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Related Experiment Video

Updated: Jul 4, 2026

Perceptual and Category Processing of the Uncanny Valley Hypothesis' Dimension of Human Likeness: Some Methodological Issues
07:34

Perceptual and Category Processing of the Uncanny Valley Hypothesis' Dimension of Human Likeness: Some Methodological Issues

Published on: June 3, 2013

People make graded judgments about the inconceivable.

Jennifer Hu1, Felix Sosa2, Tomer Ullman3

  • 1Department of Cognitive Science, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD 21218, USA; Department of Computer Science, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD 21218, USA.

Cognition
|July 2, 2026
PubMed
Summary

People perceive some impossible events as more unlikely than others. Judgments of inconceivability are based on conceptual distance within our mental ontology, not just language patterns.

Keywords:
ImpossibilityInconceivabilityLanguage modelsMetaphorModal reasoningTypes

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Area of Science:

  • Cognitive Psychology
  • Philosophy of Mind
  • Linguistics

Background:

  • Real-world impossibilities vary in perceived difficulty (e.g., levitating a feather vs. a rock).
  • The concept of inconceivability extends to abstract or conceptual impossibilities (e.g., "red writing a play").
  • It remains unclear if judgments of conceptual inconceivability are systematic and graded.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate whether people make graded judgments about the likelihood of inconceivable events.
  • To identify the cognitive mechanisms underlying these judgments.
  • To determine if inconceivability is influenced by linguistic properties, metaphorical interpretation, or conceptual structure.

Main Methods:

  • Participants rated the likelihood of various inconceivable events.
  • Stimulus sets were designed to manipulate inconceivability through different means.
  • Hypotheses tested included string likelihood, ease of metaphorical interpretation, and distance in a type hierarchy.

Main Results:

  • People exhibit graded and systematic judgments regarding the likelihood of inconceivable events.
  • Judgments of inconceivability were not explained by the likelihood of the event description's word string.
  • Metaphorical interpretation ease did not account for graded inconceivability judgments.
  • A measure of distance within a type hierarchy successfully predicted graded inconceivability.

Conclusions:

  • Inconceivability is a graded phenomenon, not an absolute one.
  • The perceived likelihood of an inconceivable event is influenced by an individual's mental ontology or conceptual framework.
  • Conceptual structure, specifically hierarchical relationships, plays a crucial role in understanding inconceivability.