Words as social tools: The old and the new. Bridging cognition and communication: Comment on "Words as social tools: Language, sociality and inner grounding in abstract concepts" by Anna M. Borghi et al.
The grounding of abstract concepts (ACs) in sensorimotor experience is a challenge for the embodied cognition approach. A number of proposals addressing this issue have been made in the last years [e.g. 1,2] Importantly, although Borghi et al. [3] claim that ACs are grounded in the linguistic system (p. 12) this is not the same grounding in bodily experience the embodied cognition is looking for [cf. 4] Borghi et al.'s grounding refers to the inner speech necessary "to re explain to ourselves word meaning" or "to prepare ourselves to ask the word meaning to others" (p. 40) This simply re instantiates the Chinese room problem: words must be related to something different from other words in order to have meaning. However, another potential grounding mechanism received less attention in WAT. The linguistic labels are less important for concrete concepts (CCs) since their learning relies more on perceptually available similarities across multiple instantiations, while for ACs linguistic labels are more important, serving as "a sort of "glue" keeping sparse experiences together" (p. 12) This view extends Barsalou's [5] proposal by highlighting the role of other people in ACs learning. Someone must provide a child with the label for very different experiences in order to create an AC in the child's mind. Thus, the difference between CCs and ACs is not a qualitative one, as both consist of labels and corresponding real life experiences, but a quantitative one: in the structure of an AC the socially provided label has much higher weight. This approach implies a continuum between ACs and CCs with gradually increasing role of culture and social experience when moving toward an abstract pole. It is important not to overlook the true novelty of WAT by focusing on the "words defined by other words" problem. By establishing a link between two cognitive mechanisms, namely the learning of ACs and social interactions, WAT bridges two different fields of research cognitive and communicative studies. If others play an important role in formation of ACs via communication, then (embodied) communicative practices in a given community are directly related to ACs shared by members of that community. ACs, considered as the basis of high level cognition, are taught by members of the community, and only their acquisition enables an individual to be a part of the community and to (inter)act efficiently in this community. In the play "Pygmalion" by G.B. Shaw (1912) it was not enough for
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