 While ‘cognitive science’ refers to an approach to studying a particular set of phenomena, ‘culture’ would appear to refer directly to a type of phenomenon, rather than a way of investigating it. This much may seem uncontroversial, but little else about culture (or ‘culture’) is (Risjord 2012; Lenard 2020). Before it became central to the social sciences and humanities, the term had a life of its own outside of academia, where it was primarily used to refer to the training of mental capacities in humans. In this sense, ‘culture’ was roughly synonymous with ‘education’: a cultured individual was an educated person, and the qualities of educated people, and the things that educated people produced and consumed, were construed as cultural (Jahoda 2012). Vernacular usage has retained many of these connotations, and some of the more technical uses of ‘culture’ remain indebted to these folk origins. Still, most contemporary academic understandings of the subject matter have been greatly influenced by the work of eighteenth-century philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder, whose approach to culture emphasized how human thinking and behavior are extremely flexible, and steered by environmental variation and social learning (Denby 2005).