral facts
(Hopster 2020, also see Cofnas 2020). They also point out that it has
been known since the establishment of the field of cultural evolution
that cultural evolutionary processes can and not infrequently do lead
to biologically non-adaptive outcomes (R. Boyd & Richerson 1985),
and that explanations that can account for the spread of packages of
norms and values, but do not require a commitment to moral realism,
have since grown in sophistication and empirical support (Richerson,
Baldini, et al. 2016). Other critics have argued further that whether
or not the realist's preferred explanation of the historical
trend is, indeed, the best explanation depends not only in the
empirical details about the evolution and character of our moral and
cultural capacities, but also on the details of history and how the
spread of inclusivity actually occurred. They conclude the realist
argument also requires deeper empirical engagement on a number of
fronts to be convincing (Hassan 2019).


### 4.4 Culture and Epistemology



The improved understanding of the impact of culture on cognition, and
especially of the importance of social learning and the extent and
depth of cognitive diversity (J. Henrich, Blasi, et al. forthcoming),
has also attracted the attention of epistemologists (Machery, Stich,
et al. 2017; Mizumoto et al. 2018; also see Figueroa & Harding
2003, especially Wylie 2003; Feest & Sturm 2011). Western
epistemology has traditionally focused on questions about what it is
for individuals to have knowledge, but the last several decades have
seen a growing interest in socially-oriented approaches to epistemic
phenomena and to knowers themselves. These social approaches, in turn,
are better positioned to capture and account for the ways in which
aspects of culture are epistemologically significant (Carter, Clark et
al. 2018a; Grasswick 2006 [2018]; Goldman & O'Connor 2019
[2021]).



For example, this social turn in epistemology has sparked research
into cognitive mechanisms for epistemic vigilance, especially those
that monitor and regulate communication (Sperber, Clement, et
al. 2010; Mercier 2020). It has also directed attention towards many
different aspects of epistemic norms, those informal rules of conduct
that regulate how people handle information, assess evidence of
various kinds, make public assertions (Kneer 2021), etc. Epistemic
norms also underpin social trust, prescribing how one ought to assign
credence to testimony given by people who bear different social
identities, belong to different groups, and are associated with
different institutions and forms of expertise (Lackey 2008; Goldberg
2010; Littlejohn & Turri 2014; Henderson 2020). An especially
fruitful strand of this research has examined variation in such norms,
and in the ways in which they can be unfair to members of marginalized
cultural groups, and thus contribute to a myriad of forms of epistemic
injustice (Fricker 2007; Medina 2013; Dotson 2014). Other research at
the intersection of social epistemology and political philosophy
(Edenberg & Hannon 2021) has looked at the way certain
configurations of epistemic norms, together with the operation of
selective learning heuristics like the my-side bias and tribal social
instincts mentioned in
 Section 3.3,
 can create filter bubbles and echo chambers (E. Anderson 2021; Nguyen
2020), contribute to the spread of misinformation (O'Connor
& Weatherall 2019), and sustain extreme forms of polarization and
partisanship (Rini 2017, also see Raymond, Kelly, & Hennes
forthcoming). Work on the character of scientific inquiry has also
looked at the role of epistemic norms in the production of knowledge
by scientific communities (Kuhn 1962; Barnes et al. 1996; Vaesen
2021), including norms that specify what counts as acceptable evidence
(Longino 1990) and norms that prescribe that empirical evidence be
accorded a unique significance in the construction and evaluation of
scientific argumentation (Strevens 2020).



