In psycholinguistics, concepts are considered abstract if they do not apply to physical objects that we can touch, see, feel, hear, smell or taste. Psychologists usually distinguish concrete from abstract concepts by means of so-called concreteness ratings. In concreteness rating studies, laypeople are asked to rate the concreteness of words based on the above criterion. The wide use of concreteness ratings motivates an assessment of them. I point out two problems: First, most current concreteness ratings test the intuited concreteness of word forms as opposed to concepts. This ignores the ubiquitous phenomenon of lexical ambiguity. Second, the criterion of abstract concepts that the instruction texts of rating studies rely on does not capture the notion that psychologists working on abstract concepts are normally interested in, i.e., concepts that could reasonably be sensorimotor representations. For many concepts that pick out physical objects, this is not reasonable. In this paper, I propose a characterization of concrete and abstract concepts that avoids these two problems and that may be useful for future studies in psychology.

在心理语言学中，如果概念不适用于我们可以触摸，看到，感觉，听到，闻到或品尝到的物理对象，则认为它们是抽象的。心理学家通常通过所谓的“具体程度”来区分具体概念和抽象概念。在具体性评级研究中，要求外行根据上述标准对单词的具体性进行评级。具体等级的广泛使用促使人们对其进行评估。我指出了两个问题：首先，大多数当前的具体等级评定测试的是单词形式与概念相对的直觉具体性。这忽略了词汇歧义现象的普遍现象。其次，评级研究的指导文本所依赖的抽象概念的标准并没有捕捉到从事抽象概念的心理学家通常对概念感兴趣的概念，即可以合理地作为感觉运动表征的概念。对于许多挑选物理对象的概念来说，这是不合理的。在本文中，