This paper explores the inferential processes underlying analogical reasoning, with a focus on its relationship to abduction. Peirce identified abduction as a central element of analogy (CP 1.65), and more specifically, as the cognitive mechanism uniquely responsible for the generation of new knowledge (CP 5.171). From this perspective, in this paper, I propose a typology of analogical reasoning based on the varying roles that abductive inference plays in the formation of analogical thought. To develop this framework, I draw on Peirce’s theory of abduction, as further refined by Eco’s (1981) typology of abductive processes. I argue that different types of abductive inferences give rise to distinct forms of analogy, each producing specific epistemic effects, ranging from quasi-immediate understanding to more elaborate processes that activate creative capacities. The typology of analogical reasoning developed here is then applied to metaphorical cognition in order to account for the different levels of cognitive complexity and the distinct epistemic functions that metaphors by analogy may have.

This paper argues that interpersonal synchronization of physiological and motor rhythms constitutes the earliest and most basic mechanism of communication and meaning formation. Drawing on empirical work in developmental psychology and neuroscience, phenomenological analyses of intersubjectivity, and accounts of embodied social interaction, it proposes that temporal coordination between bodies affords a minimal, non-conceptual form of sense-making that precedes symbols, concepts, and linguistic articulation. On this view, meaning does not originate in detached cognitive representations but arises within shared temporal structures enacted through bodily attunement. On this basis, the paper further contends that disruptions of rhythmic synchronization can have distinctive epistemic consequences. Engaging phenomenological accounts of intercorporeality, particularly those developed by Merleau-Ponty, it suggests that the recognition of others as epistemic agents depends upon pre-reflective, bodily modes of attunement. When this intercorporeal ground is destabilized, as in schizophrenia, the conditions of mutual intelligibility are compromised. The resulting difficulties cannot be reduced to deficits in communication or social cognition alone; they extend into the epistemic domain, where individuals may cease to be readily acknowledged as knowers.

Schizophrenic patients struggle with figurative language, interpreting non-literal expressions in a literal way. This tendency, called concretism, is considered a schizophrenia core symptom. Despite being well-documented, concretism lacks a comprehensive review on methodological aspects, like stimuli and experimental designs. Following PRISMA guidelines, we conducted a literature review on behavioural studies comparing the comprehension of metaphorical and literal sentences between schizophrenic patients and healthy controls. Findings are limited and controversial, with only 12 articles identified. Studies show a substantial heterogeneity in stimuli and experimental designs. Notably, concretism was observed in only two studies, reflected in accuracy measures, but not reaction times. This review highlights a serious replicability issue, characterized by two intertwined factors. First, insufficient information provided by studies prevents their replication. Second, the lack of dedicated replication experiments, further complicates the findings validation. This considerable methodological heterogeneity likely leads to the involvement of different cognitive mechanisms in task performance, making findings difficult to compare. Although it was not our primary aim, we observed that concretism was not supported by findings which reveal only an overall linguistic impairment. Concretism, traditionally identified in relation to proverbs, has expanded to encompass all forms of figurative language, leading to a case of Epistemic Injustice, i.e., the potentially inaccurate presumption that schizophrenic patients interpret all figurative language literally. This conclusion should not be interpreted as evidence that concretism does not exist, but rather that current literature has yet to consistently and robustly demonstrate its presence.

IntroductionPrevious research has shown that experimentally manipulated physical states of instability negatively affect judgments and opinions. Based on this result, in the current study we want to investigate whether the processing of metaphorical expressions related to physical instability (e.g., “Our economy is shaky”) and underpinned by the conceptual metaphor EMOTIONAL STABILITY IS BALANCE negatively affects participants’ judgments.MethodsThree hundred participants were assigned to three experimental groups. Each group was presented with sentences containing, respectively, stable metaphors, unstable metaphors or unstable literal sentences. After reading the sentences, participants were asked to respond to six topical questions regarding current and future economic and life perspectives.ResultsData shows that across all six topical questions, reading stable metaphors led to more positive judgments compared to unstable sentences (both metaphors and literal ones). Moreover, in four questions out of six, reading unstable metaphorical sentences led to lower ratings compared to unstable literal sentences.DiscussionThese findings support the main claim of Conceptual Metaphor Theory, i.e., the idea that abstract and complex concepts are structured via metaphorical mappings from more concrete and simple ones and align with the Embodied Cognition Hypothesis. Furthermore, these findings suggest that metaphors can have a powerful influence on our perception of the world and contribute to our understanding of how metaphorical language can shape bodily experiences and attitudes.

