Beyond Newton: Why Assumptions of Universality are Critical to Cognitive Science, and How to Finally Move Past Them

Abstract

Fifty years of cross-cultural researchers critiquing classical cognitive science’s omission of cultural variation suggests an unresolved tension deeper than this surface conflict. We propose that the intransigence of classical cognitive science can be explained by the action of a tacit Newtonian principle (NP) that the proper subjects of cognitive science are universal properties of the mind. If we jettison the NP, it is not clear how we can rule out that cognitive science should apply to a myriad of ungeneralizable case studies (e.g. studying the idiosyncrasies of some individual or group). In fact, this collapse into hermeneutics has occurred in some branches of cognitive research within living memory. The status of the NP as both problematic and necessary explains why the culturalist critiques calling for the dismantling of the NP consistently gone unheard: Calls to cut away a rotten beam may well fall on deaf ears if the beam is all that holds up the roof. In order to break out of this cycle, we propose an alternative to the NP, combining cultural evolutionary theory with a newly-developed principle of articulation. We go on to show how this alternative framework provides a more productive and accurate approach to incorporating both universal and culturally-specific cognitive features as evidenced by ethnographic, biological and cognitive data as well as motivating a range of new directions of research.