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In the language sciences, words like “freedom”, “justice”, and “peace” are classified as abstract concepts, because – unlike concrete words like “car” and “elephant” – they don’t refer to objects in the physical world. Recent studies reveal that in fact abstract concepts are rooted in our experience of emotion and social interaction, and may be less abstract than one may think!
Imagine you only speak your own native language. You find yourself “locked in a room”, let’s say, with a Chinese book, a Chinese dictionary, and a set of rules in your own native language. By applying the rules, you learn to relate the Chinese words in the dictionary to the book, only by recognising the shapes of the characters they contain. You learn to manipulate the strings of Chinese symbols so well that you start to resemble a native Chinese speaker who actually understands Chinese words and sentences. Yet, what you are doing is just manipulating formal symbols without knowing what they mean. Are you behaving any differently than the artificial mind of a computer?
When facing unexpected world changes, as in the case of the current pandemic, the language system adapts to the challenge to express a new reality. How? By forging new words! Let’s find out how this happens by looking at one of the most powerful engines we can count on: our brain.