This paper develops an embodied account of the problem of other minds. I argue that our capacity to recognize others, and to be recognized by them, as individuals capable of subjective experience and knowledge, is rooted in a pre-reflective intersubjectivity, articulated through Merleau-Ponty’s notion of intercorporeality. On this view, the body plays a twofold role. At a basic level, social understanding arises through bodily attunement: in perceiving others’actions, our bodies simulate their experiences, thereby generating a corporeal mode of understanding. At a second level, the body contributes to the construction of meaning, as suggested by data on the embodiment of language and, specifically, on the embodiment of metaphors. This twofold role of the body is clarified through the case of schizophrenia. Reframing the problem of other minds in embodied terms carries epistemological implications. If the recognition of others as epistemic agents is rooted in bodily self-experience, disturbances of embodiment undermine the very conditions of epistemic relatedness.

Vitality Forms (VFs) constitute the dynamic essence of human actions, providing insights into how individuals engage in activities. The ability to perceive and express VFs during interpersonal interactions is pivotal for understanding others’ intentions, behaviors, and fostering effective social communication. Despite their ubiquity in all actions, research exploring the role of VFs in neurodivergent conditions related to social and communicative skills, particularly in autism, remains limited. This study aims to investigate the expression of different VFs during the execution of both social and non-social actions in children with an Autism Spectrum Condition (ASC) in comparison to neurotypical children (NT). ASC children and NT children were asked to move a small bottle either towards a target point (non-social context) or moving it towards a receiver (social context) with different VFs specifically neutral, gentle, or rude. Videotaped tasks were subsequently analyzed to study kinematic parameters characterizing VFs. Our results highlighted three main findings: (1) overall, ASC children are able to tune the motor profile of their actions, effectively conveying both gentle and rude VFs; (2) distinct kinematic parameters in the execution of VFs are able to distinguish autistic children from NT children; (3) the social context significantly influences the child’s ability to express positive and negative VFs in autism. Taken together, these findings provide new insights to understand how VFs contribute to the complex dynamics of social communication in neurodivergent autistic children, providing a valuable contribution for future interventions and support strategies.

In this study we carried out a behavioral experiment comparing action language comprehension in L1 (Italian) and L2 (English). Participants were Italian native speakers who had acquired the second language late (after the age of 10). They performed semantic judgments on L1 and L2 literal, idiomatic and metaphorical action sentences after viewing a video of a hand performing an action that was related or unrelated to the verb used in the sentence. Results showed that responses to literal and metaphorical L1 sentences were faster when the action depicted was related to the verb used rather than when the action depicted was unrelated to the verb used. No differences were found for the idiomatic condition. In L2 we found that all responses to the three conditions were facilitated when the action depicted was related to the verb used. Moreover, we found that the difference between the unrelated and the related modalities was greater in L2 than in L1 for the literal and the idiomatic condition but not for the metaphorical condition. These findings are consistent with the embodied cognition hypothesis of language comprehension.

Several studies demonstrated that explicit forms of negation processing (e.g., “I don’t know”) recruits motor inhibitory mechanisms. However, whether this is also true for implicit negation, in which the negative meaning is implicated but not explicitly lexicalized in the sentence (e.g., “I ignore”), has never been studied before. Two Go/No-Go studies, which differed only for the time-windows to respond to the Go stimulus, were carried out. In each, participants (N = 86 in experiment 1; N = 87 in experiment 2) respond to coloured circle while reading task-irrelevant affirmative, explicit negative and implicit negative sentences. We aimed to investigate whether: (i) the processing of implicit negations recruits inhibitory mechanisms; (ii) these inhibitory resources are differently modulated by implicit and explicit negations. Results show that implicit negative sentences recruit the inhibitory resources more strongly when compared to explicit ones, probably due to their inferential nature, likely requiring deeper processing of the negative meaning. Implicit and inferential meaning (i.e., pragmatic information) are grounded too in the same mechanisms that integrate action with perception. Such findings provide further evidence to the embodied account of language, showing that even abstract aspects, like implicit negation, are grounded in the sensory-motor system, by means of functional link between language and motor activity.

In this study, we conducted a behavioural experiment using literal, idiomatic, conventional and novel metaphorical action sentences. Participants viewed an action video, immediately after a sentence containing a verb that did (matching modality) or did not (mismatching modality) match the observed action. All the sentences were presented both in the matching modality and the mismatching modality. Participants had to indicate whether the sentence made sense or not by pressing a designated response key. We recorded participants' reaction times and accuracy. We found no significant differences between the matching and mismatching modality in the idiomatic condition. Instead, we found a facilitation effect for the literal and the metaphorical conventional condition in the matching modality compared to the mismatching modality and an interference effect for the metaphorical novel condition in the matching modality compared to the mismatching modality. We interpret these findings in light of the Embodied Cognition approach to language.

