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A cognitive pragmatic perspective on communication and culture 39

planations in the domain of culture should focus on a particular relation between
psychological and ecological influences. On his view, a defining feature of so-
cial-cultural things is the relation between forms and structures, which are by
and large in the environment of people, and mental representations, which are in
individual people’s minds/brains. Therefore, cultural categories should be seen
as resulting from interactions between intra-individual, cognitive-psychologi-
cal, mechanisms responsible for our ability to interpret the world, and inter-
individual, social-cultural, mechanisms, such as communication, which enable
us to disseminate these representations within and across human populations
(see Sperber 1996: 49). On this view, cultures are not natural kinds. Rather, they
consist of relatively stable patterns of a particular type of metarepresentation,
which I will call cultural representation:

Cultural representation: a metarepresentation which involves a stable three place re-
lation between:
– a mental representation (of a physical entity, event, direct emotional experience,
etc.);
– a belief about this mental representation (e.g. hammer, doorstop, love, anger);
and
– a sizable population made up of individuals (a nation, an ethnic group, an age
group, a professional group, etc.) who share the same, or very similar, beliefs
about particular types of mental representations over significant time spans.

Cultural representations emerge and spread through causal chains which in-
volve mental representations and public productions (utterances, texts, pictures,
artefacts in the environment of individuals) which are reproduced repeatedly
and reasonably faithfully, thus achieving stability and wide distribution,
through a process (very sketchily) illustrated in figure 1.

Mental Public Mental Public Mental
Repre- Produc- Repre- Produc- Repre-
sentation tion sentation tion sentation

Figure 1. Schema of the causal chain involved in the spreading of cultural represen-
tations.

This approach is articulated in the context of an analogy between the study of
culture and the study of epidemics. Just as there is no epidemic without individ-
ual organisms being infected by particular viruses or bacteria, there is no culture
without representations being distributed in the brains/minds of individuals.
This analogy is very suggestive in several ways. For instance, it is often ob-
served that culture is both an individual and a social construct (see Matsumoto
1996: 18). There is no epidemic without diseased individuals, but the study of
epidemics cannot be reduced to the study of individual pathology. By the same