Another strand in this research examines familiar tensions between
individual and collective levels of analysis as they emerge in
epistemological contexts. For example, psychological tendencies that
look like biases or failures of rationality from the point of view of
individual reasoning may be the very same tendencies that, when widely
shared, allow for the accumulation over time of group beneficial
cultural traits and adaptive wherewithal. The tendency of humans to
over-imitate, for example, may lead them to occasionally expend extra
time and energy mimicking unnecessary steps in a sequence of
behaviors. Considered individually, episodes of copying "too
much" can look like a mistake, and the underlying propensity
like a source of irrationality and inefficiency. From a collective
perspective, however, such a tendency, distributed across members of
the population, may be a key factor in the group's ability to
create, sustain, and faithfully transmit cumulative culture and
knowledge over the span of generations (Hoehl et al. 2019, also see J.
Henrich 2016). Similarly, others have argued that what look like
reasoning mistakes when examined in isolation are driven by heuristics
like a my-side bias that make important contributions to a
group's ability reap the benefits of dividing cognitive labor
(Mercier & Sperber 2011, 2017; also see Peters forthcoming on
confirmation bias). A similar perspective has been used to recast
questions about epistemic accountability, suggesting that while many
'biases' may facilitate collective reasoning and the group
level production of knowledge, individuals who employ those biases
fail to qualify as epistemically virtuous. Those individuals, that is,
do not deserve any epistemic credit for the knowledge their biases
help produce (N. Levy & Alfano 2020; also see Palermos 2016 and
Alfano 2021; cf. Rini 2017 for an argument that inverts the
evaluation, holding that in some contexts partisanship in acceptance
of testimony can be individually virtuous but lead to epistemic
outcomes--like the widespread circulation of fake news--that
are clearly vicious at collective levels).


### 4.5 Culture, Intuition, and Philosophical Methodology



Contemporary philosophy that is considered Western is recognized as
such in virtue of tracing its origins back to a particular
geographical region, centered especially in Athens and Rome, but also
in virtue of a shared body of topics and methods. Appreciation of
human cultural and cognitive diversity can fuel the suspicion that
many topics worthy of philosophical consideration have been given less
attention than they deserve by the Western tradition. This, in turn,
can be used to support the case that more Western philosophers should
branch out, exploring comparative projects and studying other
traditions (Van Norden 2017, also see Coseru 2009 [2017]; Outlaw 2010
[2017]; Vargas 2007; Kasulis 2019; Wong 2001 [2020]; Mollgaard
2021).



Within the Western tradition, arguments from cultural and cognitive
diversity have come to loom large in debates about philosophical
methodology. Some have pointed out that many traditions use approaches
that seem alien to contemporary Western philosophy, such as meditation
or syncretism (McLeod 2016, also see Struck 2016 for a case that
divination was taken seriously by ancient Greek philosophers, and
Jones 2001 for an argument that philosophical methods are universal).
Most discussions in this area, however, have centered on intuitions,
and their character, distribution across populations, and proper role
in philosophical theorizing (also see Pust 2012 [2019])



Since the early 2000s, experimental philosophers have gathered their
own data and used it to support a variety of projects (Sytsma &
Livengood 2016; Knobe & Nichols 2017). One of the most prominent
has tried to develop arguments showing how diversity--in culture,
in cognition, and especially in philosophical intuition--presents
challenges to philosophers who rely too heavily on appeals to their
own intuitions, or solely on the intuitions of a select few (Egler
forthcoming). Intuitions about philosophical issues may vary in ways
that raise doubts about the significance of projects that fail to take
account of such variation. As an early manifesto put it:



> 
> 
> Since it's in some sense an accident that I had the cultural
> upbringing that I did, I am forced to wonder whether my intuitions are
> superior at tracking the nature of the world, the mind, and the good.
> (Knobe & Nichols 2008, 11; also see DiPaolo & Simpson 2016;
> Andow 2016)
> 
> 
> 



Conclusions reached mainly on the basis of 'close to home'
intuitions may be relative and limited in scope, the argument goes, as
philosophers in other cultures and with other intuitions may
rationally arrive at different or even contrasting conclusions.



The empirical situation as revealed by experimental philosophy,
however, is far from simple or straightforward. Initial efforts
presented evidence of diversity in the intuitive judgments people from
different groups made about the moral, epistemic, and semantic
features of a range of scenarios. For example, one of the first
experimental philosophy studies found that East Asian participants
exhibited markedly different responses than Westerner participants to
the kinds of Gettier cases commonly used by analytic epistemologists
(Weinberg, Nichols, & Stich 2001). Similarly, the first
cross-cultural study of semantic intuitions about reference, which
used scenarios based on Kripke's famous Godel-case, again
found evidence of interesting differences between East Asian and
Western participants (Machery, Mallon, et al. 2004).



