 The effect of the first principle is to lay bare the fact that the seemingly vast differences between cultures is more a matter of our selective preferences; that is, the habits of mind we have cultivated for being more keenly attuned to difference rather than similarity. The first stage of relativism, then, is to reorient our focus in favor of the similarity to be found across value communities. Cultural cognates and correlates are objective because they are discovered to be real features of multiple value systems. They are in an important sense “there” to be discovered both by internal and external observers of the value group. The reason that these value cognates count as neutral is that they do not, in virtue of their being objective, privilege any value-type or value-content over any other. At this stage they are taken as mere facts of the matter about the values that exist within communities.