The debate about the nature of the representational format of concepts seems to have reached an impasse. The debate faces two fundamental problems. Firstly, amodalists (i.e., those who argue that concepts are represented by amodal symbols) and modalists (i.e., those who see concepts as involving crucially representations including sensorimotor information) claim that the same empirical evidence is compatible with their views. Secondly, there is no shared understanding of what a modal or amodal format amounts to. Both camps recognize that the two formats play essential roles in higher cognition, leading to an increasing number of hybrid proposals. In this paper, I argue that the existence of those fundamental problems should make us suspicious about a modal/amodal dichotomy. Also, I suggest that hybrid approaches, as they currently stand, do not provide suitable solutions to the impasse. Instead, we should overcome the dichotomy and treat the modal/amodal distinction as a graded phenomenon. I illustrate this hypothesis with an example of a cognitive-computational model of concepts based on the Predictive Processing framework.

关于概念表征格式的性质的争论似乎陷入了僵局。这场辩论面临两个基本问题。首先，非模态论者（即那些认为概念由非模态符号表示的人）和模态论者（即那些认为概念涉及包括感觉运动信息在内的关键表征的人）声称相同的经验证据与他们的观点是一致的。其次，对于模态或非模态格式的含义没有共同的理解。两个阵营都认识到这两种格式在更高的认知中起着至关重要的作用，导致越来越多的混合提案。在本文中，我认为这些基本问题的存在应该让我们怀疑模态/非模态二分法。此外，我建议采用目前的混合方法，不要为僵局提供合适的解决方案。相反，我们应该克服二分法并将模态/非模态区别视为分级现象。我用一个基于预测处理框架的概念认知计算模型的例子来说明这个假设。