Three symbol ungrounding problems: Abstract concepts and the future of embodied cognition

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

Psycho-physiologic emergentism; four minds in a body

The mind-body problem represents one of the most debated topics in the neurosciences. From a psychological standpoint, abstract/non-material data are an intrinsic part of the mind, intervening to a large extent in reasoning and decision making processes. Imaging studies also show a strong correlation between higher cognitive functions (such as working memory) and specific cerebral brain regions (a fronto-parietal network of interacting left and right brain areas). In contrast, the physical/material brain would be unable to interact with abstract-immaterial data, such that the psychological processing of abstract data (processes such as thinking, reasoning, and judgment) is attributed to the mind, with the mind representing a distinct entity interposed between the brain and abstract-immaterial data. Recent data suggest that the mind-body problem may simply be an artifact of human experience/ understanding, as the brain actually represents actually an intrinsic part of the mind. Even if the physical brain is not able to interact with abstract mental data, the brain still could process abstract data through a dynamic association between the abstract data and cerebral stimuli/ impulses. This form of processing without interaction defines the mind as a complex neurobiological structure, with the unconscious part of the mind processing abstract-immaterial data in a conscious/ mental format. In this overview, important concepts of psycho-physiologic emergentism, including internal mental reality, internal mental existence, internal mental interaction, and structural and informational dichotomies of the brain, are iterated. Such concepts/properties represent a neuro-informational support system capable of generating four distinct minds within the single brain. Future studies should further develop the dynamic and immaterial-material nature of the mind, as a possible premise for a scientific definition and understanding of mental events like affectivity, emotions, soul, etc

Pacifier overuse and conceptual relations of abstract and emotional concepts

This study explores the impact of the extensive use of an oral device since infancy (pacifier) on the acquisition of concrete, abstract, and emotional concepts. While recent evidence showed a negative relation between pacifier use and children’s emotional competence (Niedenthal et al., 2012), the possible interaction between use of pacifier and processing of emotional and abstract language has not been investigated. According to recent theories, while all concepts are grounded in sensorimotor experience, abstract concepts activate linguistic and social information more than concrete ones. Specifically, the Words As Social Tools (WAT) proposal predicts that the simulation of their meaning leads to an activation of the mouth (Borghi and Binkofski, 2014; Borghi and Zarcone, 2016). Since the pacifier affects facial mimicry forcing mouth muscles into a static position, we hypothesize its possible interference on acquisition/consolidation of abstract emotional and abstract not-emotional concepts, which aremainly conveyed during social and linguistic interactions, than of concrete concepts. Fifty-nine first grade children, with a history of different frequency of pacifier use, provided oral definitions of the meaning of abstract not-emotional, abstract emotional, and concrete words. Main effect of concept type emerged, with higher accuracy in defining concrete and abstract emotional concepts with respect to abstract not-emotional concepts, independently from pacifier use. Accuracy in definitions was not influenced by the use of pacifier, butcorrespondence and hierarchical clustering analyses suggest that the use of pacifier differently modulates the conceptual relations elicited by abstract emotional and abstract not-emotional. While the majority of the children produced a similar pattern of conceptual relations, analyses on the few (6) children who overused the pacifier (for more than 3 years) showed that they tend to distinguish less clearly between concrete and abstract emotional concepts and between concrete and abstract not-emotional concepts than children who did not use it (5) or used it for short (17). As to the conceptual relations they produced, children who overused the pacifier tended to refer less to their experience and to social and emotional situations, usemore exemplifications and functional relations, and less free associations

Is there a semantic system for abstract words?

Two views on the semantics of concrete words are that their core mental representations are feature-based or are reconstructions of sensory experience. We argue that neither of these approaches is capable of representing the semantics of abstract words, which involve the representation of possibly hypothetical physical and mental states, the binding of entities within a structure, and the possible use of embedding (or recursion) in such structures. Brain based evidence in the form of dissociations between deficits related to concrete and abstract semantics corroborates the hypothesis. Neuroimaging evidence suggests that left lateral inferior frontal cortex supports those processes responsible for the representation of abstract words

The mind-body problem; three equations and one solution represented by immaterial-material data

