Causality and Agency Across Cultures and Languages.

Why does wood float on water? What made Jim shout at me, and why had he to be so offending? Who is responsible for my son’s sickness? And why should incest be wrong? All these questions share one important feature: They ask for causal explanations. Causality is a core concept in our attempts to make sense of the physical world and of social interactions; and this makes causal cognition a topic of prime interest for cognitive science. Yet, in spite of an increasing body of high-quality and high-profile research, most previous studies paid only incidental attention to the potential of cognitive and linguistic diversity in causal cognition. The cross-cultural evidence available so far (reviewed in Bender, Beller, u0026 Medin, subm.) indicates that culture plays a crucial role in causal cognition on various levels and in all domains. It affects not only how, but even whether people engage in causal explanations, by defining the settings in which causal cognition occurs, the manner in which potential factors are pondered on, and the choices for highlighting one of several potential causes or for expressing them linguistically in one way or another (e.g., Astuti u0026 Harris, 2008; Bender u0026 Beller, 2011; Bohnemeyer et al., 2010; Norenzayan u0026 Nisbett, 2000; and see the contributions in Beller, Bender, u0026 Waldmann, 2014). These findings justify the call for a more thorough investigation of the possibly constitutive role that culture and language may play for causal cognition (Widlok, 2014). While it is plausible that most causal learning, and even a considerable proportion of causal explanations, will be invariant across culture, without thoroughly scrutinizing each of the candidates for invariance we are not in a position to draw any generalizations. Important questions have thus remained unanswered: • Along which dimensions do socio-linguistic groups differ in how they speak about causality, and to what extent do these differences affect how people represent causal relations? • Is causal reasoning always based on the same cognitive mechanisms and principles, or do our cultural background and our native language shape how we process respective information? • How are multiple explanatory frameworks organized and activated for accounts of illnesses or moral reasoning? • Last, but not least, how can we make sure that the methods we use to investigate potential differences across cultures and languages do really capture the relevant issues in an unbiased manner? Our symposium attempts to advance this field of research at the heart of cognitive science. It brings together researchers from various of its sub-fields, who will present theoretical analyses and empirical findings on those factors that may constrain, trigger, or shape the way in which humans think and talk about causal relationships. • Jurgen Bohnemeyer has designed a large-scale survey on the linguistic representation of causality that combines approaches from psychology, linguistics, and anthropology (e.g., Bohnemeyer et al., 2010; Moore et al., in press). • Annelie Rothe-Wulf and colleagues combine psychological and anthropological expertise to investigate the effect of cultural concepts and linguistic cues on causal cognition (Beller et al., 2009; Bender u0026 Beller, 2011). • York Hagmayer has for many years specialized in psychological and philosophical aspects of causal reasoning (Hagmayer u0026 Sloman, 2009; Waldmann u0026 Hagmayer, 2013); here he examines, in collaboration with an anthropologist, cross-cultural data on explanations for illnesses. • Rita Astuti, one of Europe’s leading (cognitive) anthropologists (Astuti u0026 Harris, 2008; Astuti, Solomon, u0026 Carey, 2004), investigates causal reasoning related to biological concepts and moral processes. By integrating insights from their various disciplinary backgrounds, this symposium will span a broad range of the subfields of cognitive science in an exemplary manner.