What Are Abstract Concepts? On Lexical Ambiguity and Concreteness Ratings

Abstract

In psycholinguistics, concepts are considered abstract if they do not apply to physical objects that we can touch, see, feel, hear, smell or taste. Psychologists usually distinguish concrete from abstract concepts by means of so-called concreteness ratings. In concreteness rating studies, laypeople are asked to rate the concreteness of words based on the above criterion. The wide use of concreteness ratings motivates an assessment of them. I point out two problems: First, most current concreteness ratings test the intuited concreteness of word forms as opposed to concepts. This ignores the ubiquitous phenomenon of lexical ambiguity. Second, the criterion of abstract concepts that the instruction texts of rating studies rely on does not capture the notion that psychologists working on abstract concepts are normally interested in, i.e., concepts that could reasonably be sensorimotor representations. For many concepts that pick out physical objects, this is not reasonable. In this paper, I propose a characterization of concrete and abstract concepts that avoids these two problems and that may be useful for future studies in psychology.

A context-sensitive and non-linguistic approach to abstract concepts

“…Thus, those interested in abstract concepts in the imperceptibility sense should hesitate to adopt concreteness ratings as measures for the kind of concept abstractness that interests them. (See Löhr [16] for related concerns about concreteness ratings. )…”

“…In short, the referents of a concept may be highly abstracted from past experience without themselves being difficult to perceive. (See Löhr [16] for related points.) By contrast, the referents of other concepts standardly held to be abstract do seem difficult to perceive and are perhaps not perceptible at all.…”

“…It is not in the sense that organisms are not clearly perceivable, or only perceptible ‘to some extent.’ In short, the referents of a concept may be highly abstracted from past experience without themselves being difficult to perceive. (See Löhr [16] for related points. )…”

Abstract concepts and emotion: cross-linguistic evidence and arguments against affective embodiment

“…Words for abstract concepts are generally processed more slowly [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10], memorized less accurately [11][12][13][14] and acquired later than words for concrete concepts [15][16][17][18]. Although there is controversy about what exactly characterizes the concreteness/abstractness divide [19][20][21], most researchers consider concepts to be abstract 'if they do not apply to physical objects that we can touch, see, feel, hear, smell or taste' [19, p. 1]. Owing to their lack of sensorimotor content, such concepts are generally seen as a challenge to grounded or embodied theories of cognition [22,23].…”

“…However, a closer look at the same data reveals that the idea of emotional grounding characterizes, if at all, only a very small minority of concepts. Much of the recent discussion on abstract concepts has argued that we need to recognize that abstract concepts as a group are characterized by heterogeneity [19,55,61,62]. For example, a recent cluster analysis of semantic rating data found evidence for at least four kinds of abstract concepts: (i) philosophical and spiritual, (ii) self and sociality, (iii) emotion and inner states, and (iv) physical, spatio-temporal and quantitative concepts [55].…”