concepts typically are defined in terms of lacking physical or perceptual referents. We argue instead that they are not devoid of perceptual information because knowledge of real-world situations is an important component of learning and using many abstract concepts. Although the relationship between perceptual information and abstract concepts is less straightforward than for concrete concepts, situation-based perceptual knowledge is part of many abstract concepts. In Experiment 1, participants made lexical decisions to (...) class='Hi'>abstract words that were preceded by related and unrelated pictures of situations. For example, share was preceded by a picture of two girls sharing a cob of corn. When pictures were presented for 500 ms, latencies did not differ. However, when pictures were presented for 1,000 ms, decision latencies were significantly shorter for abstract words preceded by related versus unrelated pictures. Because the abstract concepts corresponded to the pictured situation as a whole, rather than a single concrete object or entity, the necessary relational processing takes time. In Experiment 2, on each trial, an abstract word was presented for 250 ms, immediately followed by a picture. Participants indicated whether or not the picture showed a normal situation. Decision latencies were significantly shorter for pictures preceded by related versus unrelated abstract words. Our experiments provide evidence that knowledge of events and situations is important for learning and using at least some types of abstract concepts. That is, abstract concepts are grounded in situations, but in a more complex manner than for concrete concepts. Although people's understanding of abstract concepts certainly includes knowledge gained from language describing situations and events for which those concepts are relevant, sensory and motor information experienced during real-life events is important as well. (shrink)

Invariantists argue that the notion of concept in psychology should be reserved for knowledge that is retrieved in a context-insensitive manner. Contextualists argue that concepts are to be understood in terms of context-sensitive ad hoc constructions. I review the central empirical evidence for and against both views and show that their conclusions are based on a common mischaracterization of both theories. When the difference between contextualism and invariantism is properly understood, it becomes apparent that the way the question of (...) stability is currently investigated will not lead to a consensus. Instead of focusing directly on stability, we should turn our attention to other desiderata on a theory of concepts. In particular, I show that invariantism, but not contextualism, fails to account for compositionality and abstract concepts. (shrink)

Our thoughts depend on knowledge about objects, people, properties, and events. In order to think about where we left our keys, what we are going to make for dinner, when we last fed the dogs, and how we are going to survive our next visit with our family, we need to know something about locations, keys, cooking, dogs, survival, families, and so on. Researchers have sought to explain how our brains can store and access such general knowledge. A growing body (...) of evidence suggests that many of our concepts are grounded in action, emotion, and perception systems. We appear to think about the world by means of the same mechanisms that we use to experience it. Abstract concepts like ‘democracy,’ ‘fermion,’ ‘piety,’ ‘truth,’ and ‘zero’ represent a clear challenge to this idea. Given that they represent a uniquely human cognitive achievement, answering the question of how we acquire and use them is central to our ability to understand ourselves. This book argues that abstract concepts are heterogeneous and pose three important challenges to embodied cognition. They force us to ask: How do we generalize beyond the specifics of our experience? How do we think about things that we do not experience directly? How do we adapt our thoughts to specific contexts and tasks? It argues that a successful theory of grounding must embrace multimodal representations, hierarchical architecture, and linguistic scaffolding. Abstract concepts are the product of an elastic mind. (shrink)

After more than 15 years of study, the 1/f noise or complex-systems approach to cognitive science has delivered promises of progress, colorful verbiage, and statistical analyses of phenomena whose relevance for cognition remains unclear. What the complex-systems approach has arguably failed to deliver are concrete insights about how people perceive, think, decide, and act. Without formal models that implement the proposed abstract concepts, the complex-systems approach to cognitive science runs the danger of becoming a philosophical exercise in futility. (...) The complex-systems approach can be informative and innovative, but only if it is implemented as a formal model that allows concrete prediction, falsification, and comparison against more traditional approaches. (shrink)

Traditionally, the investigation of truth has been anchored in a priori reasoning. Cognitive science deviates from this tradition by adding empirical data on how people understand and use concepts. Building on psychophysics and machine learning methods, we introduce conceptual scaling, an approach to map people's understanding of abstract concepts. This approach, allows computing participant-specific conceptual maps from obtained ordinal comparison data, thereby quantifying perceived similarities among abstract concepts. Using this approach, we investigated individual's alignment with (...) philosophical theories on truth and the predictive capacity of conceptual maps. The obtained results indicated that, while people's understanding of truth is multifaceted and encapsulates notions of coherence and authenticity, alignment is best for the correspondence theory of truth. Furthermore, conceptual maps allowed predicting individual outcomes with an accuracy of roughly 70%. This research demonstrates that conceptual scaling offers accurate descriptions of individual's understanding of abstract concepts, behavioral predictions, and quantification of alignment with theoretical perspectives. (shrink)

Our ability to deal with abstract concepts is one of the most intriguing faculties of human cognition. Still, we know little about how such concepts are formed, processed, and represented in mind. Current views are presented in their most recent and advanced form in this special issue, and directly compared and discussed in a lively debate, reported at the end of each chapter. The main results are reported in the editors’ introduction.

Starting from the Humboldtian characterization of Chinese writing as a "script of thoughts," this article makes an attempt to show that notwithstanding the important role played by phonetic elements, the Chinese script also relies on visual-graphical means in its constitution of meaning. In point of structure, Chinese characters are made up predominantly of components that are sensible or even tangible in nature. Out of these sensible components, not only physical objects or empirical states of affairs can be expressed, but also (...) the most subtle and abstract concepts, such as 萬, 它, 言, 災, 仁, 義, 思, 念, 法, 律, 善, 考, 莫, 瞏, and 幾, attesting to what Humboldt says about the Chinese script as having "embraced philosophical work within itself." Humboldt's idea of "analogy of script" throws light on the mechanism behind this structure to stimulate new reflections on the traditional theory of the "Six Ways" (六書) of character formation to provide a productive platform for interpretation. (shrink)

A great deal of research has focused on the question of whether or not concepts are embodied as a rule. Supporters of embodiment have pointed to studies that implicate affective and sensorimotor systems in cognitive tasks, while critics of embodiment have offered nonembodied explanations of these results and pointed to studies that implicate amodal systems. Abstract concepts have tended to be viewed as an important test case in this polemical debate. This essay argues that we need to (...) move beyond a pretheoretical notion of abstraction. Against the background of current research and theory, abstract concepts do not pose a single, unified problem for embodied cognition but, instead, three distinct problems: the problem of generalization, the problem of flexibility, and the problem of disembodiment. Identifying these problems provides a conceptual framework for critically evaluating, and perhaps improving upon, recent theoretical proposals. (shrink)

The meanings of abstract concepts depend on context. Perceptual symbol systems (PSS) provide a powerful framework for representing such context. Whereas a few expected difficulties for simulations are consistent with empirical findings, the theory does not clearly predict simulations of specific abstract concepts in a testable way and does not appear to distinguish abstract noun concepts (like truth) from their stem concepts (such as true).

Can children’s handedness influence how they represent abstract concepts like kindness and intelligence? Here we show that from an early age, right-handers associate rightward space more strongly with positive ideas and leftward space with negative ideas, but the opposite is true for left-handers. In one experiment, children indicated where on a diagram a preferred toy and a dispreferred toy should go. Right-handers tended to assign the preferred toy to a box on the right and the dispreferred toy to (...) a box on the left. Left-handers showed the opposite pattern. In a second experiment, children judged which of two cartoon animals looked smarter (or dumber) or nicer (or meaner). Right-handers attributed more positive qualities to animals on the right, but left-handers to animals on the left. These contrasting associations between space and valence cannot be explained by exposure to language or cultural conventions, which consistently link right with good. Rather, right- and left-handers implicitly associated positive valence more strongly with the side of space on which they can act more fluently with their dominant hands. Results support the body-specificity hypothesis (Casasanto, 2009), showing that children with different kinds of bodies think differently in corresponding ways. (shrink)

In psycholinguistics, concepts are considered abstract if they do not apply to physical objects that we can touch, see, feel, hear, smell or taste. Psychologists usually distinguish concrete from abstract concepts by means of so-called _concreteness ratings_. In concreteness rating studies, laypeople are asked to rate the concreteness of words based on the above criterion. The wide use of concreteness ratings motivates an assessment of them. I point out two problems: First, most current concreteness ratings test (...) the intuited concreteness of word forms as opposed to concepts. This ignores the ubiquitous phenomenon of lexical ambiguity. Second, the criterion of abstract concepts that the instruction texts of rating studies rely on does not capture the notion that psychologists working on abstract concepts are normally interested in, i.e., concepts that could reasonably be sensorimotor representations. For many concepts that pick out physical objects, this is not reasonable. In this paper, I propose a characterization of concrete and abstract concepts that avoids these two problems and that may be useful for future studies in psychology. (shrink)

The problem of how concepts can refer to or be about the non-mental world is particularly puzzling for abstract concepts. There is growing evidence that many characteristics beyond the perceptual are involved in grounding different kinds of abstract concept. A resource that has been suggested, but little explored, is introspection. This paper develops that suggestion by focusing specifically on metacognition—on the thoughts and feelings that thinkers have about a concept. One example of metacognition about concepts (...) is the judgement that we should defer to others in how a given concept is used. Another example is our internal assessment of which concepts are dependable and useful, and which less so. Metacognition of this kind may be especially important for grounding abstract concepts. -/- This article is part of the theme issue ‘Varieties of abstract concepts: development, use and representation in the brain’. (shrink)

Dedekind's mathematical work is integral to the transformation of mathematics in the nineteenth century and crucial for the emergence of structuralist mathematics in the twentieth century. We investigate the essential components of what Emmy Noether called, his ‘axiomatic standpoint’: abstract concepts, models, and mappings.

Our concerns fall into three areas: (1) Barsalou fails to make clear what simulators are (vs. what they do); (2) activation of perceptual areas of the brain during thought does not distinguish between the activation's being constitutive of concepts or a mere causal consequence (Barsalou needs the former); and (3) Barsalou's attempt to explain how modal symbols handle abstraction fails.

The concepts of “good” and “bad” are associated with right and left space. Individuals tend to associate good things with the side of their dominant hand, where they experience greater motor fluency, and bad things with their nondominant side. This mapping has been shown to be flexible: Changing the relative fluency of the hands, or even observing a change in someone else's motor fluency, results in a reversal of the conceptual mapping, such that good things become associated with the (...) side of the nondominant hand. Yet, based on prior studies, it is unclear whether space–valence associations were determined by the experience of fluent versus disfluent actions, or by the mere expectation of fluency. Here, we tested the role of expected fluency by removing motor execution and perceptual feedback altogether. Participants were asked to imagine themselves performing a psychomotor task with one of their hands impaired, after which their implicit space–valence mapping was measured. After imagining that their right hand was impaired, right-handed participants showed the “good is left” association typical of left-handers. Motor imagery can change people's implicit associations between space and emotional valence. Although asymmetric motor experience may be necessary to establish body-specific associations between space and valence initially, neither motoric nor perceptual experience is needed to change these associations subsequently. The mere expectation of fluent versus disfluenct actions can drive fluency-based effects on people's implicit spatialization of “good” and “bad.” These results suggest a reconsideration of the mechanisms and boundary conditions of fluency effects. (shrink)

A growing body of evidence suggests that cognition is embodied and grounded. Abstract concepts, though, remain a significant theoretical chal- lenge. A number of researchers have proposed that language makes an important contribution to our capacity to acquire and employ concepts, particularly abstract ones. In this essay, I critically examine this suggestion and ultimately defend a version of it. I argue that a successful account of how language augments cognition should emphasize its symbolic properties and incorporate (...) a view of embodiment that recognizes the flexible, multi- modal and task-related nature of action, emotion and perception systems. On this view, language is an ontogenetically disruptive cognitive technology that expands our conceptual reach. (shrink)

Political activity on the basis of a shared identity has been with us for several decades. Race, sexual orientation, gender, and myriad other categories form the center-of-gravity around which social groups demand recognition of the validity and value of their self-understandings. How should social and political institutions respond to these demands? In contemporary social and political philosophy much of the weight of answering this question has fallen on developing a theory of recognition. That theory would then perform several functions: It (...) could provide an explanation as to the emergence and subsequent contestation of shared social norms; it could offer an account of the motivation that drives people to... (shrink)

Despite the recent upsurge in research on abstract concepts, there remain puzzles at the foundation of their empirical study. These are most evident when we consider what is required to assess a person’s abstract conceptual abilities without using language as a prompt or requiring it as a response—as in classic non-verbal categorization tasks, which are standardly considered tests of conceptual understanding. After distinguishing two divergent strands in the most common conception of what it is for a concept (...) to be abstract, we argue that neither reliably captures the kind of abstraction required to successfully categorize in non-verbal tasks. We then present a new conception of concept abstractness—termed Trial Concreteness—that is keyed to individual categorization trials. It has advantages in capturing the context-relativity of the degree of abstraction required for the application of a concept and fittingly correlates with participant success in recent experiments. (shrink)

The present study examines whether deictic time and valence are mentally associated, with a link between future and positive valence and a link between past and negative valence. We employed a novel paradigm, the two-choice-sentence-completion paradigm, to address this issue. Participants were presented with an initial sentence fragment that referred to an event that was either located in time or of different valence. Participants chose between two completion phrases. When the given dimension in the initial fragment was time, the two (...) completion phrase alternatives differed in valence. However, when the given dimension in the initial fragment was valence, the two completion phrase alternatives differed in time. As expected, participants chose completion phrases consistent with the proposed association between time and valence. Additional analyses involving individual differences concerning optimism/pessimism revealed that this association is particularly pronounced for people with an optimistic attitude. (shrink)

The ‘standard picture of meaning’ suggests that natural languages are composed of two different kinds of words: concrete words whose meaning rely on observable properties of external objects and abstract words which are essentially linguistic constructs. In this study, we challenge this picture and support a new view of the nature and composition of abstract concepts suggesting that they also rely to a greater or lesser degree on body-related information. Specifically, we support a version of this new (...) view which we call “x-ception theory” maintaining that abstract concepts are based on internal information of a proprioceptive, interoceptive and affective kind. Secondly, we address a methodological issue concerning the so-called concreteness and imageability measures, two tools that are widely used in (mainly psycholinguistic) empirical research to assess the degree of concreteness of specific words. On the basis of this analysis we argue that—even though the classical concreteness and imageability measures were developed in relation to the standard picture of meaning—they can also be used in the new framework of x-ception theory. In particular, we suggest that the discrepancy between these two measures provides a clue as to whether a word relies on internal information. By contrast, we argue that a new measure for concreteness recently proposed in order to address some problems with the old measure is completely inappropriate for this aim. (shrink)

The role played by language in our cognitive lives is a topic at the centre of contemporary debates in cognitive (neuro)science. In this paper we illustrate and compare two theories that offer embodied explanations of this role: the WAT (words as social tools) and the LENS (language is an embodied neuroenhancement and scaffold) theories. WAT and LENS differ from other current proposals, because they connect the impact of the neurologically realized language system on our cognition to the ways in which (...) language shapes our interaction with the physical and social environment. Examining these theories together, their tenets and supporting evidence, sharpens our understanding of each, but also contributes to a better understanding of the contribution that language might make to the acquisition, representation and use of abstract concepts. Here we focus on how language provides a source of inner grounding, especially metacognition and inner speech, and supports the flexibility of our thought. Overall, the paper outlines a promising research program focused on the importance of language to abstract concepts within the context of a flexible, multimodal, and multilevel conception of embodied cognition. (shrink)

Humans can understand thousands of abstract words, even when they do not have clearly perceivable referents. Recent views highlight an important role of social experience in grounding of abstract concepts and sub-kinds of abstract concepts, but empirical work in this area is still in its early stages. In the present study, a picture-word semantic priming paradigm was employed to investigate the contribution effect of social experience that is provided by real-life pictures to social abstract (...) concepts and emotional abstract concepts. Using a lexical decision task, we examined responses to picture-SA word pairs and picture-EA word pairs in social/emotional semantically related and unrelated conditions. All pairs shared either positive or negative valence. The results showed quicker responses to positive SA and EA words that were preceded by related vs. unrelated prime pictures. Specifically, positive SA words were facilitated by the corresponding social scene pictures, whereas positive EA words were facilitated by pictures depict the corresponding facial expressions and gestures. However, such facilitatory effect was not observed in negative picture-SA/EA word conditions. This pattern of results suggests that a facilitatory effect of social experience on abstract concepts varies with different sub-kinds of abstract concepts, that seems to be limited to positive SA concepts. Overall, our findings confirm the crucial role of social experience for abstract concepts and further suggest that not all abstract concepts can benefit from social experience, at least in the semantic priming. (shrink)

