Chapter 2 explores why culture influences social theory construction. Social theory starts with a nucleus, or a theoretical hard core, maturing gradually into a system of ideas through the process of nucleation. The hard core is composed of two parts, the metaphysical component and the substantive component. While the former helps perceive empirical facts in the world, the former enables people to understand and interpret such facts. Culture matters in theory construction because it shapes the metaphysical component. It is the shared knowledge of a cultural community and the sediments of long practices of its members (knowledge producers included), thus becoming the lens through which they see, understand and interpret things around them and making them tend to think and do in a culturally oriented way. Culture, resting on their collective practice, develops their common worldview and constitutes their shared background knowledge, thus providing the meaningful elements of the metaphysical component of the theoretical hard core.