What we mean when we say semantic: A Consensus statement on the nomenclature of semantic memory

Tulving (1972) characterized semantic memory as a vast repository of meaning that provides a substrate for language and many other cognitive processes. Tulving’s perspective resulted in a paradigm shift in the study of human conceptual knowledge. The study of semantic memory since evolved as a multidisciplinary endeavor advanced by fields with their own entrenched theoretical perspectives and idiosyncratic lexicons (e.g., concept has different connotations in philosophy vs. cognitive psychology). Yet, no uniform nomenclature exists for translating results and aligning theories across disparate fields. Core semantic constructs remain underspecified to an extent that falsifiability and incremental theory-building remain elusive. One consequence of these limitations is that similar arguments about semantic phenomena are continually recycled with no resolution in sight. The aim of this multidisciplinary workgroup (N=53) was to establish consensus definitions for some of the major recurring constructs in semantic research (e.g., concept, amodal, abstract). These efforts yielded a glossary consisting of succinct definitions, agreement and subjective confidence ratings, relevant theoretical background, and principled dissenting views. These core definitions will potentially yield benchmarks for aligning perspectives in semantic research

What we mean when we say semantic: Toward a multidisciplinary semantic glossary

Tulving characterized semantic memory as a vast repository of meaning that underlies language and many other cognitive processes. This perspective on lexical and conceptual knowledge galvanized a new era of research undertaken by numerous fields, each with their own idiosyncratic methods and terminology. For example, “concept” has different meanings in philosophy, linguistics, and psychology. As such, many fundamental constructs used to delineate semantic theories remain underspecified and/or opaque. Weak construct specificity is among the leading causes of the replication crisis now facing psychology and related fields. Term ambiguity hinders cross-disciplinary communication, falsifiability, and incremental theory-building. Numerous cognitive subdisciplines (e.g., vision, affective neuroscience) have recently addressed these limitations via the development of consensus-based guidelines and definitions. The project to follow represents our effort to produce a multidisciplinary semantic glossary consisting of succinct definitions, background, principled dissenting views, ratings of agreement, and subjective confidence for 17 target constructs (e.g., abstractness, abstraction, concreteness, concept, embodied cognition, event semantics, lexical-semantic, modality, representation, semantic control, semantic feature, simulation, semantic distance, semantic dimension). We discuss potential benefits and pitfalls (e.g., implicit bias, prescriptiveness) of these efforts to specify a common nomenclature that other researchers might index in specifying their own theoretical perspectives (e.g., They said X, but I mean Y).<br/