Human life occurs within a complex bio-psycho-social milieu, a heterogeneous system that is integrated by multiple bidirectional interrelations existing between the abstract-intangible ideas and physical-chemical support of environment. The mind is thus placed between the abstract ideas/ concepts and neurobiological brain that is further connected to environment. In other words, the mind acts as an interface between the immaterial (abstract/ intangible) data and material (biological) support. The science is unable to conceives and explains an interaction between the immaterial and material domains (to understand nature of the mind), this question generating in literature the mind-body problem. We have published in the past a succession of articles related to the mind-body problem, in order to demonstrate the fact that this question is actually a false issue. The phenomenon of immaterial-material interaction is impossible to be explained because it never occurs, which means that there is no need to explain the immaterial-material interaction. Our mind implies only a temporal association between the immaterial data and material support, this dynamic interrelation being presented and argued here as a solution to the mind-body problem. The limited psycho-biologic approach of the mind-body problem is expanded here to a more comprehensive and feasible bio-psycho-social perspective, generating thus three distinct (bio- psychological, bio-social, and psycho-social) equations. These three equations can be solved through a solution represented by a dynamic cerebral system (two distinct and interconnected subunits of the brain) which presumably could have the capability of receiving and processing abstract data through association (with no interaction) between immaterial and material data

On staying grounded and avoiding Quixotic dead ends

The 15 articles in this special issue on The Representation of Concepts illustrate the rich variety of theoretical positions and supporting research that characterize the area. Although much agreement exists among contributors, much disagreement exists as well, especially about the roles of grounding and abstraction in conceptual processing. I first review theoretical approaches raised in these articles that I believe are Quixotic dead ends, namely, approaches that are principled and inspired but likely to fail. In the process, I review various theories of amodal symbols, their distortions of grounded theories, and fallacies in the evidence used to support them. Incorporating further contributions across articles, I then sketch a theoretical approach that I believe is likely to be successful, which includes grounding, abstraction, flexibility, explaining classic conceptual phenomena, and making contact with real-world situations. This account further proposes that (1) a key element of grounding is neural reuse, (2) abstraction takes the forms of multimodal compression, distilled abstraction, and distributed linguistic representation (but not amodal symbols), and (3) flexible context-dependent representations are a hallmark of conceptual processing

Language as a disruptive technology: Abstract concepts, embodiment and the flexible mind

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

Grounding abstractness: Abstract concepts and the activation of the mouth

One key issue for theories of cognition is how abstract concepts, such as freedom, are represented. According to the WAT (Words As social Tools) proposal, abstract concepts activatebothsensorimotorandlinguistic/socialinformation,andtheiracquisitionmodality involves the linguistic experience more than the acquisition of concrete concepts. We report an experiment in which participants were presented with abstract and concrete definitions followed by concrete and abstract target-words. When the definition and the word matched, participants were required to press a key, either with the hand or with the mouth. Response times and accuracy were recorded. As predicted, we found that abstract definitions and abstract words yielded slower responses and more errors compared to concrete definitions and concrete words. More crucially, there was an interaction between the target-words and the effector used to respond (hand, mouth). While responses with the mouth were overall slower, the advantage of the hand over the mouth responses was more marked with concrete than with abstract concepts. The results are in keeping with grounded and embodied theories of cognition and support the WAT proposal, according to which abstract concepts evoke linguistic-social information, hence activate the mouth. The mechanisms underlying the mouth activation with abstract concepts (re-enactment of acquisition experience, or re-explanation of the word meaning, possibly through inner talk) are discussed. To our knowledge this is the first behavioral study demonstrating with real words that the advantage of the hand over the mouth is more marked with concrete than with abstract concepts, likely because of the activation of linguistic information with abstract concepts

Solving the Mind-Body Problem through Two Distinct Concepts: Internal-Mental Existence and Internal Mental Reality

In a previous published paper, we initiated in this journal discussion about new perspectives regarding the organization and functioning of the mind, as a premise for addressing the mind-body problem. In this article, we continue focussing discussion on two distinct but interrelated concepts, internal-mental existence/ entity and internal-mental reality. These two psycho-physiological subunits of the mind interact each other in the form of an internal-mental interaction, having no sense if one is isolated/ studied separately from the other. In other words, the mind (as a dynamic psycho-physiological construction) has no sense in the absence of this internal mental interaction that which takes places between internal-mental existence and internal-mental reality. In the case of the `mind-body problem`, the tendency until now was to assign extremely complex functions of the mind (abstract ideas, consciousness, colors) to simplistic physiological/ neuronal structures. We hope that this paper opens a new perspective, in respect to complex/ interrelated neuronal structures that construct the mind through their interaction, a process that is both physiologically (transmission of neural impulses) and psychologically (transmission of information), and that requires time (an immaterial component) to occurs