Article

From Experience to Concept: Nominalization and the Formation of Philosophical Meaning in Everyday Life

Maryna Tsehelska ORCID , Olena Ilienko ORCID
    Received: 27 February 2026 | Revised: 16 May 2026 | Accepted: 23 May 2026 | Published Online: 30 May 2026

    Abstract

    Philosophical inquiry has traditionally approached abstract notions such as responsibility, resilience, and meaning as products of sophisticated theoretical reasoning, while paying comparatively limited attention to the ways in which these constructs arise from ordinary human experience. This paper seeks to address this imbalance by investigating nominalization—the linguistic process through which actions and processes are recast as conceptual entities—as a central mechanism in the emergence of philosophical meaning. The study examines how abstraction mediated by language enables individuals to reinterpret concrete experiences in conceptual terms. Employing conceptual mapping as its primary analytical framework, it traces the shift from the experiential sphere of human activity to the conceptual domain associated with human needs. Based on the analysis of six metacognitive conceptual maps, the findings demonstrate that recurrent actions can be systematically transformed into stable conceptual categories through processes of abstraction, conceptualization, and generalization. Moreover, the intentional structuring of linguistic domains, together with a focused emphasis on nominalization, contributes to the formation of a coherent and transferable conceptual system. The results indicate that nominalization should be understood not merely as a grammatical phenomenon, but also as a cognitive mechanism that supports the reflective interpretation of lived experience. One of the central contributions of the study is its integration of philosophical perspectives and linguistic theory with multimodal conceptual mapping.

    Keywords

    Nominalization, Philosophical Actualization, Conceptualization, Generalization, Metacognition, Conceptual Mapping, Multimodal Dimension

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