Psychological universals, or core mental attributes shared by humans everywhere, are a foundational postulate of psychology, yet explicit analysis of how to identify such universals is lacking. This article offers a conceptual and methodological framework to guide the investigation of genuine universals through empirical analysis of psychological patterns across cultures. Issues of cross-cultur...

Human universals--of which hundreds have been identified--consist of those features of culture, society, language, behavior, and mind that, so far as the record has been examined, are found among all peoples known to ethnography and history. After presenting some of the basic conceptions and problems concerning such universals per se--their kinds and causes and the methodological and disciplina...

Most work in ‘evolutionary linguistics’ seeks to motivate the emergence of linguistic universals. Although the search for universals never played a major role in semantics, a number of such universals have been proposed concerning connectives, property and preposition denoting expressions, and quantifiers. In this paper we suggest some evolutionary motivations for these proposed universals usin...

There is considerable variation across the languages of the world, nonetheless it is possible to discern common patterns in how languages are structured and used. The underlying source of this variation as well as the nature of crosslinguistic universals is the focus of much debate across different areas of linguistics. Some linguists suggest that language universals derive from the inner worki...

In the past fifteen years or so there has been a lot of attention paid to theories of “sparse” universals, particularly because of the work of D. M. Armstrong. These theories are of particular interest to those of us concerned with the distinction between natural and non-natural properties, since, as David Lewis has observed, it seems possible to analyze naturalness in terms of sparse universal...

David Armstrong believes in universals. Once universals are accepted, it must also be accepted that they resemble one another to various degrees. Colors, for instance, fall into a complicated multidimensional resemblanceorder. Armstrong claims that all universals are complex universals, and that they resemble one another insofar as they have common universal constituents. Armstrong’s reductive ...

In this article, I examine whether the Tractarian objects include universals. suggest that Tractatus does not support a realist view—namely apart from including particulars, also universals—or nominalist view—that is, only particulars. This is because, beyond fact there no standard definition of notions “particulars” and “universals”, term “object” remains indeterminate in Tractatus. contributi...

Philosophers have long debated about two ways of conceiving of universals: as Platonic universals and as Aristotelian universals. Roughly, Aristotelian universals are inherent in the particulars that instantiate them; they can be multiply located (located just where the instances are located), and they exist only if they have at least one instance. Platonic universals, by contrast, are truly ab...