Moving beyond the distinction between concrete and abstract concepts

Abstract

From the perspective of the situated conceptualization framework, the primary purpose of concepts is for categorizing and integrating elements of situations to support goal-directed action (including communication and social interaction). To the extent that important situational elements are categorized and integrated properly, effective goal-directed action follows. Over time, frequent patterns of co-occurring concepts within situations become established in memory as situated conceptualizations, conditioning the conceptual system and producing habitual patterns of conceptual processing. As a consequence, individual concepts are most basically represented within patterns of concepts that become entrained with specific kinds of physical situations. In this framework, the concrete versus abstract distinction between concepts is no longer useful, with two other distinctions becoming important instead: (i) external versus internal situational elements, (ii) situational elements versus situational integrations. Whereas concepts for situational elements originate in distributed neural networks that provide continual feeds about components of situations, concepts for situational integrations originate in association areas that establish temporal co-occurrence relations between situational elements, both external and internal. We propose that studying concepts in the context of situated action is necessary for establishing complete accounts of them, and that continuing to study concepts in isolation is likely to provide relatively incomplete and distorted accounts.This article is part of the theme issue 'Varieties of abstract concepts: development, use and representation in the brain'.

Varieties of abstract concepts: development, use and representation in the brain

“…In this view, a concept derives its meaning in interaction with other concepts representing other situational elements together with their integration. As a consequence, Barsalou et al [28] claim that current approaches that study concepts in isolation have provided a distorted account. According to the authors, a more complete understanding of concepts requires their study in the context of situated action.…”

“…Challenging standard approaches in the literature, Barsalou, Dutriaux and Scheepers [28] propose to abandon the traditional distinction between concrete and abstract concepts. The authors insist that concepts emerge to support situated action, i.e.…”

“…The papers in this section focus on the importance of the distinction between external versus internal situational elements [28] and investigate theoretically and empirically how inner experiences, especially interoception [29] and metacognition [30], influence abstract concepts representation.…”

“…Future research will need to convincingly highlight the main dimensions that characterize abstract concepts (linguistic, social, emotional) and to verify whether these dimensions assume different values for different kinds of abstract concepts. In our theme issue we have included a section on grounding of abstract concepts in perception and action systems [22][23][24][25][26][27] and two sections focusing on the roles of the inner experience (situatedness in inner processes [28], interoception [29] and metacognition [30]) and of the linguistic and social experience in grounding abstract concepts [31][32][33][34][35].…”

Abstraction and concepts: when, how, where, what and why?

“…Abstract concepts are composed, predominantly, of abstract knowledge, but may have sensorimotor correlates (e.g. the concept joy; for related discussion, see Barsalou, Dutriaux, & Scheepers, 2018).…”