Wierzbicka, Anna (2006). On folk conceptions of mind, agency and morality. Journal of Cognition and Culture, 6(1/2), 165-179. DOI: 10.1163/156853706776931286

This paper is part of a special issue on folk conceptions of mind, agency and morality. It consists of four parts, in which the author comments on the topic at large, then singles out three of the papers in it for further comment. At the end of the first part, she makes the following main points, which apply, in one way or the other, to all papers in the special issue.

  1. To compare folk conceptions or folk concepts of any kind we need a tertium comparationis, that is, a culture-independent semantic metalanguage.
  2. English cannot serve as such a metalanguage, because like any other natural language, it is itself saturated with culture-specific folk conceptions.
  3. A culture-independent metalanguage in which unbiased comparisons can be carried out is available in “NSM”, that is, the Natural Semantic Metalanguage.
  4. Language is a key issue in all cross-cultural research and all research that has as its subject human cognition. No matter how broad the empirical basis of a cross-cultural study, or the study into human cognition, is, if this study does not pay attention to the language in which its hypotheses and analyses are formulated, it is likely to impose on the data an ethnocentric perspective. Such ethnocentrism may have been unavoidable in the past, before it was known what the universal, culture-independent human concepts were. Now that this is known, however, it is no longer unavoidable. The Natural Semantic Metalanguage is available as a tested analytical tool for anyone who would wish to engage in a study of human speech practices, and human cognition, in an unbiased and maximally (if not entirely) culture-independent way. The effectiveness of this tool has been demonstrated in hundreds of analyses, carried out by many scholars across a broad spectrum of languages, cultures, and conceptual domains.


Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners