Abstract and concrete sentences, embodiment, and languages

Mind & Language, 2019

Cognition, it is often heard nowadays, is embodied. My concern is with embodied accounts of language comprehension. First, the basic idea will be outlined and some of the evidence that has been put forward in their favor will be examined. Second, their empiricist heritage and their conception of abstract ideas will be discussed. Third, an objection will be raised according to which embodied accounts underestimate the cognitive functions language fulfills. The remainder of the paper will be devoted to arguing for the cognitive indispensability of non-embodied, abstract representations by highlighting some of the cognitive benefits they bestow upon us.

2009

This paper proposes an extension of existing embodied views of cognition in order to account for the linguistic experience and its complexity. We claim that embodied views should be extended in order to consider not only language grounding but the social and normative aspects of language as well. Motor resonance mechanisms based on mirror neurons are a necessary but not sufficient component of this. We will argue that words cannot be conceived of as mere signals of something but also as tools that allows us to operate in the world. On this basis, we formulate a theoretical proposal that addresses one of the critical problems embodied views face: the problem of the so called "abstract concepts". Our proposal extends embodied views assuming two simultaneous cognitive sources for word meanings; an individual one, the embodied individual experience, and a socially embodied one. While for words having a concrete referent labels are "attached" to concepts formed on the...

RIFL - Rivista Italiana Filosofia del Linguaggio, 2013

Grounded and embodied theories of cognition face the problem of a consistent account of abstract concepts: if cognition is grounded in the brain modal systems and consists in modal simulations, where are abstract concepts from? After discussing some fully modal embodied theories of abstract concepts and two pluralistic approaches involving modal and amodal representational systems, we will present a way to account for abstractness without involving amodal formats: the Words as Tools theory. Combining embodied and extended approaches, the WAT theory holds that embodied experience is not enclosed inside the boundaries of our body; words are modal entities (they are perceivable and activate multimodal situations related to their meaning) and they also are social instruments to perform actions of selection and grouping; abstract words are grouping tools whose related sensorimotor experiences are so variable and dissimilar among them that linguistic information provides us with a necessary support to bind them together in the same category. Social and linguistic (embodied) experience is crucial for building the meaning of words, particularly of abstract ones.

Frontiers in Psychology

Proceedings of the 31st annual conference of the Cognitive Science Society, 2009

This paper proposes an extension of existing embodied views of cognition in order to account for the linguistic experience and its complexity. We claim that embodied views should be extended in order to consider not only language grounding but the social and normative aspects of language as well. Motor resonance mechanisms based on mirror neurons are a necessary but not sufficient component of this. We will argue that words cannot be conceived of as mere signals of something but also as tools that allows us to ...

laral.istc.cnr.it

2013

Del Campo (2011), we presented an embodied theory of semantic representation, which crucially included abstract concepts as internally embodied via affective states. Paivio (2013) took issue with our treatment of dual coding theory, our reliance on data from lexical decision, and our theoretical proposal. Here, we address these different issues and clarify how our findings offer a way to move forward in the investigation of how abstract concepts are represented.

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.

2013

Studies in Applied Philosophy, Epistemology and Rational Ethics, 2015

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 "xceptive theory" maintaining that abstract concepts rely 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 thateven though the classical concreteness and imageability measures were developed in relation to the standard picture of meaningthey can also be used in the new framework of xceptive 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.