The fundamental role of causal models in cultural models of nature

INTRODUCTION Cultural Models (CMs) are a way to organize mental knowledge (Holland and Quinn, 1987; Bennardo and De Munck, 2014) within communities of various sizes. Regarding their internal organization, causality plays a major role in CMs’ structure/s. A widely accepted way to represent causality in a variety of domains is that of using causal models (Sloman, 2009; Rips, 2011). I propose to think about and use the concept of causal model as a fundamental aspect of CMs. I provide a tentative exemplification of this proposal by looking at causal models in CMs of nature.