On collective cognition and language

This chapter presents a model of cognition as an attribute of groups and not just individuals, bringing into play cultural conceptualizations as the instrument of analysis. In this sense, cognition is viewed as an emergent phenomenon resulting from the interactions between the members of a group, who form a cognitive network across time and space. Collective cognitions, such as what I term cultural cognition, are “distributed” in the sense that the cognitive structures that give rise to the emergent, collective cognition are heterogeneously distributed across the minds of the members of the group. This view of group-level cognition is compatible with the Complex Adaptive Systems paradigm. In this chapter I focus on cultural cognition and its two intrinsic aspects: cultural conceptualization and language. Cultural conceptualizations are components of cultural cognition such as schemas, categories, and metaphors. These have a conceptual dimension as well as a linguistic encoding. For example, words in human languages evoke schemas and categories that are conceptual in nature. In a sense, a language serves as a “memory bank” for cultural conceptualizations of its speakers, past and present, and as such is an important aspect of the group of speakers’ collective cognition. This chapter elaborates on the model sketched here and presents examples of cultural conceptualizations from several languages.