The common cognitive environment was not borrowed from one culture to another. A cognitive environment is a cultural heritage shaped by infinite forces and influences generation by generation, through complexities that cannot be traced or identified. Even today when one culture decides to imbibe deeply of the cognitive environment of another (e.g., the Japanese adoption of Western culture), the result is a complex mix of that which is adopted wholesale, that which is adapted, that which is taken at one level without really being understood, that which is utterly rejected, and on and on in
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