The structure of the human brain reflects multifarious random influences terrestrial and phylogenetic history, yet higher mental functions correlated with this unique cerebral neurophysiology are generally assumed to embody universals common intelligences independent biological substrate.

This paper presents an axiomatic formalisation of a theory of top-level relations between three categories of entities: individuals, universals, and collections. We deal with a variety of relations between entities in these categories, including the sub-universal relation among universals and the parthood relation among individuals, as well as cross-categorial relations such as instantiation an...

This paper provides an axiomatic formalization of a theory of foundational relations between three categories of entities: individuals, universals, and collections. We deal with a variety of relations between entities in these categories, including the is-a relation among universals and the part-of relation among individuals as well as cross-category relations such as instance-of, member-of, an...

Psychological universals, or core mental attributes shared by humans everywhere, are a foundational postulate of psychology, yet explicit analysis of how to identify such universals is lacking. Drawing on the emerging field of cultural psychology, this article offers a conceptual and methodological framework to guide the investigation of genuine universals through empirical analysis of psycholo...

This article offers a general discussion of the concept of universals in linguistics (and in general), spelling out different ways of understanding claims to universality and connecting such claims to other (often familiar) related distinctions, terminology and approaches such as competence and performance or I-language and E-language, evolutionary explanations, deep and surface universals, rat...