In the last decades, the embodied approach to cognition and language gained momentum in the scientific debate, leading to evidence in different aspects of language processing. However, while the bodily grounding of concrete concepts seems to be relatively not controversial, abstract aspects, like the negation logical operator, are still today one of the main challenges for this research paradigm. In this framework, the present study has a twofold aim: (1) to assess whether mechanisms for motor inhibition underpin the processing of sentential negation, thus, providing evidence for a bodily grounding of this logic operator, (2) to determine whether the Stop-Signal Task, which has been used to investigate motor inhibition, could represent a good tool to explore this issue. Twenty-three participants were recruited in this experiment. Ten hand-action-related sentences, both in affirmative and negative polarity, were presented on a screen. Participants were instructed to respond as quickly and accurately as possible to the direction of the Go Stimulus (an arrow) and to withhold their response when they heard a sound following the arrow. This paradigm allows estimating the Stop Signal Reaction Time (SSRT), a covert reaction time underlying the inhibitory process. Our results show that the SSRT measured after reading negative sentences are longer than after reading affirmative ones, highlighting the recruitment of inhibitory mechanisms while processing negative sentences. Furthermore, our methodological considerations suggest that the Stop-Signal Task is a good paradigm to assess motor inhibition’s role in the processing of sentence negation.

In previous studies on auditory vitality forms, we found that listening to action verbs pronounced gently or rudely, produced, relative to a neutral robotic voice, activation of the dorso-central insula. One might wonder whether this insular activation depends on the conjunction of action verbs and auditory vitality forms, or whether auditory vitality forms are sufficient per se to activate the insula. To solve this issue, we presented words not related to actions such as concrete nouns (e.g.,"ball"), pronounced gently or rudely. No activation of the dorso-central insula was found. As a further step, we examined whether interjections, i.e., speech stimuli conveying communicative intention (e.g., "hello"), pronounced with different vitality forms, would be able to activate, relative to control, the insula. The results showed that stimuli conveying a communicative intention, pronounced with different auditory vitality forms activate the dorsal-central insula. These data deepen our understanding of the vitality forms processing, showing that insular activation is not specific to action verbs, but can be also activated by speech acts conveying communicative intention such as interjections. These findings also show the intrinsic social nature of vitality forms because activation of the insula was not observed in the absence of a communicative intention.

Department of Ancient and Modern Civilizations, University of Messina, Messina, Italy, Department of Cognitive Sciences, Psychology, Education and Cultural Studies, University of Messina, Messina, Italy, 3 Language and Communication, Faculty of Humanities, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, Netherlands, Center for Functionally Integrative Neuroscience, Institute for Clinical Medicine, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark, 5 Faculty of Arts, The University of Auckland, Auckland,

Negation can be considered a shared social action that develops since early infancy with very basic acts of refusals or rejection. Inspired by an approach to the embodiment of concepts known as Multiple Representation Theories (MRT, henceforth), the present paper explores negation as an embodied action that relies on both sensorimotor and linguistic/social information. Despite the different variants, MRT accounts share the basic ideas that both linguistic/social and sensorimotor information concur to the processes of concepts formation and representation and that the balance between these components depends on the kind of concept, the context, or the performed task. In the present research we will apply the MRT framework for exploring negation in Italian sign language (LIS). The nature of negation in LIS has been explored in continuity with the co-speech gesture where negative elements are encoded through differentiated prosodic and gestural strategies across languages. Data have been collected in naturalistic settings that may allow a much wider understanding of negation both in speech and in spoken language with a semi-structured interview. Five LIS participants with age range 30-80 were recruited and interviewed with the aim of understanding the continuity between gesture and sign in negation. Results highlight that negation utterances mirror the functions of rejection, non-existence and denial that have been described in language acquisition both in deaf and hearing children. These different steps of acquisition of negation show a different balance between sensorimotor, linguistic and social information in the construction of negative meaning that the MRT is able to enlighten.

We investigated the impact of exposure to literary and popular fiction on psychological essentialism. Exposure to fiction was measured by using the Author Recognition Test, which allows us to separate exposure to authors of literary and popular fiction. Psychological essentialism was assessed by the discreteness subscale of the psychological essentialism scale in Study 1, and by the three subscales of the same scale (such as discreteness, informativeness, and biological basis) in Study 2 that was pre-registered. Results showed that exposure to literary fiction negatively predicts the three subscales. The results emerged controlling for political ideology, a variable that is commonly associated with psychological essentialism, and level of education.