CONCEPTUAL ANALYSIS article
Front. Psychol.
Sec. Environmental Psychology
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1612191
This article is part of the Research TopicNarrating the environment: Innovation, looks and stories on real and virtual boundariesView all articles
Why things look the way they do: We live in a Cartesian grid of reified concepts
Provisionally accepted
- University of Cambridge, Cambridge, United Kingdom
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The world we live in now is almost exclusively populated by things designed by minds to be understood by other minds. I argue here that: 1. Human environments now consist mainly of reified concepts, such as 'chairs'. 2. These externalized concepts look like simple cartoons of the concepts they reify, with flat, homogenous surfaces in geometric shapes, with one or a small number of colors, textures and surfaces, so that they can be easily identified and distinguished. 3. Reified concepts are organized within a Cartesian grid, that enables their perception, location and memory. 4. Simple concepts are nested within complex concepts, such as rooms, houses, streets, hospitals or cities, designed to be read by our minds, and guide behavior, within the externalized mind of society. 5. Components of the human environment that are not conceptual are actively removed, resulting in a very low entropy of information, and giving the illusion that reality is entirely conceptual. 6. Reified concepts and their conceptual ordering help perception, comprehension and use of human environments. 7. These ideas have application to design, architecture, aesthetics, phenomenology, ontology and understanding why things look the way they do.
Keywords: reified concepts, extended mind, Distributed cognition, architecture, aesthetics, Philosophy, Phenomenology, environmental psychology reified concepts
Received: 15 Apr 2025; Accepted: 13 Jun 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Brown. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Guy C. Brown, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, United Kingdom
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