The Semantic Roots and Cultural Grounding of ‘Social Cognition’

Abstract

Social cognition (roughly, how people think about other people) is profoundly shaped by culture. It cannot be insightfully studied except by methods that are able to tap into the perspectives of cultural insiders, while avoiding the pitfalls of conceptual and terminological Anglocentrism. This paper shows how the analytical concepts and techniques developed by the NSM approach to language description, such as semantic explications and cultural scripts, can meet these requirements. It argues that the metalanguage of semantic primes, the outcome of a decades-long program of research, is well adapted to modelling local culturally-grounded modes of social cognition in fine detail.