Abstract
ion, one of the hallmarks of human cognition, continues to be the topic of a strong debate. The primary disagreement concerns whether or not abstract concepts can be accounted for within the scope of embodied cognition. In this paper, we introduce the embodied approach to conceptual knowledge and distinguish between embodiment and grounding, where grounding is the general term for how concepts initially acquire their meaning. Referring to numerous pieces of empirical evidence, we emphasise that, ultimately, all concepts are acquired via interaction with the world via two main pathways: embodiment and social interaction. The first pathway is direct and primarily involves action/perception, interoception and emotions. The second pathway is indirect, being mediated by language in particular. Evidence from neuroscience, psychology and cognitive linguistics shows these pathways have different properties, roles in cognition and temporal profiles. Human development also places revealing constraints on how children develop the ability to reason more abstractly as they grow up. We recognize language as a crucial cognitive faculty with several roles enabling the acquisition of abstract concepts indirectly. Three detailed case studies on body-specificity hypothesis, abstract verbs and mathematics are used to argue that a compelling case has accumulated in favour of the ultimate grounding of abstract concepts in an agent’s interaction with its world, primarily relying on the direct pathway. We consolidate the debate through multidisciplinary evidence for the idea that abstractness is a graded, rather than a binary property of concepts.
Highlights
INTRODUCTIONWe need concepts to organise our knowledge about the world. One aspect of these concepts
The accepted view is that “democracy” does not just appear to be a more abstract concept than “pain”; instead, more abstract concepts are said to rely on cognitive processes that are in some important way different from those of more concrete concepts
There seems a general agreement about the fundamental importance of language in human cognition within embodied approaches, where a number of language roles have been identified: (1) Language allows linguistically-mediated communication (Evans, 2016), (2) it enables inner speech that helps us in monitoring our knowledge and in searching for meaning (Clark, 1998), (3) language is involved in controlling mental representations (Lupyan & Bergen, 2016), (4) it provides an efficient shortcut in certain tasks involving conceptual processing (Connell, 2019; Barsalou et al, 2008) and (5) it serves as a cognitive tool that enhances cognition as such in various ways and enables the acquisition and processing of abstract concepts (Mirolli & Parisi, 2011; Borghi, 2020), as discussed later
Summary
We need concepts to organise our knowledge about the world. One aspect of these concepts. The second pathway builds on this to take into account how social aspects and language, in particular, add an additional route of grounding abstract concepts This coincides with our idea of a continuum of abstractness that reflects different ways that concepts are grounded, the extent to which they depend on either of the two pathways outlined above. We briefly summarise the strong empirical support for embodiment of knowledge and outline the various roles language is assumed to play in cognition This will provide grounds for developing our ideas, on the basis of three detailed, purposefully chosen case studies of increasing abstractness. The case studies provide specific examples of different ways that concepts are grounded and provide further evidence for an embodied basis of abstraction.
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