ERC Starting Grant · 2021
Abstraction. Unlocking meaning from experience, through language.
Words, language's building blocks, are labels that define different types of categories. Some words define categories of concrete entities (cats, tables) while others define abstract entities (legacy, empathy). Some words define generic categories that encompass many different entities (vehicles, art) while others define more specific ones (sport cars, Impressionism). To unlock meaning from experience, we construct different types of categories through mechanisms of abstraction. Concreteness and specificity are the two variables that support abstractions. However, when investigating the mechanisms and effects of abstraction, scholars from different fields typically focus only on specificity…
From the public funding record at EU CORDIS. Describes the funded project, not the reviews below.