The term “agency” is quite slippery and is used differently depending on the epistemological roots and goals of scholars who employ it. Distressingly, the sociological literature on the concept rarely addresses relevant social psychological research. We take a social behaviorist approach to agency by suggesting that individual temporal orientations are underutilized in conceptualizing this core sociological concept. Different temporal foci—the actor's engaged response to situational circumstances—implicate different forms of agency. This article offers a theoretical model involving four analytical types of (...) agency (“existential,”“identity,”“pragmatic,” and “life course”) that are often conflated across treatments of the topic. Each mode of agency overlaps with established social psychological literatures, most notably about the self, enabling scholars to anchor overly abstract treatments of agency within established research literatures. (shrink)

The distinction between abstract and concrete concepts is fundamental to cognitive linguistics and cognitive science. This distinction is commonly operationalized through concreteness ratings based on the aggregated judgments of many people. What is often overlooked in experimental studies using this operationalization is that ratings are attributed to words, not to concepts directly. In this paper we explore the relationship between the linguistic properties of English words and conceptual abstractness/concreteness. Based on hypotheses stated in the existing linguistic literature (...) we select a set of variables and verify whether they are statistically associated with concreteness ratings. We show that English nouns are rated as more concrete compared to other parts of speech, but mass nouns are rated as less concrete than count nouns. Furthermore, a more complex morphological structure is associated with abstractness, and as for etymology, French- and Latin-derived words are more abstract than words of other origin. This shows that linguistic properties of words are indeed associated with the degree of concreteness that we attribute to the underlying concepts, and we discuss the implications that these findings have for linguistic theory and for empirical investigations in the cognitive sciences. (shrink)

Producing content-related gestures has been found to impact students’ learning, whether such gestures are spontaneously generated by the learner in the course of problem-solving, or participants are instructed to pose based on experimenter instructions during problem-solving and word learning. Few studies, however, have investigated the effect of (a) performing instructed gestures while learning concepts or (b) producing gestures without there being an implied connection between the gestures and the concepts being learned. The two studies reported here investigate the (...) impact of instructed hand movements on students’ subsequent understanding of a concept. Students were asked to watch an instructional video—focused on the concept of statistical model—three times. Two experimental groups were given a secondary task to perform while watching the video, which involved moving their hands to mimic the placement and orientation of red rectangular bars overlaid on the video. Students were told that the focus of the study was multitasking, and that the instructed hand movements were unrelated to the material being learned. In the content-match group the placement of the hands reinforced the concept being explained, and in the content-mismatch group it did not. A control group was not asked to perform a secondary task. In both studies, findings indicate that students in the content-match group performed better on the posttest, and showed less variation in performance, than did students in the content-mismatch group, with control students falling in between. Instructed hand movement—even when presented as an unrelated, secondary task—can affect students’ learning of a complex concept. (shrink)

concepts are defined as concepts that cannot be experienced directly through the sensorimotor modalities. Explaining our understanding of such concepts poses a challenge to neurocognitive models of knowledge. One account of how these concepts come to be represented is that sensorimotor representations of grounded experiences are reactivated in a way that is constitutive of the abstract concept. In the present experiment, we investigated how sensorimotor information might constitute GOD-related concepts, and whether a person’s self-reported (...) religiosity modulated this grounding. To do so, we manipulated both the state of the body and the state of stimuli in two tasks that required conceptual categorization of abstract words. Linear Mixed Effects model fitting procedures were used to determine which manipulated factors best predicted response latency and accuracy in both tasks. We successfully replicated previous research demonstrating faster categorization of GOD-related words when they were presented at the top of the screen. Importantly, results demonstrated that the kneeling posture manipulation enhanced this effect, as did religiosity, as participants who scored higher in religiosity showed a greater effect of the posture manipulation on the speed with which word categorization occurred when those words were presented in the higher visuospatial presentation condition. Overall, we interpreted our findings to suggest that directly manipulating sensorimotor information can facilitate the categorization of abstract concepts, supporting the notion that this information in part constitutes the representation of abstract concepts. (shrink)

