A purity culture within communities that elevate cognitive science as the master framework for understanding mind and behavior, where proper cognitive thinking becomes a test of virtue and belonging. Cognitive puritanism demands that true members explain all mental phenomena in terms of cognitive processes, treat appeals to emotion, culture, or experience as insufficiently rigorous, and maintain the purity of cognitive explanations against contamination by alternative frameworks. Members compete to demonstrate their cognitive sophistication, their freedom from bias, their commitment to the cognitive model against all challenges. The result is a community that claims to understand thinking while being blind to everything about thought that isn't computation.
Example: "The group dismissed her embodied, situated account of knowledge as 'unscientific'—Cognitive Puritanism, where only information-processing models count as real explanations of mind."
by Abzugal Nammugal Enkigal March 14, 2026
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