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model behind the word “bachelor.” Many have come to reject it, thereby either dropping the word or changing its meaning. For example, many people now use the word “bachelor” for unmarried women, thus, giving the word new
situated meanings and applying it against a new cultural model. Other people use a word like ‘‘spinster” as a badge of honor and respect, once again creating new situated meanings and cultural models.
The “bite” of Fillmore’s example is this: if any word in English seems to have a clear “definition,” it is a word like “bachelor.” But this word is not used in terms of a definition, but rather against a set of social and cultural
assumptions that constitute a cultural model. If this is true of a word like “bachelor,” how much more likely is it to be true of words like “democracy,” “justice,” “intelligent,” or “literate,” for instance?
4.2 Videotapes in the mind
The “bachelor” example is, of course, too simple. There are lots of different sorts of cultural models and lots of different ways to think and talk about them. Another way to think about cultural models is this: Cultural models are
rather like “movies” or “videotapes” in the mind, tapes of experiences we have had, seen, read about, or imagined. We all have a vast store of these tapes, the edited and, thus, transformed records of our experiences in the world or
with texts and media. We treat some of these tapes as if they depict prototypical what we take to be “normal” people, objects, and events. We conventionally take these “prototypical” tapes to be the “real” world, or act as if they
were, overlooking many of the complexities in the world in order to get on with the business of social action and interaction.
Cultural models can become emblematic visions of an idealized, “normal,” “typical” reality, in much the way that, say, a Bogart movie is emblematic of the world of the “tough guy” or an early Woody Allan movie of the “sensitive,
but klutzy male.” Cultural models are also variable, differing across different cultural groups, including different cultural groups in a society speaking the same language. They change with time and other changes in the society, as
well as with new experience. But we are usually quite unaware we are using them and of their full implications, unless challenged by someone or by a new experience where our cultural models clearly don’t “fit.”
The “videotapes in the mind” metaphor should not be taken too rigidly. We have cultural models within cultural models, like Chinese boxes, and can switch among them quite rapidly. In the last chapter we took a “pattern-
recognition” view of the mind. Such a perspective argues that thinking is not a matter of following general rules and engaging in logic-like computations on abstract representations the viewpoint of traditional cognitivist
perspectives. Rather, pattern-recognition perspectives argue that the mind stores connected “images” of actual experiences, problem-
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solves through finding patterns in that experience, applies these patterns in a “customized” adapted way to understand new experiences, and dynamically changes these patterns in the face of those new experiences.
Recall, for instance, our example in the last chapter of how you think about bedrooms p. 49. Your “image” of a prototypical bedroom is a compendium something rather like an edited collection of what you take to be your most
typical bedroom videotapes of your many experiences of bedrooms, linking, at a lower level, many smaller images, such as types of beds and carpets, and linking, at a larger level, to other sorts of images, such as types of adjoining
bathrooms and closets.
When I tell you the bedroom has a small sink and refrigerator in it, you immediately transform your image and “customize” it for this new setting, forming an image, perhaps, of something like a college dorm room. The two
different images you have formed are what I called, in the last chapter, ‘‘situated meanings” for “bedroom”. But each one is used against or in relation to different cultural models. In one case, your cultural model of what you take
to be typical adults and their bedrooms and houses, in the other case your cultural model of what you take to be typical college students, and their living quarters.
Both of these cultural models will vary significantly based on your social class and other sociocultural memberships. In fact, you may very well have not formed a situated meaning involving college students at all in the second case.
And, indeed, your situated meaning of bedrooms with and without refrigerators in them will vary a good bit based on your class-based and other sociocultural experiences and the cultural models about people, bedrooms, and houses
to which they have given rise.
Any situated meanings and cultural models active in a given context bring with them are linked to a good many other related situated meanings and cultural models. When you think about bedrooms, you activate more or less
strongly related situated meanings and cultural models having to do with houses, homes, relationships, and a good deal more. Any situated meaning or any cultural model is like a ball attached to a great many other balls on a string.
When you pick up the ball situated meaning or cultural model you drag along all the other balls some more closely attached to the original ball than others.
In the rest of this chapter we will see other sorts of cultural models and other ways to think about cultural models. We will also see an array of psychological, social, and political issues that arise, in different cases, when we study
cultural models and the situated meanings they help to organize, and lead us to form and transform.
4.3 All meaning is local