Tested the hypothesis that the younger the child the more perceptual and concrete are the concepts used. Differences were examined between children and adults (a) in using both concrete and abstract concepts as opposed to only one kind of concept, and (b) in using either concrete or abstract concepts for the 1st of 2 different kinds (concrete or abstract) of concepts. Equivalence tasks of a forced-choice type were employed to test the use of (...) concrete and abstract concepts by 45 1st graders and 45 undergraduates. Only in a minority of cases were significant differences obtained between the groups. (French summary). (shrink)

Philosophy for/with children continues to face the suspicion that children—especially of relatively young ages—cannot philosophize because they are unable to think in abstract terms. In what follows we will try to establish that thinking abstractly should not be confused with thinking in general terms: All the concepts and ideas that pertain to philosophy and are abstract in nature, namely, beauty, friendship, justice, fairness etc. are, first of all, contestable and ambivalent; second, they endure throughout history, constantly resurfacing (...) occupying a locus of interest—common to both, adults and children—and, finally, they seem to be already operative, embodied within children’s lives. Thus, the question that we need to pose refers to the meaning of the term ‘abstract’. We will try to establish that to think about abstract concepts it suffices to be able to acknowledge the ambivalent character of the aforementioned ideas: and being ambivalent means that there is no consensus regarding their meaning; thus, to think about abstract concepts might mean to be able to acknowledge and think from different standpoints; something akin to Kant’s sensus communis. (shrink)

A central problem of theories of grounded cognition concerns the grounding of abstract concepts in sensorimotor representations. The paper aims at providing a new basis for a theory of cogni-tive abstraction mechanisms. The focus will be on the notions of causal indexicals and affordances, understood as action related concepts that show different degrees of abstraction. Abstraction mechanisms will be characterized that allow the transformation of such obviously "grounded" concepts into more abstract ones. In this way, (...) the relation between sensorimotor processes and abstract concepts will be described in detail, and general principles of abstraction will be determined. (shrink)

A central problem of theories of grounded cognition concerns the grounding of abstract concepts in sensorimotor representations. The paper aims at providing a new basis for a theory of cogni-tive abstraction mechanisms. The focus will be on the notions of causal indexicals and affordances, understood as action related concepts that show different degrees of abstraction. Abstraction mechanisms will be characterized that allow the transformation of such obviously "grounded" concepts into more abstract ones. In this way, (...) the relation between sensorimotor processes and abstract concepts will be described in detail, and general principles of abstraction will be determined. (shrink)

In the article the authors put and discuss the problem of rationality in the culture of Old Russia in the context of contemporary discussions on the prob- lems of rationality. Enlighteners of Peter's time adhered to the view of the total absence of intellectual life in Old Russia. Authors distinguish various areas of intellectual activity: the study of nature, mathematical and chronological works, the use of logical tools in apologetics and polemics, medical practices, political strategies, translation activity, understanding of the (...) inner nature of man. The evolution of Old Russian language passed along the line of transformations of concrete-figurative thinking into conceptual, abstract thinking. In the processes of mastering philosophical concepts, the formation of an analytical system of language on a logico-verbal basis takes place. In the formation of a verbal-ordered language, the key role was played by symbols-concrete things, verbal and abstract. Fundamental philosophical concepts stem from symbols. Specific-proprietary and conceptual languages have different expressive and cognitive capabilities. Allegory, analogy, thought experiment, isolation of an abstract trait, visualization are typical techniques of figurative thinking. Modern Russian language absorbed the features of both figurative and logical construction. The digital era opens up new possibilities for visual methods of encoding information. (shrink)

Thinking about what the senses cannot grasp is one of the hallmarks of human cognition. We argue that “intangible abstracta” are represented differently from other products of abstraction, that goal-derived categorization supports their learning, and that they are grounded also in internalized linguistic and social interaction. We conclude by suggesting different ways in which abstractness contributes to cement group cohesion.