Some, but not all, of these results have replicated (Cova, Strickland,
et al. 2021). While later studies seemed to confirm that semantic
intuitions differ cross-culturally (Beebe & Undercoffer 2016; van
Dongen et al. 2021), subsequent research has indicated there may be
cross-cultural convergence on Gettier-cases and other epistemic
intuitions (Kim & Yuan 2015; Machery, Stich, et al. 2017; Yuan
& Kim forthcoming; but see Waterman et al., 2018; Sekowski et
al. forthcoming). Empirical research on intuitions about free will has
revealed another messy picture, with some work suggesting that many
young Americans have compatibilist intuitions (Nahmias et al. 2006),
while other studies find evidence of convergence, with participants
from different cultures embracing incompatibilism and rejecting
determinism (Sarkissian et al. 2010). Other research suggests that
people in Asia tend to make judgments about free will that
systematically differ from the judgments in the rest of the world
(Hannikainen et al. 2019). Investigation into aesthetic intuitions
found that participants across cultures broadly agree that aesthetic
judgments are subjective and not universally valid, though there is
evidence of patterns of differences in detail (Cova, Garcia, &
Liao 2015).



Philosophers continue to debate the implications of this complicated
and evolving empirical picture. Some have explored how such evidence
may be put to use by experimental philosophers engaged in positive
substantive projects of explication and conceptual engineering
(Shepherd & Justus 2015; Schupbach 2017; Nado 2021). Even when
intuitions about philosophical cases do not significantly vary,
systematic investigation of them may still yield important evidence in
the analysis of concepts (Stich & Tobia 2016, also see Knobe 2016
and Machery 2017).



The empirical picture has been interpreted by advocates of more
traditional (Western) methods to support those methods. Some have
given a close analysis of the nature and use of intuitions, and
defended the perhaps surprisingly view that even if they do exhibit
patterns of cross-cultural variation, it would be irrelevant to
philosophical methodology because intuitions play only a minor role in
philosophical argumentation (Cappelen 2012, also see Ichikawa, Maitra,
& Weatherson 2012). Others have accepted that intuitions are
important to philosophical methodology, but argued that the empirical
record does not reflect enough variation, or the right kind of
variation, to be philosophically troubling (Knobe 2019; cf. Stich
& Machery forthcoming). Some have been most impressed with the
discovered uniformity, arguing that it deflates experimental
philosophy's diversity-based methodological challenge (Ichikawa
2012).



Another line of response to the challenge focuses on the details in
the patterns of variation, arguing that the revealed diversity is
often superficial or philosophically toothless (Sosa 2009), or that
disagreement suggested by the presence of conflicting intuitions would
usually disappear if the individuals from different cultures could
discuss cases or provide justifications for their intuitions (Deutsch
2010). Debates about one such response, which has become known as the
expertise defense, consider in detail the possibility that some
instances of variation are innocuous. Some people's intuitions,
specifically those people with special expertise or training, are more
sensitive to philosophical issues. Thus, not only should differences
between lay people and experts to be expected, but, continues the
argument, the intuitions of the experts deserve more evidential weight
in philosophizing (Devitt 2011; Williamson 2011; also see Horvath
& Koch 2021). This defense, claim its critics, relies on what
appear to be questionable empirical assumptions about experts and
their intuitions (Weinberg, Gonnerman, et al. 2010; Schwitzgebel &
Cushman 2015; Wiegmann, Horvath, & Meyer 2020; Horvath &
Wiegmann forthcoming). One response that is particularly intriguing
for those interested in cognition and cultural variation is that the
intuitions of experts--trained philosophers--seem to vary
quite dramatically according to their linguistic background (Vaesen,
Peterson, & Van Bezooijen 2013). These debates continue. No one,
however, has argued against the idea that reflection on cultural
diversity in worldviews, values, conceptualizations, cognition, or
intuition can be philosophically valuable in ways that go far beyond
their relevance to debates about methodology.