Description
The Freedom of Words examines how abstract language enables humans to transcend concrete experience and reshape reality through words. Anna M. Borghi draws on cognitive science, linguistics, and philosophy to demonstrate how abstraction in language represents a fundamental cognitive achievement that distinguishes human thought.
The book explores how words create distance from immediate sensory experience, allowing us to reason about concepts, time, hypotheticals, and possibilities. Borghi discusses the neural mechanisms underlying abstract language processing and how this capacity emerged through evolution and develops in childhood. She argues that linguistic abstraction provides humans with unprecedented cognitive flexibility and freedom—the ability to imagine, plan, and communicate beyond the here and now, fundamentally shaping our understanding of reality itself.
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