This article offers a critique of the notion “universals” in cross-cultural studies on music and emotions based empirical observations philosophical arguments. The material comes from experiments with songs evoking animals belonging to Indigenous Sámi “yoik” tradition. Participants Belgian Ardenne untrained yoik ( N = 114, age 4–79) listened recordings tried guess which animal was evoked. While...

Human languages carve the world into category systems that are highly informative (e.g. Kemp & Regier, 2012)—but how do such systems develop? One possibility is that these systems result from the process of cultural transmission. Xu, Dowman, and Griffiths (2013) showed that human simulation of cultural transmission in the lab creates systems of categories that converge toward those in natural l...

This study examines and compares prominent characteristics of maternal responsiveness to infant activity during home-based naturalistic interactions of mother-infant dyads in New York City, Paris, and Tokyo. Both culture-general and culture-specific patterns of responsiveness emerged. For example, in all 3 locales infants behaved similarly, mothers also behaved similarly with respect to a hiera...

In social psychology, cognitive consistency is a powerful principle for organizing psychological concepts. There have been few tests of cognitive consistency in children and no research about cognitive consistency in children from Asian cultures, who pose an interesting developmental case. A sample of 172 Singaporean elementary school children completed implicit and explicit measures of math-ge...

Philosophers have long pondered the Problem of Universals. Socrates and Plato hypothesized that the Universals exist independent of the real world in a universe of their own. The Doctrine of the Forms was criticized by Aristotle, who stated that the Universals do not exist apart from things — a theory known as Hylomorphism. This paper postulates that Measurement in Quantum Mechanics is the proc...

Natural language, as is well known, seems to involve a rather rich ontology. It easily allows for reference to universals (with nominalizations such as honesty) und thus seems to involve a realist ontology, with properties acting as objects. It also allows reference to collections of any sort (with plurals and conjunctive NPs) und thus seems to involve unrestricted composition. In this paper, I...

Universals have traditionally thought to obey the identity of indiscernibles, that is, it has been there can be no perfectly similar universals. But at least in conception universals as immanent, is nothing rules out being indiscernible In this paper, I shall argue useful work do, and so might reason postulate particular, postulating allow a theory identify particulars with bundles universals, ...