The Abstract Form Hypothesis: Dissolving the Abstract-Concrete Distinction through Linguistic Pragmatics

Contemporary metaphysics remains bifurcated by the abstract– concrete distinction, yet struggles to provide a unified account of how “causally inert” entities play an indispensable role in concrete human practice. This paper introduces the Abstract Form (AF) Hypothesis, which reframes abstractness not as an intrinsic property of objects, but as a situational effect of linguistic pragmatics. I argue that AFs arise to address a cross-linguistic structural constraint termed the “problem of subordinate clauses”: the inability of natural language to embed bare assertions without a formal shift. Drawing on the phenomenology of labor (Weil, 2002) and the linguistics of root transformations (Hooper & Thompson, 1973), I demonstrate that because communicative assertions demand an embodied “persuasive effort” to ground claims in reality, speakers strategically employ AFs to reuse propositional content while withdrawing from the realist contract. This withdrawal of performative labor triggers a phenomenological mismatch that manifests as the characteristic “abstract feel,” leading the listener to perceive the object of discourse as detached from the resistance of the brute world. By analyzing the gradation of nominalization and the reification of situational phrases, I characterize abstract entities as highly functional epistemic technologies designed to scale human cooperation. Finally, I provide an empirical falsification criterion: the AF Hypothesis predicts that for any realist species, a “bare” embedding without a detectable formal or prosodic shift is impossible, a claim supported by a cross-linguistic survey of clause-typing mechanisms.