This chapter discusses the development of methods in cognitive anthropology. It documents how these methods developed from a focus on documenting shared cultural knowledge to a period where the person returned as a primary locus of cultural experience. The chapter’s discussion is organized into three overlapping historical periods. The ethnoscience period involved strategies for the elicitation of cultural domain taxonomies, componential analyses, and methods that allowed the identification of prototypical members of a category or subcategory. The cognitive schemas period used more structured data collection methods to document cultural schemas that organize items in a cognitive domain and statistical methods for modeling their interrelations. Cognitive anthropologists also developed ways to document cultural schemas in everyday talk, mainly using the method of semi- and unstructured extended interviews and life histories. The cultural models period used structured and unstructured data collection methods and quantitative and qualitative data analysis from the cultural schemas research period. These methods were used to connect culture to variations in individual experience.

This chapter presents a coherent picture of culture as emerging from a distinctive human mind architecture. I consider the mental processes that characterize the components of mind, and the inherently constituting and structured knowledge that represents its content. Grounded in a necessary and eclectic theory of cognition, I propose that culture consists of mental models shared within a community, or cultural models. Both the undeniably universal nature of numerous mental activities and the significantly idiosyncratic contents of an individual cultural mind find a plausible account within this theoretical approach. I explore three fundamental issues related to the investigation of culture as a mental phenomenon. The first regards a brief survey of theories about human cognition – both architecture and processes – that are of value and consequence to the anthropological enterprise. The second concerns the theorizing about the mental organization of knowledge. The thirdcovers the nature and value of cultural model theory in the contemporary anthropological landscape. I close by suggesting the concept of cultural model as a salient and necessary unit of analysis for anthropology.

In Chapter 7, we outline new empirical evidence that perspective taking depends on the reader’s analogy to their personal knowledge and experience. In the first experiment, participants read narratives that involved either familiar or unfamiliar cultural and social schemas. As predicted, we found that it was more difficult to take a character’s perspective when the events of the story world did not make sufficient contact with the reader’s own experience. A second experiment examined the use of prior knowledge and experience as it unfolds in the course of reading. When readers were asked to focus on places in the text where they were reminded of prior experience, the number of such remindings predicted perspective taking. In the third experiment, we manipulated the availability of relevant personal knowledge more directly: Before reading a story, participants were asked to think about a prior experience that either was or was not related to the experience of the character. As predicted, priming relevant prior experience promoted perspective taking.

The theory of common ground is an important analytical tool in linguistics and intercultural pragmatics. Common ground has applicability in the characterization of speech acts and allows for distinguishing, for example, between an assertive, which requires a dynamic common ground, and a declarative that depends more on appropriate contextual factors for a successful realization. The theory of common ground is intrinsically linked to how knowledge relates to language and how a discourse advances between interlocutors. As such, the creation and maintenance of common ground has consequences for our stance on knowledge and what we KNOW, BELIEVE, DESIRE, and our INTENTIONS for action. There are many kinds of knowledge and a relevant portion of these are framed within a discourse situation, with common ground. We discuss the interfaces and relationship between situation, context, common ground, and knowledge including cultural knowledge, drawing on the thinking of Malinowski and Firth, and others. The challenges addressed are: (a) how do we ground the notions of context and common ground and their contents, with the appropriate level of specificity? (b) how do we represent them in such a way to become operationally useful in linguistic analysis? and (c) how do we show how context and common ground contribute to utterance meaning?